Books I read in 2019
When I was little (think elementary school), my parents would take me and my sister to the local library. We would check out 20ish books, tear through them over the course of the three-week return period, and do it all again - a ridiculous pace, looking back on it. My nose was always buried in a book, ignoring warnings about reading in the car ("You'll get dizzy!") and reading in low light ("You'll ruin your eyesight!"). I don't really remember exactly when - probably around when I got exclusive access to my own computer - but definitely by high school I didn't really read books for fun anymore.
In 2019, I started reading books for fun again, and it's been great. I read 43 books this year, either on Kindle (paid for by a very open-ended book reimbursement from work) or checked out from the Chinatown branch of the San Francisco Public Library. A decent number are re-reads - the Ender's Game/Shadow series, and the Moist von Lipwig Discworld books.
In the list below, books marked with an exclamation mark (!) are the ones I enjoyed especially.
- Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
(!)Bad Blood - John Carreyou- Move Fast And Break Things - Nathan Taplin
- The Curse Of Bigness - Tim Wu
- Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
- Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
(!)Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card- Xenocide - Orson Scott Card
- Children of the Mind - Orson Scott Card
- Ender in Exile - Orson Scott Card
- Ender's Shadow - Orson Scott Card
- Shadow of the Hegemon - Orson Scott Card
- Shadow of the Giant - Orson Scott Card
- Shadows in Flight - Orson Scott Card
- Nonviolent Communication - Marshall Rosenberg
(!)The Big Short - Michael Lewis- Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman
- The First 90 Days - Michael Watkins
(!)Going Postal - Terry Pratchett(!)Pachinko - Min Jin Lee- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- Lucky Boy - Shanthi Sekaran
(!)Exhalations - Ted Chiang- Making Money - Terry Pratchett
- Fruit of the Drunken Tree - Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Uprooted - Naomi Novik
- Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman
- Becoming - Michelle Obama
- Raising Steam - Terry Pratchett
- The Good Nurse - Charles Graeber
- Neuromancer - William Gibson
(!)Little Bee - Chris Cleave(!)Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer- Electric Dreams (anthology) - Philip K. Dick
(!)Outside Looking In - T.C. Boyle(!)The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz- Bullshit Jobs - David Graeber
(!)Ultimate Speed - Samuel Hawley(!)If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino- The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court - Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong
- The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories - Ken Liu
(!)Countdown to Zero Day - Kim Zetter- Your Brain On Music - Daniel J. Levitin
I'm also looking for book recommendations, especially fiction - for some reason the book lists I see tend towards "useful" non-fiction, and picking books randomly off library shelves is a little hit-or-miss at times. Let me know if you have any!