Variety across adventure, crime, and some good ode gentle rambling. Any recommendations what I should dive into next?

I watched a bunch of great youtube videos on microchips from Branch Education and I am inspired to learn more about the industry. Two books that I plan to read are:

Chip War by Chris Miller

Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink

I'd love a third book to round out the list. I've seen these two books posted here before so I'm hoping I'll catch others who have gone down this rabbit hole or hear from others who have enjoyed a book related to this topic.

Hii ppl!

I am going to start with this "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. If anybody has read it before, I would love loveee to know what's ur take on this!

Always seen some of his books among best sellers in a lot of countries(his novels or non fiction) and wanted to know if hes any good

Full disclosure up front: I am the author.

I spent years researching and writing the book I could not find. The Complete World of Coffee covers the whole subject in five parts: coffee's origins and history from Yemen and Ethiopia outward, the plant and processing science, roast chemistry and water, extraction and brewing craft, and then culture, sustainability, and the economics of the value chain. It is 615 pages, hardcover, $55, published October 1, 2026 by my own Lyons Den Publishing in San Diego.

It is for two kinds of readers: the home brewer whose questions have outgrown blog posts, and the coffee professional who wants one reference that holds the science and the history together. It is not a recipe book and it is not a beginner's pamphlet; if you want a short, light introduction, James Hoffmann's World Atlas of Coffee is the better first buy, and I will say that in my own thread.

Details and sample pages are at keithlyons.org. Happy to answer questions about anything in it, including where I think it is weakest.

Been getting more into nonfiction, technology, and its cultural effects. Here's my top two for the year - adjacent to my request:

- This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee

- GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything by Freya India

Thank you!!!!

Edit - I should add anything adjacent is also welcome as a suggestion :)

I don't read non fiction too often but iam thinking about reading one so i need a suggestion i want to read a book which tells how to be happy without any acheivements because I can't really be happy with myself it's always a goal and then even if i fulfill it then there's another goal so I want to find happiness that is within me not connected to my acheivements

Current Read.
Has anyone read it?

What did you guys think about it?

The Fifth Risk - Michael Lewis

It's a great book 5/5

"Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves." -Trump

Well I knew the trump adminstration was bad, i didn't know it was this bad

This book provides an inside account on Trump's first term transition, during elections before the results you are supposed to list people who will serve as heads of various government departments and the previous admin is supposed to help the incoming admin with the goings of various government projects

Trump after winning the election removed every one on his proposed list and began appointing people who you would never imagine to lead a gov organisation.

In this book Lewis walks you through various us government departments, their projects and some extraordinary personalities behind them and the appointees trump admin selected.

It's a very small book, you clould finish it in a single sitting.

Red Pine's translation of The Diamond Sutra is one of the best examples of what an annotated edition can be. The sutra itself, a 5,000-word dialogue between the Buddha and a monk about the nature of perception and reality, runs maybe thirty pages; the rest of the book is Red Pine weaving in commentary from dozens of Chinese commentators spanning over a thousand years, plus his own travel notes from retracing the sutra's history in China. There's a genuinely great nonfiction thread in there too: the story of the 868 CE woodblock copy found at Dunhuang, which happens to be the oldest dated printed book in existence, predating Gutenberg by six centuries. Even if you have zero interest in Buddhist doctrine, it works as literary detective work, watching translators and scholars fight over every line for a millennium.

I stumbled upon Christian IX while reading The Romanovs: 1613–1918 and got curious about his family. That's how I found The Family of Kings by Theo Aronson.

Christian IX had six children, four of whom married into royal families and connected Denmark to the thrones of Britain, Greece, and Russia:

- Frederick VIII, King of Denmark.

- Alexandra, who married Edward VII and became Queen of the United Kingdom.

- George I, King of Greece.

- Dagmar, who married Alexander III and became Empress of Russia.

Their children and grandchildren included George V of Britain, Nicholas II of Russia, and Christian X of Denmark.

I particularly enjoyed the stories about their summer family get-togethers, when members of European royal families gathered for family reunions.

What I loved about Aronson's book was how he wrote about them as family members first, and kings, queens, and emperors second. I went in expecting political schemes and carefully planned marriages, but I was so wrong 🤣

It was a really interesting read and I'm officially down the rabbit hole.

Since I'm still pretty new to this subject, I'd really appreciate any book recommendations you might have. I'm especially interested in books about royal families and their personal lives rather than politics and wars. Thank you.

I’ve read a lot about the Soviets and saw this in my local. Would love to hear your thoughts. Worth picking up for $12.50?

