Good Books for a Lousy Year
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
"Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that US writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", which he said dragged down the quality of their work. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/01/us.literature....
[1]: That said, one of my new favorite authors is an Argentinian writer named Samanta Schweblin whose I discovered on TOB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samanta_Schweblin
If you know French La Republique des Livres is a good choice[3]
In Spanish there are lots of sites, but this book recommendation section from Clarin has a good selection from all over the world [4]
I really liked this site[5] in English about "post-modern" writers (Kafka, Borges,Joyce,Beckett etc), too bad it was shut down, but you can still read it on Internet archive.
Surprisingly 4chan /lit has very good taste in literature.They have several guides,for example one by origin of the work[6]
To finish I will give 7 books, very well known, but they wont always appear in, say a reddit top 100 books or whatever:
1. The tartar steppe. Dino Buzzati
2. Pedro Paramo. Juan Rulfo.
3. Life and fate.Vasily Grossman
4.Memoirs of Hadrian. Marguerite Yourcenar
5. The book of disquiet. Fernando Pessoa
6. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. Yasunari Kawabata.
7. Midaq Alley. Naguib Mahfouz
[1]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [2]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [3]https://larepubliquedeslivres.com/ [4]https://www.clarin.com/tema/libros-recomendados.html [5]https://web.archive.org/web/20130401045155/http://www.themod... [6]https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Literat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague (contains spoilers)
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/daniel-defoe/a-journal-of-...
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/giovanni-boccaccio/the-dec...
Unfortunately, I ended up reading lot more this year. By GoodReads counts I have already read 70+ books, so, with the re-reads and other physical books, I will be hitting 80+ books this year (I didn't participate in their book count this year).
When I'm anxious, I either read or play chess. If I'm pitching or have an important meeting, I would have likely played few games of chess.
Pretty much all books gives you something or the other to learn. I started writing about the books I read, each year, since 2018. For this year, here are few, in no particular order that I feel happy and fulfilled reading them. I will be digging deeper and doing a retrospective, and write a blog post by early 2021.
- Cant't hurt me by David Goggins.
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
- Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. (Re-read)
- Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. A very un-assuming book that taught me lot about leadership.
- How to influence and win friends (re-read 3rd or 4th time).
- Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein.
- I am Malala (daughter like it and so I read it)
- Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Issacson. (I'm taking this real slow, still reading after 6+ months.)
- Range (the one mentioned by Bill Gates)
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
- The Future is Asian by Parag Khanna.
- Turn the Ship Around.
- Under Pressure by Lisa Damour (I have a daughter, turning teenager in another year.)
- Venture Deals (still valid in today's fund raising scenes)
- Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker. Still reading but learning a lot already.
If you need a different perspective on exercising and pushing yourself to your limits this book is a must. Don't try to be David Goggins (you might die). But to read his story is to see what extremes a human can push themselves to and it might help you push a little harder.
Learning to work with intention and not just when I feel "focused" or "energized" has been hard work for me and something that this last year has really forced. His book was very helpful to me in framing mentally uncomfortable things as "workouts" and opportunities to grow.
It's a great book if you apply that concept to things like family, marriage, work, LIFE, and not just increasing your suffering personal record.
Personally, I feel something missing if I totally skip something, so I tend to or try to finish what I read. I was known to be that kid who read Newspapers top to bottom of all pages, so that is that.
My tricks;
- Don't drive, get an Uber and read. I have finished so many books inside an Uber car.
- If I'm flying, I finish about 2 typical books per leg of the flight.
- Always have your Kindle or a Book with you. Read instead of looking at your phone. ;-)
- If you have kids, read to show them that you read, they will follow.
Here is from our family's collective https://oinam.fyi/books/ (WIP).
Up to a certain point 'reading from a Kindle' looks exactly the same as burying your face in a phone. Do you prefer physical books at home to model the reading behavior? Or have you found that young kids understand that e-book reading is not the same as phone-use?
I wrote about it at https://oinam.blog/why-physical-books-matter-7a2872c64821
I am the same way. This makes it very hard for me to skim books or even sections of books because it feels like I’m “cheating” and not really finishing the book properly. This also makes it hard for me to quit books halfway, even if I don’t enjoy it.
I know that both of these things (skimming and knowing when to quit early) are vital skills for readers, but my completionism borders on obsessive.
