I read "Crucial Conversations" this year. It feel like it has the potential to be life changing. Need more time to tell what impact it really has.
It introduced me to a new topic, which is analyzing social situations and apply problem solving skills to them. Something that never occurred to me for some reason. I now realize there are smart people working and having interesting thoughts and conclusions in this topic. So much more to explore. (Open to recomindations too!)
The book also seems to give more useful information about how to handle difficult social situations. I was pretty down on work and becoming cynical (still am though hah!) The advice I often get is stuff like be agreeable, don't rock the boat, dont say anything with passion ("corp speak"), to get ahead and get what you want. This feels bad to me. Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people. I feel like this book gave me the tools to have differing opinions and express them successfully.
I also liked the book shows that a lot of these difficult conversations are actually in your control. Most people seem to have terrible communication skills I'm learning. Often I would write off a bad conversation as the other person just being an asshole or difficult or something. after reading this it seems like it is possible to handle a lot of these a lot better.
Disjointed thoughts off the top of my head, but I found the book pretty enlightening. Id recommend it if you struggle with expressing your opinions in emotional conversations.
I read it once and took some notes. Haven't looked back on either the source nor my notes (until now!), but the book came to me at a time when I was dealing with a lot of inner-organizational bureaucracy on a small-scale, but was utterly frustrating.
The book gave me new frameworks, and was reco'd to me from someone within the org who I was confiding in on the top-level. But ultimately, the frameworks weren't enough to change necessary structures – because those in power and with influence didn't want to change their attitudes, goals, and approaches.
As "negative" as that sounds, the book helped in part for me to understand the four major buckets for how decisions get made:
• command, from on high to everyone below you who must carry out the orders
• consult, to invite input but still one leadership board/ leader makes the final call
• vote, where majority decides what'll happen after being presented with options
• consensus, where a decision is made only after everyone agrees
These frameworks helped me to understand that whatever was causing obstructions/ friction, was because people in power were presenting things as if they were based on consultations leading to majority votes, but ultimately, there was a lot of game-playing from the top leaders who wanted to use those tactics as cover to ultimately have their own way.
Helped me to accept that things were the way they were, and there was no need to exert unnecessary energy. And from then on, to discern first and foremost what the decision-making dynamics are in any group endeavor, be it small-teams or entire orgs, and to go from there.
Crucial Conversations was mandatory material for managers at Facebook, and I feel it's so impactful for any communication channel that I recommend to all my professional friends IRL. Also in that vein, I highly recommend Nonviolent Communication.
Buying this off the strength of your recommendation. That sounds exactly like what the doctor ordered. I'm getting worse at expressing myself the older I'm getting, and I'm finding it impairing my personal life, work life, social situations, etc. Will give this one a read--thank you!
I ordered both - "Crucial Conversations" and "Nonviolent Communication" - as audio books. Both turned out to be super dry. Same analogies and scenarios over and over again, eventually got tired of listening them; will try again now.
> Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people.
That is why I love consulting. The managers that hire me often express themselves to be as critical as possible on the current way of working or possible problems. This does not allow me to be blunt, because I still need to convince people of another way. But at least I do not have to pretend and worry about my position.
When I find myself nervous about a meeting, I go back to this book and outline the steps it suggests, not just the gist of it, but I walk through the steps. It's like having a colleague who wants to help you be a better person.
Reading it right now, but I already think it's the test thing: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
I was (and still am) obsessed with productivity. But I more and more my tasks had felt like something I needed to get done, to afterwards finally be able to relax and profit from them. But this time never came and I just got busier.
The book does a great job at explaining how much of our daily grind is based on a refusal to accept our finitude. And once we accept our finitude, we can get a lot more done in a happier way.
I also recommend his mailing list, "The Imperfectionist". He only sends out an essay maybe once a month but they aren't posted anywhere so you have to subscribe.
This book was definitely one of my highlights. The number of times I exclaimed “I’m really not the only one that feels that?!” Was too many to measure. It really forces you to confront time in a way that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.
