Some of the books I read recently:

• We Are Anonymous - entertaining though necessarily a bit dumbed-down discussion of the Anonymous/LulzSec hacks. In this genre, I prefered The Hacker Crackdown or Mitnick's Ghost in the wires, but it was interesting to see where the 'Anonymous' hackers came from, where they succeeded, and how they got caught.
• Miller's Spent - sex, evolution and consumer behavior which was recommend to me here, and discusses EvoPsy / consumerism. Overall, an interesting book, until the last few chapters where the author unsuccesfully attempts to show how to overcome consumerism.
• Linden's The Accidental Mind was a particularly insightful pop-sci discussion of how our brain works, with an emphasis on how buggy/imperfect it is, and how the brain works around that.
• Some other books that I liked: Shell's Bargaining for advantage (pretty good book about, well, bargaining, which presents the subject in a structured, non-BS way). If finally read Cialdini's Influence (it was a bit anecdotical for my taste, but it's a pretty good overview of the little tricks people use to influence others)

"Labyrinths" by Borges is a good read. And it's only, y'know, 50 years old. Not LW-related even a little, except by analogy in the vocabulary department. It's fun, interesting, and "culturally uplifting."

Read "The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester and am torn between liking it and not. It was recommended as a 'must read' for anyone who liked HPMOR by someone on r/hpmor. It really has no rationality in it to speak of - the character spends more time punching his way through problems then out-thinking them. There's a couple cool sequences where the character pushes himself to learn in harsh environments, but that's about it. At several points through the book I was severely tempted to put it down and not finish but at other times I was quite caught up in it. It reminds me somewhat of Ayn Rand's works in that the author has decided their character is going to be really good at things and so spends a fair amount of time telling the reader how awesome their character is. It seems to have worked though, given that the version I read has a gushing intro from Neil Gaimman about how gripping and powerful the main character is. I wasn't convinced.

I reread "Dune" by Frank Herbert. It's even better than I remembered and has some fun rationalist themes (though without enough details in those themes to make it comparable to HPMOR). I tried reading the second book years ago and got tired half-way through. I might try again.

I also read some of Oscar Wilde. I was a little disappointed in "The Importance of Being Earnest", probably due to my having read P.G. Wodehouse who has pretty similar story lines. I was expecting by his reputation more cleverness in the story. That said, his writing is quite entertaining and I found myself laughing out loud several times.

"The Way of Cross and Dragon" by George RR Martin has some relevant themes.

You can either read it in the anthology "Dreamsongs," or just click here

Excerpt (mildly spoilery):

"We Liars, like all other religions, have several truths we take on faith. Faith is always required. There are some things that cannot be proved. We believe that life is worth living. That is an article of faith. The purpose of life is to live, to resist death, perhaps to defy entropy."

..."We also believe that happiness is a good, something to be sought after.".... "The Liars believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transitory, and certainly it is uncaring."

Not really new, but I found China Miéville's Perdido Street Station really good. It's a mix of steampunk, fantasy and horror, and Miéville is a magician with words. He also looks at the motivations of all the actors, good and bad (and human, non-human).

I finished reading 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami.

My first reaction upon finishing the book was, "Well, if his previous work wasn't enough to merit a Nobel Prize, this one isn't going to help."

Good things: Murakami is still the only currently living master of magical realism, and this could be his last major work. The most charitable interpretation of the book is that it is the culmination of all of his work on loneliness and alienation. It takes very traditional Western magical elements like the fae, doppleganger, and immaculate conception, and weaves them in with traditional Japanese cultural elements like NHK fee collectors, filial piety, and the hikikomori. The title's connection with Orwell's 1984 is subtle and mostly well-done.

Bad things: Too often do characters say or think that something that was clearly arranged by the author happened "by coincidence"; in general the writing is somewhat lazy. No explanation is given as to why, e.g., a policewoman in '84 would know who Marshall McLuhan is. Egregious abuse of Occam's razor (by name) in the third part to mask the author feeding the plot-so-far into the mind of a character he needlessly recycled from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Summer Wars is one of if not the best anime movie I have seen. While its not a hyper-rational movie the plot is kicked off largely as a result of people making realistic bad decisions which is nice to see. Also it has na hSNV as a major antagonist and the portrayal is more realistic that in most movies (which is not the same as actually realistic).

For future media threads, can you take out the phrase "which I was apparently too dumb to do" from the OP? Repeatedly reading the the self-depreciation is disconcerting.

I love reading and have enjoyed some of the recommendations I found on LW; however, I'm sure the collective knowledge of interesting books in the LW-community is much bigger than the few book seen in the Media Thread or in the wiki. Moreover, there doesn't seem to be a place to find the, say, top-5 most higly rated books in some subject, or the top-5 of must-read books of the last 12 months.

If someone knows how we could start something like this on LW, your advice would be highly appreciated!

Do anime movies belong in other or movies? I assume the latter, but wanted to check.