Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

It’s a slow-burner of a book [affiliate link]. Everyone said how great it was. It took me a while to read and I thought it was a bit meh.

But over time its impact seeps in. You notice the rings on your hob, the hints about which way a door opens (often incorrectly), forcing function on ATMs.

After a while you realise you’re noticing these things because you read the book. Maybe it wasn’t so meh after all.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

When I completed this series on Mastodon, I wrote about Pollen. This was a mistake. Not because Pollen is a bad book, but because it’s the followup to Vurt [affiliate link]. It was Vurt that I was thinking of. You should read both of them, but you should start with Vurt.

Unfortunately for me, it’s quite a difficult book to explain. It’s kind of cyberpunk with psychedelics. But the thing that made it stand out to me was the setting. Whereas most other cyberpunk books were set in Japan or China or San Francisco, this was set in grey and drizzly Manchester, in the north of England.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Like Accidental Empires, this is one of those books that people in the software industry probably should read but mostly don’t. Maybe knowing the history and the characters that got us to our current state may not make a big difference day-to-day, but I think it allows us to appreciate what we have, or at least understand some of the starting conditions.

For instance, we take the idea of free software for granted these days, but it wasn’t always that way. (But maybe rms always was that way. Society turned a blind eye to a lot of questionable behaviour over the years, and the software industry is no different. When you read about the good work he did, you might also want to read up on some of his more recent writings to get a more rounded picture.)

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I have previously joked that if you could somehow combine Neal Stephenson and Douglas Coupland, you’d end up with a dense, well-researched, character driven story.

Over the years, Stephenson has got better at writing people and Coupland has added more plot. Just as I argue that Snow Crash was the sweet spot for Stephenson, I think that Microserfs is for Coupland. (Don’t @ me. That’s an opinion, not an objective truth.)

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I’m not sure how much of backstory of this [affiliate link] book I understood when I first read it, but I enjoyed the ride so much that I ended up doing some research into parts of the story. This enhanced my appreciation of the book, since Stephenson had clearly done the same research!

Stephenson’s later books took this mingling of fiction and history and science to the next level, but this was the first of his books that I read and, in my mind, is still the sweet spot.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

In many ways, this choice [affiliate link] represents travel writing in general. Theroux has written a lot of books that could fit the bill. The reason I include this one is that, towards the end, there’s a very much warts-and-all description of his return journey. He’s bored and hungry and homesick. Many writers would have skipped this part, or at least glossed over the worst parts, but travel isn’t all glamour. Its inclusion here is what makes it a classic.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Many people in the computer industry don’t understand how we got here. Well, maybe not here. Due to the passage of time, it would be how we got to the mid-nineties.

This book [affiliate link] does not pretend to be objective or complete, but talks about both the technology and the people that got us from the invention of transistors to Windows PC. What I love about it is that it focuses on the people rather than the technology, yet still manages to put the technology into perspective. The writing is also very chatty and full of character. So much tech history is stodgy or dull or inaccurate. Empires is none of those things.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

As I type this I am wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “Don’t Panic” on it. Douglas Adams [affiliate link] was always going to make a “best of” list from me. Might as well get it out of the way at the start. The combination of science fiction, satire, and the quality of the writing just works for me. I am one of those people who is forever quoting the books. Sorry, not sorry.

I’ve been following and participating in the twenty books in twenty days hashtag on Mastodon. It’s described as follows:

20 books that have had an impact on who you are. One book a day for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just book covers.

I’m going to cheat. I am going to explain my choices. The posts that follow are all part of the challenge. As with my annual reading lists, these are not reviews per se, more notes, observations or thoughts that occur to me as I read them.

Those with extraordinarily good memories will recall that I read a couple of John Scalzi book a few years ago and enjoyed them (“Redshirts” and “Fuzzy Nation”). In fact, it took me longer to pick up another one of his books than I expected, though, to be fair, when I did it, I did it in style: I bought a “Humble Bundle” of them. “The Kaiju Preservation Society” is the first of that bundle that I’ve read.