That's interesting, I'm the complete opposite, I find it almost impossible to read while anxious.
This does mean you're not, say, having a lot of quiet time for your thoughts. I don't necessarily miss this, but I'm sure others will.
Generally I’m reading at least two books at a time, one non-fiction and one fiction. I tend to listen to the non-fiction books and read the ebook/physical fiction book.
I wake up in the morning, make coffee/breakfast for me and my wife, and read the ebook/physical book while I’m eating. I read whenever I’m in the car (audiobook non-fiction) and when I’m doing simple chores around the house or at work. I recently started reading the audiobooks during my exercise time, so that adds at least an hour a day. If I’m eating alone for lunch I’ll read the ebook/physical book. On days off I’ll read the ebook/physical book as a form of relaxation for a few hours as well. Finally, I read the ebook/physical book every night as I fall asleep. I generally have to go back a page or two the next morning as I might have missed a few paragraphs as I drift off.
I generally boost the speed of the audiobook to as fast as I can deal with (depends on the narration), but I can’t do that with any voices I’m familiar with. I read Obama’s audiobook recently and I kept that at 1X speed.
I’ve been reading the audiobooks for ~3 years, and before that I averaged around 60 or 70 books a year with a range of 50 on the low end to 82 on the high end.
Last year I took notes on all the non-fiction ebook/physical books I read. I haven’t done the same this year and I feel like I’m not missing out on anything, although the notes were useful when trying to find a reference quickly.
I sleep at least 8 hours a night, and I don’t feel rushed in my reading or anything like that. I think what allows me to read so many books is that I have been reading like this since I was a teenager (~20 years) so I read and comprehend quite quickly. The high-speed audiobooks also almost double the number of books and I don’t see a huge drop off in knowledge/usefulness/entertainment. I also don’t really watch TV so this is my main form of entertainment, along with movies a few times a week.
Any recommendations from the 121?
Fiction recommendations:
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. This book absolutely wrecked me emotionally (in a good way) for weeks after reading it
- The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. I enjoyed this even more than the Underground Railroad, which was also great. Both also won a Pulitzer for what it’s worth.
- The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea. This book gave me a glimpse into what it’s like for Mexicans who immigrate to the US, and the storytelling was just wonderful.
Non-fiction recommendations:
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Mix together equal parts science, indigenous knowledge and myth, botany, and wonderful writing and you get this book. I love Kimmerer’s voice (both in terms of her writing and her performance of the audiobook) and I read Gathering Moss by her this year as well because she’s just that good.
- American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. In my opinion is the definitive book about the atomic bomb and Oppenheimer. I also read The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman and I think that was a pretty good follow up about the arms race and Cold War that came after.
- Barbarian Days by William Finnegan. I knew nothing and cared little about surfing before this book. I couldn’t put it down after I picked it up though. I’ve heard the audiobook is great so I might just read it again in that format because it was that good.
There are so many more but I think those are a good start. If you want recommendations in a certain genre I can probably give some because I’ve read widely over the years.
I also think that this year was probably not lousy for many people, me included, and I'm a bit tired of giving 2020 negative adjectives.
And while I think attributing negative adjectives to 2020 is arbitrary, since the bad things happening now are not bound to the calendar, this year was particularly bad for an even bigger number of people than the average year. It may not have been bad for you, but passing off the year as remotely good is disrespectful and shows a lack of empathy to the millions who had it bad because of covid, racial conflicts, natural disasters, terrorism, increased poverty etc etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph...
I keep telling people that 2020 is our chance to both address the lousy situation many are in, and to recognize what is truly important in our lives. The fact that many people did in fact have a very lousy year and you did not also falls into that category. Why do you think your year was not lousy, and what can we learn from it?
Personally, I thought Range was a fantastic book. I agree that it was repetitive at times but that drum beating of the theme was welcome and showed the un/kind learning environment thesis in many areas of human learning.
I gave copies of the book out to my group at work in 2019 and everyone in the group loved it (so they told me!). My team members appreciated the other examples beyond the Woods-Federer example and my boss brings up those examples from time to time.
The central core idea of un/kind learning environments is a crucial one and has really helped me when I have to learn new things too. As my career is not generally in a kind learning environment, it has made me more confident to graze for new information far and wide, like here on HN (:
Poor value for my reading hour.