I'm having the same experience. And what I love, is that he proposes solutions that work, without sugarcoating things.
One of the biggest learnings from this book so far, is that a certain level of anxiety is inevitable. Especially when you're doing work that is meaningful to you.
Being able to accept that anxiety and still continue is what makes all the difference.
I realize this isn't really the intent of the question, but I read "The Count of Monte Cristo" this year for the first time and it's now my favorite book. It's a classic that I just had never bothered with and the story sucked me in. The redemption, revenge, scheming, secrecy. It was phenomenal.
I love it so much. I am sad that the Halas and Batchelor animated version I watched as a kid seems to be unobtainable :-(
I _strongly_ suggest searching out the modern Robin Buss translation (Penguin books sell it in the Uk) rather than the public domain version as the text is far clearer and several large redactions are replaced.
It has been a long time since I read it, but it is truly a mindbending story. The intricate details and relationships are extraordinary, and I am amazed Dumas was able to come up with all of it. I remember the pacing being also quite good.
Such a delight. And every time I reread it I wonder why the serial story (it was published in 18 parts over a year and a half) hasn't made a comeback given how desperate sites are for eyeballs.
There's definitely stuff like that out there, generally the genre is called "web serials". Worm is a superhero type story that ran over a period of years and is probably the most widely known example. Another personal favorite is Scott Alexander's Unsong, which has a delightfully weird mix of religion and rationalism and science fiction/ fantasy.
I think most of these kinds of things tend to lack mass appeal, but they're out there, and when you find one that tickles your fancy it can be pretty addictive!
I reread it every other year. It's so much fun. It's a shame how much the movie adaptations have toned down Dantes. It seems like the perfect book for a TV show due to its serial nature
Absolutely one of my favorite books. The unabridged, modern (early 2000s, I think) retranslation by Robin Buss is the best English version, IMO. It's long, but worth every page.
CRDTs get a lot of hype on HN, 95% of the time it's for collaborative editing. But they're much more than some JS library to build an app around - they're a formalism of distributed systems that are strongly eventually consistent. What this means is if the mathematical properties [0] of CRDTs hold, there's no conflicts, no rollbacks, no user intervention - provided the same data is received by every node (in any order, mind you), they will all be in an identical state without a consensus.
For me this is massive, and I'm convinced this has big industrial applications, ie distributed systems in domains where the source of truth is most naturally modelled as append only events. In this scenario, the whole database is a single CRDT.
Also - and I hope I'm not outing myself as a pleb here - but each time I re-read it I discover new things, stuff I might have glossed over, didn't fully understand, or didn't appreciate before.
So yeah, have to hand it to this paper. It's really broadened my horizons.
[0] way less scary than you think. If you're comfortable with first year abstract algebra, operations, sets, relations etc you'll be fine.
CRDTs are useful to be aware of, but they are not a silver bullet they might appear based on the paper and online sources.
They are conflict-free only because they hide conflicts by forcing a consistent order on concurrent updates. How do they do it? By using logical clocks to version events. A logical clock is not magic. It orders concurrent events arbitrarily. Is this correct? In practice, probably not, meaning that more recent updates can be lost in favor of less recent updates. What does 'recent' mean? For a user it means latest in physical time. Just because the system doesn't know any better than to arbitrarily order a pair of events (that appear concurrent), doesn't mean the user doesn't know which event comes first.
This is why not everything is implemented as a CRDT and conflicts will always exist in use cases where updates must never be lost.
If you enjoyed PHM, you might also like:
- For a more horror take, "There's no Antimemetic Division" https://qntm.org/scp. Without spoiling, it's about people trying to fight against a threat that's impossible to remember about.
- Ted Chiang's "Understand". Again without spoiling too much, it's about a man whose intelligence rapidly increased.
- Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality. Yeah, I'm serious, if you like the "smart character solves problem by thinking" it's amazing.
If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend to read „Becoming Steve Jobs“, too.
