Hacker News Books

As a side note, I really enjoyed [Prisoners of Geography](https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Geography-Explain-Everythin...) which discusses this dam, as well as other political disputes, viewed through the lens of geography (e.g. why the Saichen Glacier matters).

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall.

This book gave me broader prospective in understanding geopolitics in a way I have never thought before.

After reading this book, I see world and global event differently, my biased opinion about many countries have changed.

Thank you for Prisoners of Geography. I just bought it and it seems very insightful, judging by the first few pages.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology (great!)

Dare to Lead (interesting and Powerful)

Rising Strong (Sensible)

What the most successful people do before breakfast (helpful in thinking about opportunity costs)

Why we sleep (interesting read)

Exponential organisations (Re-read after 2 years, worth it)

Prisoners of Geography (very interesting view of geopolitics, Putin, et al)

Continuous Delivery (great!)

Clean Code (must read for any serious programmer)

Built to last (picked it back after 1-2 years, cool book)

Site Reliability Engineering (didn't quite finish, but good book)

Building Microservices (fantastic book which puts everything I've done in the past year into so much more perspective)

One interesting book I have read is Prisoners of Geography, and it really made me think differently on geopolitics. Natural resources, trade routes and defensive barriers have a huge impact on a countries geopolitical strategy.

It made me go from “Why the hell are they doing that!?” to “reality is probably more complex”.

> I vaguely know that China contains a bunch of peoples and languages, regions with distinct cultures. But very little beyond that.

I know this is fairly off topic but I found Prisoners of Geography [1] a very accessible introduction to geopolitics. (Of course it only represents one point of view, so looking at some other sources would be advisable.) It has one chapter for each large country or continent, including one for China. I'm tempted to put a one-sentence summary of that chapter here based on my half-remembered interpretation of it, but I think that would do more harm than good!

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prisoners-Geography-Everything-Glob...

- The Prince (get's a bad press, thought provoking)

- Apex [Nexus 3] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Factfulness (Awesome, most important book I read this year)

- Prisoners of Geography (why nations act the way they do)

- Crux [Nexus 2] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Debt: the first 5000 years (slog to get through but interesting)

- Nexus [Nexus 1] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Digitocracy (super short story, super powerful message)

- Artemis (Not as good as the martian)

- Before Mars (Starts out great, fizzles out)

- Down and Out in Magic Kingdom (How reputation based social currency might pan out)

- Blood Sweat and Pixels (How games are really made)

- Masters of Doom (Awesome story of how the game was made and what it led to)

- Foundation [Foundation 1] (Prescient with where the world is, what might happen in reality)

- Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that can't... (Ok, not great, read it on blinkist)

- Ender's Game (Under rated, most fun I had reading this year, I know...)

- Neuromancer (classic, must read)

- Pre-suation (interesting and worth reading if starting a consumer facing business)

- The Three-Body Problem (Found it tedious, honestly. Interesting though)

- Radical Candour (A lot of common sense advice we take for granted and could do better with)

- Seveneves (Longggggg, but really worth it. Shame about the ending)

- The Virgin Banker (Really good read, how a bank came into being)

- Why information grows (Great read, could of been half the length, would recommend)

- Babylon Revisited (Meh)

- Money: the Unauthorised Biography (Simplistic history of money before and after coin. Good)

- Hellbent (Enjoyed it, good for a holiday read)

- Snow Crash (Classic, Awesome, read it)

- The little prince (must read)

- To Pixar and Beyond (A different viewpoint on Jobs)

Prisoners of Geography - Tim Marshall

The Revenge of Geography - Robert D. Kaplan

Prisoner's Dilemma - William Poundstone

The Master Algorithm - Pedro Domingos

Zero-Sum Future - Gideon Rachman

The End of History and the Last Man - Francis Fukuyama

Entanglement - Amir Aczel

Recommendations from my reading this year:

Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. #1 with a bullet! This is the best, most useful book I've read in many years, and totally changed how I think about my thinking, and how other people (especially smart people) think. This is a must-read for anyone who thinks they're engaged and well-informed.

