
The Name of the Wind: 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Kingkiller Chronicle)
Patrick Rothfuss and Dan dos Santos
4.9 on Amazon
36 HN comments

The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel (an illustrated interpretation of The Alchemist)
Paulo Coelho
4.4 on Amazon
36 HN comments

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller (cover design), et al.
4.3 on Amazon
35 HN comments

A Game of Thrones: The Illustrated Edition: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One (A Song of Ice and Fire Illustrated Edition)
George R. R. Martin and John Hodgman
4.8 on Amazon
34 HN comments

Breakfast of Champions: A Novel
Kurt Vonnegut
4.5 on Amazon
33 HN comments

The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien and Alan Lee
4.9 on Amazon
33 HN comments

Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang
4.5 on Amazon
33 HN comments

The Circle
Dave Eggers
3.7 on Amazon
30 HN comments

The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick
3.9 on Amazon
29 HN comments

Anthem
Ayn Rand
4.4 on Amazon
25 HN comments

A Canticle for Leibowitz
Walter M. Miller Jr., Tom Weiner, et al.
4.5 on Amazon
25 HN comments

Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami, Sean Barrett, et al.
4.6 on Amazon
25 HN comments

Contact
Carl Sagan, Laurel Lefkow, et al.
4.6 on Amazon
25 HN comments

We
Yevgeny Zamyatin and Clarence Brown
4.2 on Amazon
25 HN comments

The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
4.6 on Amazon
22 HN comments
comrhonJan 23, 2015
This is basically the premise of Dave Eggers' The Circle which takes it to a very scary conclusion.
flippyheadonAug 11, 2014
clydethefrogonApr 19, 2016
pushpoponJune 14, 2019
legelonDec 31, 2015
ninkendoonDec 30, 2016
__johnonJuly 11, 2015
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18302455-the-circle
ghaffonSep 12, 2016
lexaponJune 16, 2015
I've been on the lookout for "The Great American Internet Novel" for many years. Eggers' The Circle was crap.
ghaffonDec 11, 2019
Missed opportunity in that the book was only readable if you took it as a deliberately over the top "if this goes on" fable. And the film was mostly notable for how it squandered a top-notch cast.
juntoonFeb 1, 2015
You should read "The Circle" by David Eggers. It is basically this.
mlang23onOct 15, 2020
But I guess it is all too late. The Circle proofs to be a pretty prophetic book.
ghaffonDec 25, 2016
closeparenonDec 30, 2016
The impulse to make something better by applying a database engine that you might feel for business processes, can just as easily be felt for customer interactions or the world at large.
For an interesting (and very critical) look at this philosophy I recommend The Circle by Dave Eggers.
hanswesterbeekonMar 24, 2016
ghaffonJan 6, 2016
dskangonAug 26, 2014
mindcrimeonDec 6, 2016
And on a sorta related note... I just started watching Black Mirror and halfway though episode one (if not earlier), I was thinking "this is like The Circle by Dave Eggers".
ghaffonOct 5, 2015
mseebachonApr 17, 2018
At least The Circle didn't pretend not to be fiction, this seems like it wants to be journalism. And that's, frankly, a problem.
kjdal2001onDec 22, 2016
Maybe I just went into the book expecting an examination of the types of tradeoffs we make when interacting with social media, and instead got a thriller. The Circle works pretty well as a thriller to be honest, its just that there is still room for a more serious novel on its subject matter.
smbvonMay 27, 2021
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18302455-the-circle
mlang23onJuly 2, 2019
And do yourself a favour, never watch the movie version from 2017. The end has been butchered which ruins the whole message of the story.
gedraponDec 22, 2016
- Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart. Plenty of gotchas with real world examples from academia. Well written and easy to read.
- The Circle by Dave Eggers. This one was scary. About imaginary corporation (a blend of Facebook and Google and Amazon) and probably not too distant future. If you liked Black Mirrors, you will love this.
- Brave New World by Huxley, Aldous. Classic novel with interesting thoughts about engineered society, where every human is assigned class, purpose in the society and feature at birth.
- Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Bilton, Nick. Read this book in a weekend, really well written and well researched about the inception of Twitter.
- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Tetlock, Philip E. A study on people with above average ability to forecast feature events (mostly geo-political). Talks about measuring predictions and improving them.
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Brilliant book about overlooking rare events which have dramatic consequences because 'it's unlikely to happen'.
teekertonFeb 24, 2020
wyldfireonMay 23, 2017
> The lawsuit alleges that Google’s leaks policy covers essentially all company information and prohibits reasonable discussion about company activities.
...
> One policy allegedly even prevents employees from writing a novel about working for a large Silicon Valley corporation — like, for instance, Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel, The Circle — without first getting final draft approval from Google.
John Doe v. Google, Inc [1].
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/334736972/John-Doe-vs-Google...
passepartoutonMar 14, 2015
You clearly have not thought of the situations where using your real name can be dangerous (see for example activists) or just plain misleading for the purpose of the page (see for example, famous authors etc.). The factors of real life and people needing to hide behind a pseudonym should not be disregarded so absolutely by Facebook.
I can see where your comment is coming from, but as you say about Stallman, the world is not all black and white and people should have a right to this grey area even on a social network.
Read this: https://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/10-reasons-to-le...
Also, The Circle by Dave Eggers is a bit of a frightening example.
ilzmastronJan 26, 2015
Anhilliation - Fish out of water like story of exploring a mysterious, horrific, environment (2 sequels drag on for too much after this one though)
Many Ray Bradbury stories (Martian chronicles, and the Everyman collection contain the best ones)
Infinite Jest (Alternate American future of a culture of addiction and depravity, partly mediated by technology)
The Circle (haven't read, but like the author, life inside the biggest tech company of the future)
wallfloweronApr 9, 2016
> If anything, Live further exposes Facebook’s active, seemingly unquenchable thirst for more ways to become the middleman in your digital interactions. It literally wants you to broadcast your life on the platform. But, as noted earlier, being caged doesn’t come that naturally to humans.
From "The Circle" by Dave Eggers - a "fiction" novel about a Facebook-like mega infoglomerateorporation.
> Lionel can give me access to any of the cameras he wants. It's just like friending someone, but now with access to all their live feeds. Forget cable. Forget five hundred channels. If you have one thousand friends, and they have ten cameras each, you now have ten thousand options for live footage.
...
The words dropped onto the screen:
ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.
"Folks, we're at the dawn of the Second Englightenment. And I'm not talking about a new building on campus. I'm talking about an era where we don't allow the majority of human thought and action and achievement and learning to escape as if from a leaky bucket."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
smacktowardonAug 29, 2019
Oh God, I hope not. I read The Circle and found it to be a mess, making flawed arguments about subjects Eggers seems to not fully understand. (A review I wrote at the time goes into more detail on this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/06/book-review-the-circle/)