I’ve been doing some book reviews during this year, and hopefully I’ll be able to write another one this weekend. But I thought to tally up the books I’ve read this year to see how I was doing. The key to a great mind is to be able to process immense quantities of data of your own volition, and make it accessible and useful for decision making (the delta) when it counts. I’ve read in “Scaling Up” that good CEOs read a little more than one book every two weeks, and great CEOs read much much more than that. So without further ado:
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling
- The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham
- From Third World to First, by Lee Kwan Yew
- The Singapore Story, by Lee Kwan Yew
- Triggers, by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter
- All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
- Built to Sell, by John Warrillow
- The Four-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss
- Black Flags, by Joby Warrick
- The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas
- The Design of the Unix Operating System, by Maurice J. Bach
- Functional Programming in Python, by David Mertz
- Microservices Antipatterns and Pitfalls, by Mark Richards
- Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture, by Mark Richards
- 20 Python Libraries You Aren’t Using (But Should), by Caleb Hattingh
- The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
- Code Complete, 2nd Edition, by Steve McConnell
- Microservices in Production, by Susan J. Fowler
- Zero to One, by Peter Thiel
- Scaling Up, by Verne Harnish
- The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
- Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate
- Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd
For the exception of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, this is the first pass. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to read new books because I generally like doing the same things over and over for some things (like listening to songs on repeat on Spotify), but now I don’t think that’s the case. This list so far (I might be forgetting a bunch of ebooks online and such) totals 29, which is a bit more than two books a year (and I’m not even done yet!)
I’m pretty happy with this list. It’s a good combination of non-fiction fun books, non-fiction professional books, and fiction books. This currently takes up two shelves on my shittily-assembled Ikea Billy bookcase. Hopefully I’ll remember to update this list later on, but more hopefully I wish to make a book review of every book I read from now on, so I won’t need to.