16 books in 2019. 26 books in 2020. 38 in 2021. An encouraging trend.
I’ve never read more books in a single year, and it feels good. I’ve continued to use reading to detach my iPhone from my brain-stem, often carrying a book around and reading in short periods instead of fiddling with my phone. I didn’t play video games at all this year, replacing it with reading – keen to play a little next year though, if the new PS5 games are good. After three years of consistent reading, I feel like I’ve made significant progress breaking out of ‘the shallows’.
To cap off the year of reading. Here’s some simple stats/facts:
- Worst book: 100 Plus
- 11,800+ pages, apparently
- 11/38 from women authors (gf rightly nags me about this)
- 18/38 second hand books
I read a lot of famous and well regarded books this year, and they were so good I couldn’t pick a favourite. That said, these are a top 5 in terms of how much they durably affected my emotions and thinking.
- The Grapes of Wrath
- The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musing on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
- The Nickel Boys
- Debt: The First 5,000 years
- Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind The Rise of the Radical Right
As in the 2020 post, clicking the book cover takes you to a short review.
Below are the covers, titles, authors, and ratings of the 38 books I read this year. Click them to read my short review.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
★★★★
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
★★★★
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
K. Eric Drexler
★★★
Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
★★★
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse
★★★★
The Sciences of the Artificial
Herbert A. Simon
★★★★
Zen in the Art of Writing
Ray Bradbury
★★★
The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6)
Ursula K. Le Guin
★★★★★
The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)
Ursula K. Le Guin
★★★★★
Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
★★★★★
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
Will Larson
★★★
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
Nadia Eghbal
★★★
The Psychology of Computer Programming
Gerald M. Weinberg
★★
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
David Graeber
★★★★★
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney
★★★
The Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan
★★★★
Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
G. Pascal Zachary
★★★
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Jane Mayer
★★★★★
The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
Eric S. Raymond
★★★★★
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
Paul Graham
★★★
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
★★★★☆
Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)
Kim Stanley Robinson
★★★★
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
★★★★★
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
★★★★★
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
★★★★
Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2)
Toni Morrison
★★★
The Quiet Revolution
Jim Cairns
★★
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
Ray Kurzweil
★★★★
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
★★★★★
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Neal Stephenson
★★★★
The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
★★★★
100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith
Sonia Arrison
★
Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
★★★★★
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander
★★★★★
Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell
★★★★
I’ve set my 2022 reading goal at 40 books.
