I’m not sure that I can explain why it took me so long to read this Charlie Stross book. Some of the references to nineties computing tech dated it a little, but no more than Douglas Adams’ obsession with digital watches. The characters are pretty good, as is the writing. It strays into the mystical, magical world but there was always a logic underpinning the world. (The lack of “logic” in many fantasy books is one of the reasons I generally prefer sci-fi.)

I’ll cut to the chase: David Baddiel’s book about anti-semitism and how it’s often treated as a second-class form of racism is very much a worthwhile read. I’m sure you can find more academic works, or with more detail, but even in this short text, he’s able to passionately and effectively makes his case.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I didn’t fully understand the subject, and it does a nice job of filling in those gaps. As he notes at one point, there are lots of oh yeah, I suppose so, never really thought about it like that moments.

If there’s one good thing that has come out of the whole Brexit omnishambles, it’s that my understanding of how British politics works has dramatically increased. I don’t think it’s worth the cost, but understanding how laws are debated and passed is something that should be taught in schools, but isn’t.

Brexit taught me about Proroguing Parliament and the various readings of bills. I learned of the role that committees serve and the works that the Lords do. It made me do homework to find out what a “three line whip” is.

“A Decade in Tory” [affiliate link] by Russell Jones was a shorter book than I thought. Ordinarily that might be a bad thing, but the reason for my confusion in this case is that there are nearly five hundred pages of footnotes and fifty for the index. There are plenty of criticisms you could make, but you can’t argue that it’s not well researched or that the events are made up.

I’m biased. As Mulder did, I want to believe. Except, I want to believe that being a generalist can work. And that’s what “Range” [affiliate link] by David Epstein, claims. It’s subtitle is, “How generalists triumph in a specialised world.”

It’s not a challenging read. There is a lot of anecdata, examples of people who took a broad path and still succeeded. In that sense, maybe it’s like “Quiet,” which is about introverts. It doesn’t tell you how to succeed, only that it’s possible and that you’re not alone. Maybe that’s enough?

I’ll be honest: I wanted to like “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering” [affiliate link] by Robert L. Glass more than I did. I’m not sure if it’s dated badly — it’s from 2002 — or I was in the wrong frame of mind, or something else, but it just didn’t work for me.

The book is structured as a list of facts grouped around areas such as “Management” and “Requirements.” For each fact, there is a discussion, the controversy, and then the sources and references. The writing aims to be friendly, but I found it a bit grating¹.

Before you ask, yes, it is weird that I’m reading a bunch of “management” books.

You can watch Michael Lopp’s career by following his various books. Start with “Being Geek” [affiliate link], the software developer’s career handbook. The move into management resulted in “Managing Humans” [affiliate link]. And his promotion from manager to director and executive gets you “The Art of Leadership” [affiliate link] which is the book I recently finished.

“Radical Candor” is one of those phrases that I’ve heard and wondered about. Is it another vacuous management phrase? Does it mean anything? I saw it in the library and thought I’d find out. I’m cynical about these things but it doesn’t mean I’m closed minded!

The pitch is “Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity” which sounds positive but I don’t manage people at work. Even if it contained genuine insight, would there be anything I could use?

A couple of years ago I did a conference talk called “On Cloud Nine: How to be happy migrating your in-memory computing platform to the cloud.” I wish I’d had “Cloud Without Compromise” back then. It covers much of the same ground but, as you’d expect in a book rather than a forty minute conference talk, in much greater depth. More importantly, it puts some concepts into context much more clearly that I did, either by explaining it better or by giving it a good name.

I failed to reach my target of reading twelve books in 2021 by quite some margin this year. I finished only ten books, and that’s including the cheat of counting two short stories as two books!

Despite my objective of reading more fiction, I also failed with that (just the one novel and the two short stories).

While the volume was down both on previous years and my target, the quality was actually pretty good. From the story of the company behind the BlackBerry to the story of the Seventies, how to build a computer and how computers were made. All were worth a read.