Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

The concept is right there in the title: Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. Is it possible to use a machine gun to create a jet pack? How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge from London to New York? How high can a human throw things?

In that sense, “What if?” [affiliate link] is another one of those “backwards” choices. The book itself is only ten years old but I think my love of taking absurd questions seriously goes back much further. I do it often when my kids ask silly questions, but Munroe is able to do it with a lot more scientific and mathematical rigour. I love the concept, and it’s executed pretty much perfectly.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I was an atheist long before the four horsemen arrived on the scene in the mid-2000s. Their writing did clarify my thinking and made me consider aspects that I’d not come across before. Like How to be a Liberal, it also gave me names for concepts that I had previously been aware of.

I probably could have put any of the Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens or Dennett [affiliate links] books in the list, but there’s something about Hitchens takes-no-prisoners writing that pipped the others to the post here. (I found Dennett’s a little disappointing, to be honest. Probably a good thing I never did philosophy at university.)

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Sometimes confused with the also excellent Programming Pearls, Programming Perl [affiliate link] is quite different. It’s big and well written and well structured. But a lot of books meet those criteria, so in what sense did it have an impact on me?

It’s a technical book that proves that you don’t need to be dry and boring to get the message across. Being “professional” doesn’t mean being humourless.

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.

The rule is no reviews or justification, but I did for this book [affiliate link]. It’s such a recent one that it can’t possibly have influenced me, and that’s true. However, I included it because it gives a name to things that I’ve long believed or understood. It’s nice to realise you have a “belief system” rather than just a random collection of thoughts and opinions.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I almost didn’t include this since I inadvertently created a new “one book per author” rule. (I did resist adding Dirk Gently.)

This book [affiliate link[ is about Douglas Adams adventures visiting some of the most endangered creatures on the planet. Not the most endangered necessarily, but it includes a nice cross-section, including the cute and the scary.

This was Adams’ induction into nature conservations — something that he took seriously in later life — and you can feel his enthusiasm. The passion is (almost) catching.

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.