This year I wanted to get this list out by January :P

“The Dispossessed”, Ursula K. Le Guin

One of my favorites of this year and of all time. A great early modern perspective on what an anarchist society could look like. Le Guin did a good job at capturing anarchist morals and ethics and I think the novel could be a good fictional introduction to people who aren’t really sure how to get into the head of anarchists.

“Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”, Steven Levy

One of my top programming-adjacent books. Follows the history of computing, focusing on hacker culture in the late 70s through the 80s. Apparently this book inspired a lot of our era’s best programmers, such as John Carmack. Really fun to read, really inspiring.

“The Anarchist Cookbook”, Keith McHenry

This is the new The Anarchist Cookbook, written by one of the founders of the original Food Not Bombs in San Francisco. A little sloppily edited in terms of layout and pacing, yet the first chapter alone makes me recommend the book at least as a good-faith crash course in anarchism, anarchist ethics, and anarchist history. From there it gets into practical and ethical discussions about revolutionary tactics and makes a very good defense of the pacifist strategy. Then has some vegan recipes in it, who gives a shit about that though. At 508.dev we’ve adopted the consensus model described in this book.

Available for free online .

“Children of Ruin”, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Very cool follow-up to Children of Time that expands the universe in both predictable and unexpected ways. Gets way more material than I would have expected out of this development, and also leaves tantalizing pieces for the next book to follow-up on. Takes an abrupt left turn into the absolutely terrifying as well. Very different from the first book, very good.

“Kitchen Confidential”, Anthony Bourdain

One of my favorite books this year. I started listening to the audiobook, narrated by Bourdain himself, as I was washing dishes every night in the restaurant I opened with Tammy and Charlie. It was a little unedited and rambling, but the stories were really fun, and I feel like I took away lessons that don’t just apply to the restaurant world. I also definitely took away good lessons for our own restaurant! Very entertaining and I recommend it to anyone really, but especially food lovers and people that are thinking about going down the restaurant path.

“Children of Memory”, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Finally finished off the “Children” series by Tchaikovsky. This one was a little more optimistic than the other ones, though spent a lot longer than I would expect on one specific aspect of the story that I found a little uninteresting. Got a little tangled in its own feet there, too. Still worth reading, even if it could have been more aggressively edited.

“Shards of Earth”, “Eyes of the Void”, “Lords of Uncreation”, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Very good Tchaikovsky sci-fi. A little more fantasy than his other sci-fi but still very cool universe with really interesting, tightly-set rules. Some pretty creepy cool stuff. I like sci-fi that does worldbuilding like a good fantasy author, with just enough to leave you wondering but never answering all your questions. Great characters, as well, and sometimes almost feels like an anthology with the stylistic changes as the book follows different characters. Very vivid. One character is a very crippled and stunted woman with a savant skill at mechanics, letting her move around in mecha robots of increasingly powerful designs, another is a spook that grumbles about paperwork and engages in spycraft, another is an amazonian warrior from a female-only race that always seems to be dancing between protector of humanity and eugenics. I read the whole series this year and loved it.

“Pragmatic Programmer”, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

If you are going to read only one programming book, this feels like the one to read. I like how practical they were, describing unit tests as really important and then maybe kind of sort of important as they got more senior in their careers for example. I really enjoyed this and I think it made me a better engineer.

“Vlad Taltos”, Steven Brust

I read the entire Vlad Taltos series from start to finish on the recommendation of Cory Doctorow for the latest book. A very fun fantasy with a unique world and styling that unexpectedly turns straight into Marxist class analysis. The world building and answers to the series’ big questions slow down later into the series, which got a little annoying as I got towards the end. The last book really annoyed me on that front, being absurdly limited in scale compared to others and giving new info on the overarching plot in a little drip at the very end as part of the resolution to the book itself. