What books are you reading?
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I’m still in holiday mode, and since I picked a challenge of reading at least a book a month 2 years ago I still regularly read but the list of unread books is getting thinner.
I was wondering what books are on other people’s list, as I feel lobsters is somewhat of a community and we roughly share some common interests.
Also a why you like (or dislike) the book seems like a good thing to mention.
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Fiction: In the past couple of weeks I read Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Woman in Black.
Non-fiction (non-technical): The Devil in the White City, a book about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the serial killer H. H. Holmes who killed many people during the Exposition, to the point of building a “murder castle”.
(Looking at the above, I feel the need to point out that I am not a serial killer.)
Non-fiction (technical): Programming Rust: It seems more accessible than The Rust Programming Language.
With the older kid: The Mark of Athena, which is the third (?) book in the second pentalogy of the Percy Jackson series. My older son loves Percy Jackson and I have to admit, it’s pretty good.
With the younger kid: Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, a spin-off book from Judy Blume’s Fudge series told from their classmate Sheila’s perspective. It’s fine but I’m having trouble making a sufficient number of distinct voices for all the characters.
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Fiction: Recently read the main Book of the New Sun series, started the coda just a couple days ago. They’re great books, a lot of fun to decode what’s going on behind the scenes. Also read and enjoyed some Houellebecq recently, he’s an interesting author (very pessimistic fella!).
Nonfiction: Neoreaction a Basilisk, a fun collection of essays about online reactionaries. Slowly going through the Art of Electronics and rereading parts of Types and Programming Languages.
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I’ve been slowly going through Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. It’s slow going because you can only read so much about how your country (USA) supported death squads and the media absolutely failed to report it at the time before you have to set the book down and watch something happy on YouTube. I like that it lays out a model for how the state-backed mass media propaganda machine works, then demonstrates cases where the model’s predictions hold up. I’m not very far, but it’s also important to know where a model falls short, and I’m still waiting to see that.
I also just got The World Atlas of Whiskey in the mail, so I’ll start reading that bit by bit. So far it’s got some nice diagrams of the distilling process for different styles (single malt, Irish single pot still, bourbon, etc), maps, and cross references for recommendations.
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Just finished my vacation and The Cradles series - https://www.goodreads.com/series/192821-cradle (first heard about it on lobters🙃).
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Fiction:
- Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown
- Umbrella Academy by Way/Bá
Non-fiction
- The Anarchy by William Dalrymple
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I just finished Circe by Madeline Miller, which had been on my list for a while.
Was a very interesting book, and offered a very different take on the usual Greek tales of gods and heros. Though it’s probably best if you read The Odyssey beforehand, I feel like I missed a fair bit of context since I didn’t.
Overall though I quite liked it.
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I picked up Dune over the holiday period, but it feels pretty slow going so far, although I’ve heard such great things I’m going to push through.
Otherwise, I’ve also been going through programming Phoenix 1.4, to get more up to speed with Phoenix and start writing more Elixir in my spare time.
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fiction: I just finished rereading Dune (and I liked it less than I remembered)
non-fiction: Gary Taubes The Case for Keto, it seems good so far, but I already eat keto, so he doesn’t have much to sell me on
technical: a Springer anthology Query Understanding for Search Engines, it’s interesting and relevant for my work
with my kid: Big Ideas for Curious Minds: An Introduction to Philosophy, we’re reading a chapter together every night, so far it’s kind of a mixed bag, but it does make for some interesting discussions
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I’m a couple of pages into “Monitoring with prometheus” from James Turnbull for a second time now. I’ve read it before but it was quite some time ago and I feel I need a refresher as I completely forgot some things since I wasn’t using the knowledge I picked up last time. I remember liking the book, though, and found it was written in a clear and easy to understand way.
The second book I was going to start reading is “The Mist” from Stephen King. I came across it and remember reading it at least 15 years ago now. This one is more of an emotional thing to read again, as I still remember what I was doing at the time and I wasn’t feeling too great. I always like how King is able to vividly project the atmosphere of the subjects in my mind, and no idea why but this one stuck me the most.
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Fiction: Season of Migration to the North, in the original Arabic. I’ve read the English translation and it’s one of my favorite books.
Non-fiction: The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin. Read a few of the lectures in my first year of undergrad and figured it was about time to read the rest.
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For work I’m reading “AWS Automation Cookbook”, specifically because our devops team wants to move our CI away from Jenkins and into AWS codepipelines soon, and because we’ve been using AWS more in general, so it’s important to know more about it.
Outside of work I’ve been reading through “OpenGL Insights,” a collection of articles about different topics related to newer versions of OpenGL (mostly 4.0+). I’ve been jumping around between articles, and they’re generally well written and informative, and I’ve learned quite a bit.
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I’m reading High Performance MySQL [1], it’s about benchmarking and tuning MySQL, very interesting!
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- Last two books of the stormlight series
- Just finished “Babel”, which is about the world’s top languages
- Before that it was “Cynefin”
- I have the Stephen R. Donaldson Gap series up next
Recommend
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