The Cooking Gene, by Michael Twitty. This was recommended to me by a very smart friend as the best book she read in 2017. It's behind only Factfulness for me. Ostensibly a history of African-American cooking in the South, it's a sprawling yet deeply personal work of history, genealogy, multiculturalism, and of course food. A masterpiece, full of knowledge, wisdom, and heart.

Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall. An overview of political geography, and how the physical structure of land and water affects the cultures living there, their opportunities, and their place in the world. It caused a total rethink about why Europe and the US have been so successful, and why Africa and South America have suffered. A worthy companion to the classic Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Let's Go (So We Can Get Back), by Jeff Tweedy. An autobiography by the Wilco frontman, talking about a lot of stuff I find intensely interesting - depression, being a bandleader, and being a parent and husband.

Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor. An outstanding science fiction novella from an entirely different perspective - an African future.

The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir. A mid-century philosophy classic, tackling ethics from an existentialist perspective. Dense and difficult, but also highly entertaining and brilliant. Highly recommended if you read philosophy regularly (if you don't, start with something a little lighter!).

all non-fiction mostly geopolitics and history:

Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall
From the ruins of Empire, Pankay Mishra (best read of the year)
Capitalism: A short history, Jürgen Kocka
The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi
The Second World War, Churchill

Not from this year but still resonating:
Postmodern Imperialism, Eric Walberg (should not be read uncritically)
The Rich don't always win, Sam Pizzigati

I just finished Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall.

When I was younger, I made a rule for myself to always be reading a fiction and a nonfiction book simultaneously, to keep my reading habit from being all fiction all the time. Now that I'm older, I keep the same rule, to keep my reading from being all nonfiction all the time. As it is, I probably read five or more nonfiction books for every fiction book these days.

I don't know if it's about self-improvement so much as self-education, which seem a little different to me. For example, Deep Work is absolutely a self-improvement book, but Prisoners of Geography is simply educational. After reading Deep Work, I behaved differently (not differently enough). After reading Prisoners of Geography, I knew more, but didn't feel any different.

> I wonder if Belarussians have become prisoners of their geography

Prisoners of Geography is literally the name of the book determining this exact conclusion. Russia's history involves lots of invasions. (WW2 Germany, Mongols, etc.) Because of this, they want to secure the area around them geographically, whether by politically-aligned states or by controlling the territory themselves. West of Moscow is just huge plains, there's no defensible moat, so they think they need to secure all of the area until they geographically have a defensible moat for their army. That moat / natural barrier is the narrower choke-point on the left side of Poland, the Romanian mountains, Black Sea, and Baltic sea. That's also not-coincidentally what the USSR controlled. So Russia wants Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, and even Poland. That's why you see even Poland under Russian influence operations, as another commenter pointed out.

  - Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon by Valley John Carreyrou
  - Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep by Matthew Walker
  - The Magicians by Lev Grossman
  - Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight
  - How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
  - Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World by Hans Rosling
  - Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
  - Deep Work by Cal Newport
  - Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
  - The Phoenix Project by D.M. Cain
  - 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
  - Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Tia T. Farmer
  - Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
  - Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
  - Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
  - Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon
  - 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
  - Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
  - Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  - Atomic Habits by James Clear

Most are about self improvement...i wonder if this bias says something about those who recommended the books. Was hoping for some new fiction books to put on my audiobook list.

This particular mindset wasn't based on Jared Diamond, although he did work a related idea. For example, his observation that the geography of the Mediterranean allowed agricultural innovations from the middle east to spread across southern Europe and northern Africa (and the Mediterranean allowed for easy seagoing trade and exchange of ideas), while the north/south orientation of the Americas slowed the spread of technology there.

Tim Marshall's point in Prisoners of Geography is different. He argues that fundamental geographic features have large-scale impacts on area economies. For example, the east coast of South America is mostly cliffs, so there are few natural ports at all, and fewer large ones. Contrast this with the east coast of the US, which has incredible natural ports at Boston, New York, and Chesapeake Bay - sheltered and deep-water. Along the same lines, he compares the economic impact of rivers like the Mississippi, the Rhine, and the Yellow River to rivers that are just as large, but hard to navigate, or pass through lands not suitable for agriculture.

For a small scale comparison, think of the economy of the San Francisco Bay area, relative to, say, Big Sur.