Eli Bendersky's website - "The spy who came from the cold" by John le Carre - I found this book completely by chance by browsing for something unrelated. With acclaims to be "the best spy novel of all times", it looked like something I should give a chance. Well, I didn't read that many spy novels so I don't really have good points for comparison, but this book is very good. The first 3/4ths are excellent, even. Alas, the ending was not entirely to my taste. I think the author could have done better. Overall though, highly recommended.
- "Shawshank Redemption" by Stephen King - technically a re-read since this is the second time I read this book. But the first time was before the blog was established. I really like this book - it's short and very well written. And yet, it's better than the movie (although the movie is also great).
- "Debt: The first 5000 years" by David Graeber - some books are so well reviewed that I feel bad for not liking them. But what can you do... This book was almost unreadable for me. The author made an insightful claim in the beginning (debt originated long before money) and then went on an on to examine all of human history from his point of view, linking everything to debt. But you can really link everything to debt if you try hard enough (try harder and you can link everything to broccoli). Hence I found the book lacked a meaningful theme, and isn't written in a particularly interesting way. Perhaps it appears more exciting to people with interest in certain domains of economics.
- "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson (read in Hebrew) - The official biography of Steve Jobs. Decent book, very readable for a biography. Some of the technical details appear to be less accurate than one would hope for, but this isn't a big deal overall. Unfortunately what I had in hands was the Hebrew translation which was as awful as usual, but overall once I learned to ignore the crap the book was enjoyable.
- "Memories after my death" by Yair Lapid (read in Hebrew) - a biography of the author's father, Yosef (Tommy) Lapid. Written in an unusual (for a biography) first-person manner, this book turned out to be much better than I initially expected. I was fond of Lapid while he was active, but it turns out that I didn't know even 1/10th of what he achieved in his life. Most of all, I was not aware of his ruthlessly objective and moral character that's certainly worthy of serving as a role model. Couple that with very good writing, and this makes for an excellent book.
- "Tmux - Productive mouse-free development" by Brian P. Hogan - an excellent short guide to the tmux program. When getting set up, you can skim the important parts of this book in less than an hour, and keep it as a handy reference afterwards. I like it that the book is written by an actual programmer who "gets" the way other programmers want their configuration to be done.
Re-reads:
- "A pale blue dot" by Carl Sagan