Isaacson‘s book isn’t “wrong” per se, but it makes the wrong point, imho. There really have been two Steve Jobs it seems (but crucially, NOT in a Jekyll & Hyde way!), and Isaacson didn’t get that.
+1 for The Odyssey. I started it during an off year, almost as an intentionally-irrelevant book to pick up and forget about, but it ended up being a genuine gem; one I remember fondly, and often.
I was blown away by Lolita, but couldn’t finish Pale Fire. The poetry felt like satire to me. And reading online about it I found mixed opinions on that!
I certainly agree that Lolita is the best work of Nabokov. For _Pale Fire_, it's a weird narrative, and I think for the first read, linearly going through the book, first the poem, and then just enjoying the story in the commentary is the easiest way to go. Think of it as a mad man trying to tell you a story, while referring to various far-fetching clues hidden inside a normal poem.
> The poetry felt like satire to me
The commentary is completely twisting the meaning of the poem, so there's a strong mismatch between what Shade wrote and whatever the hell Kinbote was thinking. If you try to understand the poem from the point of view of the story, it might seem that the poet was writing very weirdly about the story, when in fact, it was Kinbote who made up all the far-fetching links.
If you think of the poem as its own thing that is not related to the story told in the commentary, just simply a long poem, by Shade and about Shade, it will make much more sense.
Anyway, that's just my read. It's certainly a strange enough book that there are plenty of mixed ideas of how to read it.
I also recommend Lost Moon (which is sometimes published as Apollo 13). I've joked with people it's the same story, except in outer space. If by "story" you mean getting the feeling every 20 pages or so of "they are dead now for sure," then it's not really that much of a joke.
I read both of these around the same time and loved them both.
Book: You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World by Torie Bosch [1]
Came across this book randomly on Twitter and picked it up. The book is broken into 26 essays about significant pieces of code (defined vaguely), ranging from the Morris Worm to Pagerank to the popup window and the 1x1 invisible gif and how these shaped the modern tech landscape. Lovely read overall, and really shows how pieces of code you work on today can end up having long lasting impact on how society perceives technology as a whole. Best of all, it's not a heavy read, but offers a lot of concise info that can send you down wormholes of wikipedia.
Paper: Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service [2]
Database systems have always been a passion of mine, and the paper from AWS about how DynamoDB works internally is an incredible look into what makes a NoSQL DB platform capable of serving 89 million requests per second _(this is in the intro)_ which is incredible scale. Always good to see how engineering decisions shape products, and it's been interesting to see Dynamo take shape over the last decade _(though I recommend most folks to stay away from it because of it's mad pricing)_
The premise is great, the characters are fun, the plot will keep you engaged.
A noir detective story about a murder that happens in the space between two cities which are in superposition. That is, they share the same geographic space, but citizens are forced to live in only one of the cities by a seemingly omnipotent power called Breach that maintains the borders of the two cities.
IIRC Kraken was described as 'an explosion in an ideas factory'. I liked the ideas but about half way through began to wish that Miéville would calm down and explore in more detail some of the characters / concepts he'd introduced earlier in the novel.
I was first drawn to TC&TC because I was told Disco Elysium draws from it, and boy howdy was that right. Something is so wonderful about a crime procedural in an entirely fantastic universe.
Readit News
It introduced me to a new topic, which is analyzing social situations and apply problem solving skills to them. Something that never occurred to me for some reason. I now realize there are smart people working and having interesting thoughts and conclusions in this topic. So much more to explore. (Open to recomindations too!)
The book also seems to give more useful information about how to handle difficult social situations. I was pretty down on work and becoming cynical (still am though hah!) The advice I often get is stuff like be agreeable, don't rock the boat, dont say anything with passion ("corp speak"), to get ahead and get what you want. This feels bad to me. Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people. I feel like this book gave me the tools to have differing opinions and express them successfully.
I also liked the book shows that a lot of these difficult conversations are actually in your control. Most people seem to have terrible communication skills I'm learning. Often I would write off a bad conversation as the other person just being an asshole or difficult or something. after reading this it seems like it is possible to handle a lot of these a lot better.
