Which books did you read in 2023 and how did you like them?

CunningFatalist
2023-12-26T12:31:15Z

I didn't have as much time for reading this year. My daughters kept me quite busy (and happy). However, I managed to squeeze in one or the other title. I don't want to discuss all of the forty-something books I read, but here's an incomplete list of what I can recommend (and what not).

I really enjoyed the following books:

number9dream by David Mitchell

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Red Rising (all six books) by Pierce Brown

The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis

Dark Rome by Michael Sommer

A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

At Night all Blood is Black by David Diop

The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World by Tim Marshall

First Person Singular by by Haruki Murakami

Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus

This is your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin

The History of Heavy Metal by Andrew O'Neill

I think my favorites were Black Swan Green and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Both are very powerful stories with complex protagonists.

I didn't really enjoy these books:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (seriously, I like Murakami, but I hated this book – the plot was annoying, stylistic choices were questionable and the protagonist bland)

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (the book was interesting, but also a bit "too much" for me)

I think those books taught me something, although they weren't necessarily fun to read:

Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim

Atomic Habits by James Clear

The Great Mental Models Volume 3: Systems and Mathematics

Especially Chris Voss and James Clear can't stop boasting and/or advertising. I learned something from their books, but I found them annoying to read. The mental models book and the Phoenix project were fun, though.

I'm a software developer and read quite some books about this topic this year. I can recommend the following of them:

Efficient Linux at the Command Line

100 Go Mistakes

The Staff Engineer's Path

TypeScript Cookbook

Principles of Package Design

But I didn't really like those (although they're good from a technical perspective):

Cloud Native Go

Security and Microservice Architecture on AWS

So, what did you guys read? What can you recommend? Which books disappointed you?

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