Non-fiction books are terrible for this though, there's often a few brilliant pages buried in hundreds of pages of filler. Fiction (ironically, as a deliberate consumption of free time) is often not nearly as bloated.
That advise was given when there where no eBook readers, Smartphones or other mobile stuff. But it's still a good advise IMO as long as you use these tools for mainly recreational activities.
So long note, short answer: reading books isn't a waste of time.
What about if I feel I'm not a good software engineer?
We do many things just for pleasure; we go on holiday, we have friends, we eat dessert, we go for walks, we read books.
If you feel you need to improve your English or your technical skills, that's fine, you can study. But that's unrelated to all the other activities you might do for your own pleasure.
Well said! This is the curse of the modern society/economy that everything you do should be towards some "improvement" either materially or otherwise. The concept and importance of "play" has all but been forgotten. Incidentally, much of Science progressed only because many of the Scientists actually loved "playing" with what interested them. The actual inventions/discoveries were more accidental like.
Knowledge for Knowledge's sake is a very good thing.
But then reading your message made me think: this sounds a lot like Sartre's waiter [1]. I don't think I can change the way I feel and approach life, and I'm quite comfortable with my approach, but if you're not and you want to make a change, you might want to dig into why that's the case.
If you are close to the beginning of your journey, like say 1-3 years ago you didn't know how to program at all, them I would take the advice you are getting with a grain of salt. I would recommend pouring your free time into your trade, gaining both a breadth of knowledge about software engineering (like spending 3 hours learning about C++ not to write a program in it but to be able to understand what it is and what it isn't so you can carry a brief conversation when the topic turns to it) and a depth of knowledge with your preferred toolset (like 200+ hours going through 3-4 ground up resources on Python because its your most reached for language to get work done).
Once you have that strong foundation, the other advice here is very sound. Turn your computer off and go do wood working, or read a comprehensive history series that tackles each decade (and then do it again from an Asian focused author rather than a Western focused one), or find a solid podcast to listen to while you go for long walks in nature, etc. Pretty much anything other than sitting at your computer for both your job and your hobby.
Then you might actually be a descent software engineer. It's when you stop worrying if you're good enough that you are most likely falling behind.
The stuff you read "for work" will undoubtedly increase your technical knowledge and make you a better software engineer, but the books you read for pleasure might just soothe your soul, increase your knowledge about the world you live in (good, interesting biographies, history books, etc) or they might just be good fun and a good way to switch off.
So while I don't necessarily think your mindset is harmful per se, I do think it is perhaps a little self limiting. That's just my opinion of course - I like literature so for me books are definitely a pleasure. Your mileage might vary :)
Though maybe I'm lucky in that I have very broad architectural responsibilities in my job...
I found that reading books on other subjects (from non-fiction I've read some biographies, some economics books, the usual suspects like Sapiens and such). I find that knowing a bit about everything is mainly a good way to keep conversations going because it enables you to chip in on many different subjects while otherwise it might be hard to find a common interest.
It also helps to see some issues that one might overlook. An example would be American Kingpin which shows how a good technical idea with no moral oversight might end up creating something that ultimately makes world a little bit worse.
Usually the part of out-of-scope of software is dealt by product managers. Maybe it is a problem of working in a big corporation?
Life happens outside of work too, it's nice to be able to talk about other things than coding. Out of scope questions can be also useful when asked the feared "do you have questions?" question during recruitment.
Whenever I go more than a few weeks or so without reading fiction, I tend to notice a drop in my productivity and problem-solving ability. Binge-reading a good book fixes it every time.
I'd recommend Issac Asimov's short stories. The robot series for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_series. You can read a few of those in a sitting.
If you want to completely escape our world then I recommend the old Conan books or the modern Brandon Sanderson starting with Stormlight Archive.
You have received plenty of Sci Fi recommendations but I will add my own personal favorite (this is one novel in the series): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Death_Ground
If you want fiction that is grounded in reality with little to no fantasy elements then the murder mystery genre has quite a few gems that are fun to try and guess the twist of when you are reading. Murder on the Orient Express is great if you havn't experienced the story yet.
Have you read Robert Jordan's 'Conan' books? I just reread them (after finally getting around to reading Sanderson's final two books of Jordan's 'Wheel of Time' series) and they're more fun than I'd remembered!
IPA: /faːɡ.i.di.uːt/
Ah, No! As a lifelong Sherlockian/Holmesian i cannot allow you to cast my hero in a unflattering light :-) That was Holmes being flippant. Over the timeline of the stories, it turns out that Holmes is actually very well and widely read and has a large personal library into which he often dips for some long forgotten fact which has suddenly become relevant to his current case.
Don't be hard on yourself for not spending every waking minute of your life working, preparing for work, or feeling bad because you "should" be doing one of those two. That's a very quick way get burned out.
YMMV, but in my experience, even if you want to optimize your life for doing the best work possible, not working all the time is a winning strategy!
And if you read the same books as everyone else, you'll have the same ideas as everyone else :-) Read about other industries - do they have stuff you can re-use? Read some of the great books and learn about history and human nature.
Develop a "hinterland" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinterland
For instance, Range, one of the books that Gates recommends, isn't specific to any occupation, but can inform one's general perspective on the hazards (or benefits) of taking a software job that is more specialized, and whether it's the best thing for your career in the long-term.
Relatedly, I can't tell you exactly what genre the You're Not So Smart or Freakonomics podcasts fit into, but like a lot of good books, each fleshes out all sorts of high-level ideas that can relate to day-to-day life.
I really enjoy learning about behavioral psychology/economics-type stuff.
This is very harmful to your "intellectual growth" and you should break out of the mindset that everything you read should be oriented towards your job and career only. Something from the book The 7 habits of highly successful people which i had read a long time ago stayed with me. There is a concept of P (for Production) and PC (for Production Capability/Capacity) mentioned in that book. P is what gets you a job in the present time since you are employed to "Produce" something for the Company immediately. However your future growth, both professionally and personally depends on how well you cultivate your "Production Capability/Capacity" so as to take advantage of whatever the future might throw at you. This is why expanding your mind and intellectual horizons by reading on widely different domains is so important. Don't limit yourself by reading only job/career related stuff. Go outside your comfort zones and expose yourself to various ideas and concepts. Life is much more fulfilling that way.
One thing to note is that you don't read all books cover-to-cover. You skim and jump back-and-forth to quickly identify the gist and essentials. Only then do you sit down for serious study of the identified sections. Also don't try to remember everything you study; only the essence/core is to be assimilated, for everything else keep a mental bookmark so that you know where to look for when you need the details later.
Finally, if you have children, reading is a great habit to instill in them. Trial and error is a good way to learn, but it's time consuming and sometimes painful. Reading is one of few shortcuts in life that's not a fool's errand.
0. https://braydie.gitbooks.io/how-to-be-a-programmer/content/e... (Free to read, Community Edition)
1. https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Programmer-Robert-Read-ebook/d...
I used to spend a lot of time working. Then over time that just started destroying me. I got let go from my job and while I had noticed this a bit, particularly on vacations, I had no idea how to "not work."
My stress level was through the roof and I had no outlets for anything.
2020 has been the year of me trying to create a life outside of work. Kind of a weird ass year to try it but despite 2020 being 2020, I've rediscovered my love of reading, really started learning music theory, and a bunch of smaller things.
I should be able to go into 2021 a lot better as a person and feel my life is "better" in a lot of ways that it was previously pretty poor. I still don't think my life is amazing or great or anything, but baby steps.
A big change in mindset to accomplish a lot of this is that my job exists to plan for the future (planning for retirement has been a big deal this year), it pays for me to have fun (enjoy the now), and it pays for me to pay my bills to live. My job is not my life, it's a means to an end. I show up, I do my job, and I leave at the end of the day and I don't think about work until I come back in the next morning.
Reading more about areas outside of your own domain of expertise can only be a good thing as it introduces you to thoughts and concepts you otherwise wouldn't know about.
Frankly, more people in your field should read more broadly, particularly in the humanities.
Think of it like a proof of concept. You don't just write perfect code every single time you sit down, right? Sometimes you write something and test whether it'll work. Sometimes you find it works, other times it doesn't.
I encourage people to try to do the same with their life.
I was always of the mind "Meditation is some kind of stupid mumbo jumbo and it's dumb and a waste of time"
I now meditate, because I tried it and realized it was helping me.