Disjointed thoughts off the top of my head, but I found the book pretty enlightening. Id recommend it if you struggle with expressing your opinions in emotional conversations.
I read it once and took some notes. Haven't looked back on either the source nor my notes (until now!), but the book came to me at a time when I was dealing with a lot of inner-organizational bureaucracy on a small-scale, but was utterly frustrating.
The book gave me new frameworks, and was reco'd to me from someone within the org who I was confiding in on the top-level. But ultimately, the frameworks weren't enough to change necessary structures – because those in power and with influence didn't want to change their attitudes, goals, and approaches.
As "negative" as that sounds, the book helped in part for me to understand the four major buckets for how decisions get made:
• command, from on high to everyone below you who must carry out the orders
• consult, to invite input but still one leadership board/ leader makes the final call
• vote, where majority decides what'll happen after being presented with options
• consensus, where a decision is made only after everyone agrees
These frameworks helped me to understand that whatever was causing obstructions/ friction, was because people in power were presenting things as if they were based on consultations leading to majority votes, but ultimately, there was a lot of game-playing from the top leaders who wanted to use those tactics as cover to ultimately have their own way.
Helped me to accept that things were the way they were, and there was no need to exert unnecessary energy. And from then on, to discern first and foremost what the decision-making dynamics are in any group endeavor, be it small-teams or entire orgs, and to go from there.
Very cool stuff, for me at least.
> I read it once and took some notes.
Curious to know how you go about taking notes for the books you read.
That is why I love consulting. The managers that hire me often express themselves to be as critical as possible on the current way of working or possible problems. This does not allow me to be blunt, because I still need to convince people of another way. But at least I do not have to pretend and worry about my position.
I put your book on my reading list.
I was (and still am) obsessed with productivity. But I more and more my tasks had felt like something I needed to get done, to afterwards finally be able to relax and profit from them. But this time never came and I just got busier.
The book does a great job at explaining how much of our daily grind is based on a refusal to accept our finitude. And once we accept our finitude, we can get a lot more done in a happier way.
One of the biggest learnings from this book so far, is that a certain level of anxiety is inevitable. Especially when you're doing work that is meaningful to you.
Being able to accept that anxiety and still continue is what makes all the difference.
I _strongly_ suggest searching out the modern Robin Buss translation (Penguin books sell it in the Uk) rather than the public domain version as the text is far clearer and several large redactions are replaced.
I think most of these kinds of things tend to lack mass appeal, but they're out there, and when you find one that tickles your fancy it can be pretty addictive!
I don’t think it would have been on my list without others recommendations
https://pages.lip6.fr/Marek.Zawirski/papers/RR-7687.pdf
CRDTs get a lot of hype on HN, 95% of the time it's for collaborative editing. But they're much more than some JS library to build an app around - they're a formalism of distributed systems that are strongly eventually consistent. What this means is if the mathematical properties [0] of CRDTs hold, there's no conflicts, no rollbacks, no user intervention - provided the same data is received by every node (in any order, mind you), they will all be in an identical state without a consensus.
For me this is massive, and I'm convinced this has big industrial applications, ie distributed systems in domains where the source of truth is most naturally modelled as append only events. In this scenario, the whole database is a single CRDT.
Also - and I hope I'm not outing myself as a pleb here - but each time I re-read it I discover new things, stuff I might have glossed over, didn't fully understand, or didn't appreciate before.
So yeah, have to hand it to this paper. It's really broadened my horizons.
[0] way less scary than you think. If you're comfortable with first year abstract algebra, operations, sets, relations etc you'll be fine.
They are conflict-free only because they hide conflicts by forcing a consistent order on concurrent updates. How do they do it? By using logical clocks to version events. A logical clock is not magic. It orders concurrent events arbitrarily. Is this correct? In practice, probably not, meaning that more recent updates can be lost in favor of less recent updates. What does 'recent' mean? For a user it means latest in physical time. Just because the system doesn't know any better than to arbitrarily order a pair of events (that appear concurrent), doesn't mean the user doesn't know which event comes first. This is why not everything is implemented as a CRDT and conflicts will always exist in use cases where updates must never be lost.
