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  • Showing only topics in ~books with the tag "year in review". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Which books did you read in 2023 and how did you like them?

      Warning: this post may contain spoilers

      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?

      19 votes
    2. What's your favorite read of 2023 so far?

      We're halfway through 2023, and I thought I'd check in and ask if anyone has a favorite book they've read this year. Doesn't have to be released this year, just a book that wow'd you in 2023 up to...

      We're halfway through 2023, and I thought I'd check in and ask if anyone has a favorite book they've read this year. Doesn't have to be released this year, just a book that wow'd you in 2023 up to this point.

      My contribution I read this year is Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden. Two boys with Cree upbringing find themselves enlisting in World War I. A hard book to read that doesn't pull punches, with descriptions that put you right there with them. Broke my heart several times.

      How about you?

      52 votes
    3. Worst books of the year

      You always see a lot of threads around the best books of the year or of their favourite ever books, but how about the opposite - let’s have a thread of books you hated. There are so many books in...

      You always see a lot of threads around the best books of the year or of their favourite ever books, but how about the opposite - let’s have a thread of books you hated. There are so many books in the world to read, it can be handy to know which ones to avoid!

      I’ll start in the comments! I’m not sure how to do spoiler tags (if that’s possible here?) so I suggest putting the title of the book in the first line so anyone who hasn’t read it can minimise the comment without seeing spoilers :)

      14 votes
    4. Year in Review: Books of 2022

      What were your highlights for the year? What were the best things you read? What surprised you? What let you down? Reflect back on the year and talk about anything and everything related to the...

      What were your highlights for the year? What were the best things you read? What surprised you? What let you down?

      Reflect back on the year and talk about anything and everything related to the books you read in 2022. You do NOT have to limit it to 2022 releases -- anything you read this year counts.

      6 votes
    5. Out of all the books you read this year, which ones were your favorites?

      What are your favorite books that you read this year? What made them so noteworthy? Who would you recommend them to? Note: the books do NOT have to be from this year (i.e. published in 2019). Any...
      • What are your favorite books that you read this year?
      • What made them so noteworthy?
      • Who would you recommend them to?

      Note: the books do NOT have to be from this year (i.e. published in 2019). Any book you read this year regardless of publication date counts.

      22 votes