Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?

James Clavell's Shogun: The contrast between the Japanese and European cultures in 1600 are delicious, the characters and plot both well developed. I've read it at least a dozen times over four decades. As I age, I find I experience it very differently.

If I was forced to only pick one, or at least one set of books it would be:

The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

There are many better books I've read, but I grew up with these, and would want access to copies at all times in my life.

Now... I'm off to make a Perfectly Normal Beast sandwich and ponder why Eddie is in the space time continuum.

If I must pick one without knowing why, I would likely pick Ark by Stephen Baxter.

The story is hard sci-fi and is, very broadly, about a multigenerational spaceship which travels across the stars following a planet-scale catastrophe. The writing and the world building are amazing and i've already read it probably a dozen times. I vaguely suspect if I can only have one book forever, some shit has gone down and I'd want a book like this.

Ark is actually the 2nd book in an unfinished trilogy, Flood precedes it and is a really great read.

Baxter's NASA Trilogy (Voyage/Titan/Moonseed) also deals with similarly isolated individuals and is a great read, though the ending is... trippy.

The Sky So Big and Black is also a book I can infinitely re-read. There's a pervasive sadness to the book which I enjoy. It's the fourth book in a quadriligoy but the first four are neither required nor are they as good as the final installment.

I'll also throw out Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. It's a great read and depicts another scenario where shit has gone down and perhaps you're left with one book. The book talks about the tragedy of what would happen after the fall of civilization but also talks about (despite loss) people could be happier with a slower simpler life, which is deeply ironic considering it was published in 1959.

it's a quadrilogy, not a book, but I'd pick Ada Palmer's _Terra Ignota_ series without hesitation. I'm comfortable arguing for it fitting within the constraint of the question, largely because it is making one sustained argument that's carried out throughout the entire series -- it's very much one book that happens to be like 4000 pages long rather than four separate books.

Anyway, Ada Palmer is a sci-fi writer whose day job is as a professor of Renaissance and Enlightenment-era European philosophy, and everything in this series (set in the 2500s in a world where the geographical nation state collapsed and world governments are now large voluntary organizations) is heavily informed by her training as a historian of philosophy.

She finished the series last year, and though each book has gotten nominated for the big awards, she's had the misfortune of publishing on more or less the same schedule as N.K. Jemisin, whose stuff typically wins the Hugo, Nebula, or both. The fandom is teensy tiny -- I've seen it described as "six people and a shoelace" -- but most people who read it get fanatically devoted to it.

This has been a year of re-reading for me, so this is a timely question. I can't pick just one at the moment, but I'll split a couple of top choices via genre. (Also worth noting that in the end, my final choice would probably be the Bible.)

Fiction: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner

Non-fiction: In Good Company - Stanley Hauerwas

Into the Silent Land - Martin Laird

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

Extremely well done series that straddles the sci-fi fantasy line. There's a reason Jemisin became the first person to win the Hugo three years running for three books of a series.

The Book of the New Sun. I've already read it 6-ish times, with a different interpretation every time, and I have every reason to believe that would continue indefinitely. I would say The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun, since I like them better, but there's no way to justify calling them one book when, even in fiction, they're 2 different books.

> (Feel free to substitute “the next 10 years“ for “the rest of your life“.)

... Say... What do you know that I don't?

Lord of the Rings.

I re-read LotR, one volume a day, every day in 5th grade. Speed reading practice. Have re-read it several times since then, it still holds up.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace: It includes so many sides of life: terrible misery and humor, both spicy and tender, sometimes simple, sometimes absurd, then politics, society, love, cynicism, - and poetry. And it predicted, by the way, shockingly many developments of today's (American) society. And the language, of course, is opulent and wild, it won't get boring any time soon.

The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)

It's a book that raises a lot of good questions about good vs. evil, free will, morality, religion and so much more.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck. My favorite piece of literature. I re-read it every few years.

Essays by Montaigne. The best way I can describe Montaigne is it’s like talking to a brilliant, compassionate best friend.

Kurt Vonnegut "Breakfast of Champions": A yearly reminder that despite the terrible cruelty of human society and the awful behavior of many people and the indifference of most others, there are good people who shine love and creativity and it's worth staying alive to try to find these people to make life bearable.

If it was TAoCP, I would always have something I didn’t understand to read. I would always be learning. And Knuth is a fine writer to boot.

Permutation City by Greg Egan. The central idea presented in this scifi novel is so compelling, I can't help but feel there is some truth in it. Also, I never feel I understood everything completely. Re reading helps clarify some new question every time.

Dune 1-6, it's that good. I really need to read it again soon.

Count of Monte Cristo

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Something about this book speaks to me. It's a wonderful examination of how the human condition never changes in a world of magic, wonders and terrors beyond imagination.

Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton

The movie cut out a lot. The book is awesome. Read it 5 times already and I might repeat it again soon.

Middlemarch by George Eliot - the greatest fiction exploration of how to live a life of integrity and significance in a world that often seems overwhelming and meaningless.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Not a book but the facilities to make one - access to either paper and pencils/pens/ink, glue, linen binding thread, leather for making covers and a book press to bind the thing. Given that I'd have the rest of my life I'd settle for access to the raw materials to make these.

I'd write the book myself, it'd probably end up like a cross between Robinson Crusoë, Baden Powell's "Scouting for Boys", Zindell's "Neverness", Tolkien's "Silmarillion", The Gulag Archipelago - for what twisted mind would keep people from reading new (to them) books other than the same mind which created the GULAG system - and more of such. It would take years to write but that'd be a good thing given that it would keep me busy.

The 1917 edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Sam Harris’ Waking Up. I’m sure that some of the neuroscience in it will become outdated, but its effect on my worldview and life trajectory can’t be understated.

Perhaps this is apocryphal, but when Richard Feynman was asked what one sentence would contain the most information to bootstrap science after apocalypse, he said “everything is made of atoms”. Sam Harris parallels this with his one sentence for spiritual practice: “you are not this next thought”.

Being reminded of this annually by way of the excellent exposition of Waking Up seems to be the right move for me.

The Sherlock Holmes Canon.

The language phrasings, creation of a masterful personality, focus on clever logical deductions, varied story lines are all combined harmoniously to take the reader on a truly enjoyable read.

I think I'd pick The Wounded Sky, by Diane Duane. It's a Trek novel in which (ROT13 to spoiler-warning a decades-old novel): onfvpnyyl gur Ragrecevfr perj urycf grfg n arj zrnaf bs cebchyfvba, evcf gur Havirefr, naq va qbvat fb zrrgf n Tbq (abg Fgne Gerx I'f Tbq!) va n arj lrg-gb-or-obea cebgb-Havirefr, juvpu gurl gura uryc sbhaq vg jvgu gurve zbfg cerpvbhf zrzbevrf.

Honestly, there's so much to explore in the very concepts that she lays down that it leaves room for an intense amount of imagination and application.

The Bible

Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Hogfather by Sir Terry Pratchett.

I read it a couple of days before Christmas every year without fail and have since it came out.

I absolutely adore the discworld (Pratchett's books shaped me as a child - I wouldn't be the person I am now nor have had the career I do without him).

> “The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door.

> There was no doubt that whoever had shut it wanted it to stay shut. Dozens of nails secured it to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it.

> 'And there's the sign, Ridcully,' said the Dean. 'You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door"?'

> 'Of course I've read it,' said Ridcully. 'Why d'yer think I want it opened?'

> 'Er ... why?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

> 'To see why they wanted it shut, of course.'

> This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.”

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. Great for entertainment as well as enlightenment.

Computer Systems - A Programmer's Perspective https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspect...

Or, any discrete math book because it will take me a lifetime to understand it.

If I choose an OS book, my life will be short indeed.

Snow Crash.

I love the opening sequence with the Pizzanator.

Also, the description of the Metaverse was a great concept.

I’ve worn out one copy so far from reading it so much.

Excession. Iain Banks.

The culture series explores a universe where machine intelligence has obsoleted mankind, mostly through the perspective of individual people interacting with earlier stage societies.

Excession explores that higher intelligence interacting with a power they cannot comprehend.

I read that each vacation as a reminder of where I want tech to end up.

Thinking Fast and Slow

This book changed my life. It's content is based on an entire life of research. I think I will learn new things every time I read it.

I like this question because I started re-reading a few books already. I find it valuable as I already know they are good and I can extract more from them the second/third/forth time.

"Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahamsa Yogananda as its a book thats on one level about a chockful of miracles in India and weird bugs about reality (like what you see if not what you get) but on a deeper level about reality in the way that steve jobs felt compelled to hand it as his parting gift at his funeral

Maybe it's the nostalgia talking, but I finished season 4 of Stranger Things yesterday, and now I have a strong urge to pick up a copy of The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. A great book, it really captured the magic that King's Dark Tower series lost along the way.

Thomas Mann’s “Joseph and his brothers”, a tetralogy on the biblical (old testament) Joseph.

I am in the fourth reading.

Quantum Field Theory by Peskin and Schroeder. There are many things in that book I could make into a standalone project that could occupy years at a time.

Some other picks:

The Man in The High Castle by Phil K. Dick. The Plague or The Outsider by Albert Camus. City of Thieves by David Benioff.

George Orwell - 1984. It talks about the present.

Rendezvous with Rama

The Holy Bible.

It's an incredible resource. For the believers, it is the Word. For non-believers, it has more snippets attributed to common wisdom than you'd suspect.

