Eli Bendersky's website - "Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense" by Malcolm Kendrick - interesting book about dissecting medical studies and data, trying to extract signal from the noise. Gives one some appreciation of the difficulty of medical research. Unfortunately, most of the book is spent on diatribes about the author's pet peeves (mostly cholesterol and statins), filled with responses to attacks on the author's own blog posts, which greatly reduces the book's overall quality. The first third or so is still very insightful, though.
- "Working" by Robert A. Caro - the author won the Pulitzer prize twice with his biographies of Lyndon B Johnson and Robert Moses. This is a relatively short book in which he explains a bit about how he conducts the research and writing for his books. Interesting read, although without having read Caro's actual biographies I don't feel very familiar with the topics. He seems to be the Donald Knuth of biography writing when it comes to meticulousness and comprehensive research.
- "Distributed Systems, 3rd edition" by Maarten van Steen and Andrew S. Tanenbaum - one of the biggest dissapointments I had with technical books in a while. I recalled Tanenbaum's books fondly from university and expected this one to be decent. Seeing no index in a 500-page technical book was an early alert, and it all went downhill from there. The book is rambling, covering pages upon packad pages with useless background text; when it comes to actual technical details it explains them so badly that it's close to useless. I tried my best to stick to it, skipping some bad sections, restarting at new topics time and again, but to no avail. What a waste of time.
- "Seven Brief Lessons in Physics" by Carlo Rovelli - a very nice introductory brush of several topics in modern physics. Super short book (~80 small pages) and good writing; wish it was longer.
- "Shalom Sefarad" by Gonzalo Hernández Guarch - history of the expulsion of Jews from Spain, told as a fictional biographic account. It was nice to get back reading in Spanish after a long hiatus, but I didn't like this book much. The historical parts are interesting, but the plot of the book is very loosely put together, in a way that I didn't find believable or appealing.
- "Alaska" by James Michener - this time Michener turned his attention to Alaska, with the typical thoroughness and trademark ~1100 pages. Nice read for the most part, though the quality of storytelling is varying. Sometimes the scenarios feel a bit too forced, just in order to tell a story.
- "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles - the life story of a member of the Russian nobility placed under house arrest in a prominent Moscow hotel after the 1917 revolution. Delightful book! It's been a while since I enjoyed a work of fiction this much. Being familiar with Russian classics (like "War and Peace") is definitely helpful, but probably not strictly necessary to enjoy this book. The audio-recording I was listening too was narrated with a British accent, which also has a positive effect on the experience.
- "The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change" by Camille Fournier - you caught me reading a management book, aargh :-) I do this very rarely, but this one was so highly and universally acclaimed that I couldn't resist. It's a good book overall, and I'd recommend it for folks working in tech today. It follows the track from mentor to TL to manager, to 2nd level manager, director, etc, all the way to the CTO of a small company (or a higher exec like VP in a larger company). Not all parts will be relevant to everyone, but I found the writing to be good, thoughtful and very relevant to my own experiences as an IC, TL and manager in tech.
- "Midnight in Chernobyl" by Adam Higginbotham - very good account of the Chernobyl disaster, what led to it and its aftermath.
- "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport - the main thesis is that pursuing a topic you love is the wrong strategy for a happy and successful career; rather, you should find something you're good at and pursue that. Nice book overall, though a bit drawn out. In addition to the main thesis, the author also presents an interesting idea about "career capital" and how it's used to leverage other parameters of success. There are also some early notes about deliberate practice and deep work which the author has developed into a later book.
Re-reads:
- "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck
- "Electric Universe" by David Bodanis