You don't have to go into some idea thinking this is the rest of your life, it's not, you can try something, see if it helps you or you enjoy it. If you aren't enjoying it or you don't see it actually helping you then stop and do something different.
I read a lot, over 20 books this year, most of it fiction. It has replaced watching tv in 2020 and I set a goal to read at least 30 minutes a day.
That said, Roger Federer is a generalist?!? Why, because he has trouble beating Rafa on clay?? As a techie generalist who has knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep, I'm not sure he would qualify. But I'll read the book and see.
It's an opinionated tale of someone actually doing the business of catching spies.
Even better for the HN crowd, the author was an engineer so there's some tidbits about just how advanced spook technology was even in the 50s and 60s (i.e. using acoustics to lift encryption keys through embassy walls as they were being typed)
The more speculative aspects like the authors' judgement of Roger Hollis is genuinely really weird. We will probably never know the truth, but if he wasn't a spy there are some genuinely abnormal correlations to be explained. If you're familiar with the case the Australian intelligence analyst Paul Monk gives a fairly strong case that even if the official story on Hollis isn't wrong, it is wildly inconsistent and economical with the truth.
Wright is a bit of a loose cannon, but the late Chapman Pincher wrote an enormous book on effectively everything publicly known about the (at the age of about 100 no less) which is much more methodical.
There was a IWP panel about the case a few years ago; some evidence is so murky that some analysts were, even with a fastidiously planned and documented "argument map" to summarize the known evidence, joking about resorting to sending a freedom of information request to the GRU.
I don't know why people bother to take umbrage at things without even trying to learn the context. What you are assuming the author claims doesn't exist anywhere in the book.
He never says the Federer is a generalist. The only mention of Federer in the book is to contrast his childhood with Tiger Wood's childhood.
"By the time [Federer] finally gave up other sports—soccer, most notably—to focus on tennis, other kids had long since been working with strength coaches, sports psychologists, and nutritionists. But it didn’t seem to hamper his development in the long run."
In contrast, Tiger Woods famously focused on golf exclusively at an early age.
Woods specialised in golf from a young age. Federer didn't specialise in a single sport from a young age.
Federer is never mentioned again after the 4th page of the book.
But if you follow Gates link, he writes a whole blog post titled "We need more Rogers: David Epstein’s Range explains the greatness of Roger Federer and other generalists," so I assumed he was featured a bit more prominently.
Did you follow that link and read Gates post before moaning about my comment? Probably not.
I definitely also recommend Barking Up The Wrong Tree, it goes hand in hand with Range, books which challenge our way of thinking and what success is or what the correlation is.
Maybe the books are good, but I would rather have them recommended from other sources, with a mix of other books. The last thing I would want to do is think like Bill Gates. I wouldn't read books recommend from Donald Trump either. I also question any books that algorithm put together for me.
The only good book list is probably a list of books that have been banned from libraries or the government wants you not to read. I think there are 451 of those books?
Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of windows.
I don't tend to read the kind of socio-political stuff he always includes, but he's quite smart and has pretty good taste in science reading.
So, sure we've paid a dear price in blood with this Covid19, but it could have been much, much, much worse. And when the truly bad one will come, we'll be so much more prepared.
COVID-19 is five times deadlier than the flu. It's killed over 1.5 million people worldwide, and almost 300,000 people in my home country (USA). It'll be many months before enough people are vaccinated to ensure herd immunity, if it ever happens. Yeah, I suppose it could improve outcomes for an even deadlier next time, but calling it a godsend seems queasily rosy.
That said, what "flu multiple" would have scared people into action? Even now, in December there are surprisingly many people in denial, up until the last moments of their lives. There are people who think this whole Covid is only a conspiracy (did you hear the one about "Gates' vaccine" which is actually just a way to inject people with nanorobots?). If Covid was only twice as deadly as the flu, would the Congress have passed the CARES act in 2 weeks? Maybe they would've if it was exactly 2.85 times as deadly as the flu, but we'll never know.
What we know is that we all die one day or another. In a regular year 2.8 to 2.9 million people die in the US. 300k is 10% of that. That's bad, and every single death is a tragedy, but this was no Bubonic Plague.
Of course we have and will continue to learn from this, but that doesn’t mean this is a good thing.