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the longest book I've read so far, and it earns its length. Piketty's subject is wealth inequality and the nature of capital itself. What sets the book apart is its empirical rigour. He spends real time explaining where his data come from and how they were built, and the series stretch back to the eighteenth century for France and Britain, whose statistical records are unusually rich. That gives the analysis a time horizon very few books can match. The trade-off is that the story is mostly about Europe and the United States, with much thinner coverage of the developing world.

The analytical core is a small set of relationships. Capital's share of national income equals the return on capital times the capital/income ratio (α = r × β). In the long run, that ratio tends towards the savings rate divided by the growth rate (β = s/g). Driving the whole argument is the inequality r > g: when the return on capital outpaces economic growth, inherited wealth grows faster than output and wages. None of these tools is exotic. Their power comes from applying them across a century or more, where the trends become impossible to miss. In Europe the capital/income ratio was extraordinarily high before 1914. It was compressed by two world wars, inflation and policy, and has been climbing back towards its old levels ever since.

One unexpected effect of all this history is how clearly it shows that each generation's picture of the world is a product of its time. A century ago, America was the egalitarian new land of opportunity, the birthplace of the American Dream, and "Old Europe" was the society of entrenched inherited wealth. Today the picture has nearly flipped: European welfare states redistribute far more and offer stronger public services, while US inequality has surged. Piketty makes the same point about the economists who came before him. Marx's apocalyptic view of capitalism took shape when industrial wages had stagnated for decades. Kuznets's reassuring curve, which held that inequality would fall naturally as economies matured, came out of the post-war boom and suited the Cold War need for good news about capitalism. Piketty's own position is that capital, left to itself, tends towards concentration, and that markets' initial distribution will not undo that.

Reading it personally is a sobering experience. The logic of the Matthew effect is brutal. If your wealth comes only from wages, while someone else holds property or financial assets, the gap between you widens over time rather than narrowing. It's hard not to feel a flicker of cynicism about people who live comfortably on inheritance alone, especially now, when growth is slowing and upward mobility feels increasingly closed off. The formula makes the point plainly: the lower the growth rate, the heavier the weight of accumulated capital. Piketty notes that the twenty-first century has partly moved from a society of rentiers to one of "supermanagers" with enormous salaries. But supermanagers save, invest and become the next generation of rentiers. Capital reproduces itself. That is simply what it is.

That's why, although his closing proposal of a global progressive tax on capital sounds idealistic (Piketty himself calls it "a useful utopia"), it's hard to see a real alternative. If capital's own dynamics push towards concentration, then rebalancing requires deliberately cutting into returns at the top. The proposal is the one place I'd dock a little, for its practicality rather than its logic. Overall, a profound and genuinely illuminating book: four and a half stars.

As someone who has been directly impacted by the opioid epidemic and the flood of heroin, I found this hard at times to read. But I’m glad I continued on as it put into context how forces so beyond my scope resulted in the devastation to my community.

I’ve just finished The Invention of Prehistory for the 2nd time, and had read The Muse of History earlier this year.

Both works are essentially seeking to understand and explain how the study of the past (prehistory for book one, Ancient Greece for book two) was used to justify or demean contemporary societal, political, economic, racial and sexual thinking.

Both books follow roughly the same time period (starting around The Enlightenment), and do a tremendous job of both examining how these areas were studied, and the subsequent use of this knowledge.

Some favourite highlights include Freud’s speculative accounts of early human history as the foundation for religious thinking (arguing that early man organised around a dominant patriarch, who would eventually be killed by his jealous sons, with the collective guilt that came from it leading to moral restrictions) and the contrast between Sparta and Athens, both used to justify wildly different forms of modern government (Athens = The Many/Democracy, Sparta = The Best/Oligarchy), and how Nietzsche and Burckhardt both viewed the Greeks as wildly pessimistic (they differed however in if/how they overcame it, with Nietzsche famously arguing Tragedy and art allowed one to transcend pessimism).

Would definitely recommend to anyone who is a fan of intellectual history, grand narrative history, or the study of Ancient Greece/early human history.

I just finished this tonight. It had been on my shelf for a few months and anyone that hangs out in this thread will know it’s recommended all the time.

It is a fascinating story. 18 months on the worst conditions on earth without touching land. It is remarkable. For all 28 to survive that was a testament to the character and experience of the men, with the exception of Orde Lees, dickhead! I’d have thrown him overboard!

I respect the achievement of how they accomplished what they did but I have to say I rarely felt their desperation except in the couple of chapters to the South Georgia islands.

I think it was maybe the methodical style i felt in the narrative or the fact that I read the escape artist the week before. Still though a good read