Books I Read in 2022

Randall Munroe does it again. He brings his scientific curiosity to answer some pretty absurd questions. He does it with a good sense of humor and easy to understand language.

This was a fantastic read looking at how some of the tech and media giants have used the lack of competition to squeeze musicians, writers, developers and the rest of the creative industry. While this book only focuses on the creative industries, there are a lot of similarities all over. Cory and Rebecca do a good job explaining the problems, how we arrived at them, and what we can potentially do to even the playing field. I even wrote a post about it.

I've been doing a lot more unit tests over the last year or two. This book did a good job going over how to write better tests and ways to improve the code to make tests better and easier to write. A good read for developers. The code examples are in C#, but the principals could be applied to other languages.

Being a space nut, this was a fun read learning about the various different ways the universe might end. Katie Mack did a fantastic job describing it with a good mix of humor and not-too-complicated language.

This was an interesting read on ancient cities. I had never even heard of two of the cities prior to reading this. It was an interesting look into the history of urban living, how it began and developed, and how these cities faded into history.

Most of what I read I was already aware of. Still, Cathy did a good job talking about what the issues with algorithms are, and why they can be problematic.

I've been a fan of Tim's writing. This book is no different. It's an interesting read helping give you some rules of thumb when reading about statistics and data. I know I've been guilty from time to time of some of the things one should avoid when being presented with data.

I know that I'm a little weak on making my websites more performant. This book did a good job talking about how to improve both JavaScript performance and examples of some things you can do to make your sites more user-friendly.

I've always enjoyed Drew Magary's writing on Defector and heard about his brush with death. This was an interesting memoir talking about his road back. Would recommend.

I've generally enjoyed Cory Doctorow's writing style. The story had an interesting premise even going so far as to touch on some of today's economic issues. Without giving too much away, some of the jumps in time were a little rough, but easy enough to follow. I enjoyed it, but it was not my favorite Doctorow novel.

I appreciate Trevor's comedy and the way he hosts The Daily Show. It was interesting reading about all he and his family had to deal with growing up in South Africa.

I enjoyed this. It definitely had the same style as The Martian. The story had a good pace and was interesting.

This book wasn't quite what I expected it to be, though looking back at it, I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting. It was still an interesting take on succeeding as a smaller business in the present day economy.

The stock market & computerized trading has become a fascination to me. This book does a great job talking about the rise of high-frequency trading and how it has caused some of the problems we see in the stock market today.

I'm by no means a Patriots fan, but I found this to be an interesting look into the 2 decades long dynasty of Brady-Belichick and the Patriots.

Dave Grohl has always seemed to be an interesting and unique person. This was an interesting memoir talking about his growth from High School punk musician, through Nirvana and eventually Foo Fighters. If you're a fan of any of his work, I'd highly recommend this.

This was a fantastic read into how we as humans can be persuaded into doing things in ways we don't always recognize. The authors do a good job going into the good and bad of it.

I enjoyed this book. It had a good story that pulled you in. As a space fan, I definitely enjoyed the tie-ins with the Apollo program. The ending wasn't my favorite part, but it did tidy up the story arcs. Would still recommend it to anyone.

I did enjoy this as the final book in the series. Given that this is the end of a long series, I still haven't come to a complete decision on how I feel about how the story was ended.

The book had a little too much of a “Rah Rah” feel to me which I guess isn't surprising since it was written by Pfizer's CEO. When I picked it up at the library I was hoping there'd be a little more meat to it.