It's the best-selling book in history, BTW.

For fiction: it's a hard tossup between Snow Crash and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, though Ender's Game, The Bicentennial Man, Rendezvous with Rama series, and Atlas Shrugged also would be contenders for me.

For nonfiction: some current contenders would be Democracy: The God that Failed, The Physics of Immortality (very thought-provoking and mind-bending), and some of Robert Green's books particularly The 48 Laws of Power.

1. Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution.

2. Kernighan & Ritchie C (I learn/interpret either something new about C or marvel the art of precise writing)

3. Harry Potter series

Cryponomicon by Neal Stephenson

"Bleak House" by Charles Dickens, unless I can get Anthony Trollope's "Barsetshire Chronicles" accepted as a single book.

When I was a bookworm, there are a couple of topics that continually interested me as the result of a single book. But then, after a couple reads, I tended to read others in the same arena. Not just for the novelty, but the different perspective.

But that was 'then', when words seemed to matter. And this is the same Now, only different, and Life is the book. Every day a new chapter. ;-)

Plato: Complete Works

Are anthologies cheating?

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Röde Orm / The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Ships

I guess it's a swedish favourite, a viking historical fiction / adventure novel. Fond memories since I was a teenager. I have only read it twice.

The Blue Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver. I read it at least once a year and live my life by it. There was no book that better described living in the digital world vs the physical world when I was growing up programming and living in muds. Every thing and every relationship in the physical world is a game that can played successfully with the right character

Don Quixote de la Mancha - M. de Cervantes Saavedra

A hundred years of Solitude - G. G. Márquez

Foucault's Pendulum - U. Eco

Cryptonomicon - N. Stephenson

The Dispossessed - U. K. Le Guin

In the sense of a piece of writing that was meant to be a book, Ulysses. Otherwise, the collected works of Shakespeare.

Regardless of taste preferences, it seems most logical to take with you some massive franchise. At least because there is more action, more characters, and therefore more room for thought.

But as for me, I would prefer Erich Maria Remarque's Three Comrades. It's simple, it's short, but it has so much life in it.

Incerto by Nassim Taleb. Best piece of work I've ever read. I'm re-reading it, and still... what a masterpiece, a mind-blowing piece of work. Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and Antifragile remain my "Holy Trinity" of books. You just couldn't stop reading them.

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell.

Just good reflections on happiness and life. Reminds me I need to read it again.

„Be not content - A subterranean journal“ is pretty eternal for me. So is „On the road“. Or take „Middlesex“. Why, they tell the story about a different life. If you want to spend the rest of your life miserable then „Im Westen nichts Neues“ (All quiet on the western front).

Love those Ask HN lists, btw!!

Bible

I would have to say Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. A short book, it covers the limits of knowledge and how to think about the world.

Every time I read it I discover something new, and it would be a good companion guide through life if I could read nothing else.

I am not sure which book I will re-read for the rest of my life, but these past few years I have read multiple times chapters from How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen and Reflections on Silver River by Ken McLeod.

Bhagavad Gita and Nine Upnishads

Time Enough for Love (Heinlein)

Is it acceptable to have the trilogy (despite different authors) of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid?

Not having read the Aeneid until much later than my 20s , I was surprised that this great work has been put to the side as I see it.

Tough choices ..

Moby Dick has so much to offer .. Gulliver's Travels ... Tristam Shandy ... Essays by Montaigne.. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ....

Probably the collected works of Shaw? Things with dialogue feel freah every time you read them.

The Collected Works of Shakespeare. There’s nothing else that even comes close.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - One of the most vividly written books I read. The style of writing made me feel like I was in its world as the story was playing out.

House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodges. Very atmospheric horror

I read to read Lord of the Rings every year but I pretty much got to memorise the whole thing and it became a drag

A Confederacy Of Dunces

Pandoras star by Peter f Hamilton. This along with pushing ice and the culture series opened a new vast world for me. Will keep rereading them every few years

Gravity's Rainbow

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon. Something about this book, jumping between eras, keeps me interested each time I jump into it.

Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death.

In many books I have tried to find answers and failed. TSUD stresses the importance of who is asking the questions.

Probably the Iliad or the Aeneid. They are the foundation of the classical education and fundamental to understanding much our past

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. For the language and the story. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. For the language and the story.

"finite and infinite games" by james carse

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics maybe.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson. Very centering and good way to lead life.

That or Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

I could read the 1632 series by Eric Flint over and over... I have.

One single book isn't enough... there has to be some variety.

The Baroque Cycle - Neal Stephenson. Newton, Leibnitz, the birth of the Royal Society - and pirates!

Founders at Work — Timeless collection of lessons learned from the men/women in the arena.

Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Tao Te Ching. Keeps me in balance, probably had reread it countless times.