But why? These ideas are elegant but usually not practical. Performance usually ends up forcing us back to ole faithful (mutability).
I discovered and read Blake Crouch this year
- Dark Matter
- Recursion
- Upgrade
- Pines
I also discovered and read
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
- Gravity by Tess Gerritsen
- A Man by, At the End of the Matinee Keiichiro Hirano
It's between Recursion and Project Hail Mary for me. I am leaning more towards Recursion.
Non-fiction
I discovered and read the following this year
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- The Millionaire Fastlane by M.J. DeMarco
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- How to Start a Business Without any Money by Rachel Bridge
- Creative Gene by Hideo Kojima
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- Show Your Work, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
- Press Reset by Jason Schreier
I would say Deep Work and Steve Jobs had the biggest impact on me.
Programming
I am learning Elixir using Elixir In Action by Sasa Juric.
Isaacson‘s book isn’t “wrong” per se, but it makes the wrong point, imho. There really have been two Steve Jobs it seems (but crucially, NOT in a Jekyll & Hyde way!), and Isaacson didn’t get that.
Supposedly there will be a Netflix adaptation.
Favorite Fiction: Pale Fire. Just pure astonishment. Left me speechless with how he made the language sing.
Also great (in no particular order):
- The Sewing Girl's Tale (non-fiction)
- The Odyssey (poem)
- Tropic of Cancer (novel)
- Tenth of December (short story collection).
- Endurance (non-fiction)
- The Billion Dollar Spy (non-fiction)
- Agent Sonya (non-fiction)
- Agent Running in the Field (novel)
- Little Dorrit (novel)
To be honest, I love most of the stuff I read this year. Only a handful of books I didn't like enough to read through.
> The poetry felt like satire to me
The commentary is completely twisting the meaning of the poem, so there's a strong mismatch between what Shade wrote and whatever the hell Kinbote was thinking. If you try to understand the poem from the point of view of the story, it might seem that the poet was writing very weirdly about the story, when in fact, it was Kinbote who made up all the far-fetching links.
If you think of the poem as its own thing that is not related to the story told in the commentary, just simply a long poem, by Shade and about Shade, it will make much more sense.
Anyway, that's just my read. It's certainly a strange enough book that there are plenty of mixed ideas of how to read it.
I read both of these around the same time and loved them both.
Came across this book randomly on Twitter and picked it up. The book is broken into 26 essays about significant pieces of code (defined vaguely), ranging from the Morris Worm to Pagerank to the popup window and the 1x1 invisible gif and how these shaped the modern tech landscape. Lovely read overall, and really shows how pieces of code you work on today can end up having long lasting impact on how society perceives technology as a whole. Best of all, it's not a heavy read, but offers a lot of concise info that can send you down wormholes of wikipedia.
Paper: Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service [2]
Database systems have always been a passion of mine, and the paper from AWS about how DynamoDB works internally is an incredible look into what makes a NoSQL DB platform capable of serving 89 million requests per second _(this is in the intro)_ which is incredible scale. Always good to see how engineering decisions shape products, and it's been interesting to see Dynamo take shape over the last decade _(though I recommend most folks to stay away from it because of it's mad pricing)_
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60254955-you-are-not-exp...
[2]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc22-elhemali.pdf
The premise is great, the characters are fun, the plot will keep you engaged.
A noir detective story about a murder that happens in the space between two cities which are in superposition. That is, they share the same geographic space, but citizens are forced to live in only one of the cities by a seemingly omnipotent power called Breach that maintains the borders of the two cities.
Kraken is the hunt for a giant squid after it vanished from a London museum.
Un Lun Dun is a young adult story of two friends who end up in a whimsical version of London.
I was first drawn to TC&TC because I was told Disco Elysium draws from it, and boy howdy was that right. Something is so wonderful about a crime procedural in an entirely fantastic universe.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7205264/