The Prophet by Kahil Gibran

PiHKAL

Time Enough for Love -- Robert Heinlein

Google Lazarus Long quotes.

Mastery by Robert Greene

Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations

Raoul Vaneigem

The Riverworld series by Phillip Jose Farmer.

The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elisabeth Moon.

Pride and Prejudice. Just love Mr.Darcy.

Brave New World

The Pilgrim's progress. John Bunyan

The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ.

In the Bible, Christ said he would visit his (maybe inexact, from memory) "...other sheep, which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd." (In John, I think?) The Book of Mormon tells of Christ's visit to the ancient Americas, after his resurrection, where he taught them things like he taught in the Near East. It also contains teachings of ancient prophets, like the Bible does.

Along with the Bible, its teachings are amazing to me, in their ongoing ability to help me want to be a better person, and to bring peace and direction, amid hard events. (And its confirmation that Christ's resurrection is real, therefore we will all live again, with justice and the opportunity for honest mercy.)

(ps: thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes.)

(pps: fun note, I have read it in English, Spanish, Esperanto (such as there is), and over 1/2-way now in Russian. Something like 115 translations exist, per wikipedia, with more on the way. Looks like several chapters even in Klingon.)

The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch

Neal Stephenson's Anathem

Animal Farm

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

Quran

Bourbaki

Quincunx

The Count of Monte Cristo

Don Quijote de la Mancha

Works of GK Chesterton.

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Book of Mormon and the Holy Bible

Quran

Qur'an. As my Arabic is poor, I'd pick the Tafsir al-Jalalayn in Indonesian. The English translation often miss out most of the good stuff. Religious books are a bit cliche, but here's my reasoning.

1. Information density

The reverse Blinkist effect - summaries of the book end up longer than the book itself. You read the book once, find it nice. Then you read someone else's understanding of it. Compare notes, and find a lot of depth that you overlooked. It's the kind of book which you can discuss one verse over a whole hour.

A lot of the scholars often have a favorite verse or chapter. Mine would be the first 3 verses of Al-Humazah: Don't speak with the intent of harming people directly. Don't speak with the intent of harming people indirectly. Don't count wealth with the purpose of making yourself immortal.

These are very difficult things to do in this era of social media. But it's compact - it fits into a whole English sentence, and makes for a good mantra. When I slip (and it's tempting to insult strangers on the internet!) I can use these verses to remind myself.

2. Motivation/Inspiration/Self-Control

The ideal book should elevate you, give you more control over yourself and your surroundings, and turn you into a better person. Some draw inspiration from religion, but why not just pick a religious book. I love Robert Greene's books because of how clever and practical they are, but they can be a little toxic to practice.

Core to the Quran is trust. Trust that things are working as planned. That doesn't mean doing nothing, you have to be patient and persevere. There's some incredible but logical feats of perseverance, such as refraining from saying hurtful words. There's stories of people who made their riches, and then go out and donate nearly all of it to the poor. And beggars. It requires a lot of willpower to suffer for your wealth and then just give it to someone apparently lazy and incompetent.

Meditation may train your mindfulness muscle, but there's virtues like kindness and selflessness that need to be trained too.

3. Psychology/Philosophy, society modeling

I love a lot of philosophical books but they feel a little incomplete. You learn from it. But can you really apply it and get better at it? What of it?

I sat for a whole night pondering the Quran's An-Nazi'at 79:18-24. This is something anyone speed reading (or reciting) will gloss over, and it's not apparent in most English translations too. Instead of asking Pharaoh to repent, Moses asks whether he's looking for a mentor to purify/cleanse himself. The teacher comes to the ready student, but the student must first open their heart. Then Pharaoh calls his retinue of yes-men, which symbolises that he refuses to be ready. It was at a time when I was stuck on something, and could not find a suitable mentor, and then realized that I was just being stubborn.

4. Entertainment

There's what I call active entertainment. Like you don't just watch a Marvel film, you end up searching/documenting/modeling the world in some way. Passive entertainment is okay, but shallow.

The part I enjoy about reading the Qur'an is that it's all interlinked and ties back into reality. I know if I spend time on it, I find something, and so there's a lot of entertainment value in spending lots of time digging into it slowly. For the last 6 months, I've been analyzing the second chapter of the Qur'an (al-Baqarah) and my notes for that one chapter are about 3000 words long. I have 500 words of notes on An-Nazi'at and it's only 46 verses long. The more I work on one part, the more meaning I can find when working on another part.

By comparison, my notes on a book like Deep Work is about 3750 words. Aristotle's Poetics is the only other book I combed through sentence by sentence, and it's under 2000 words.

Considering this, I think it's a good pick if I really just wanted one book.

Atlas Shrugged

Book of Mormon because it is both a collection of ancient records and inspired religious text. Sometimes reading it is like having a conversation with Christ Himself. Amazing book.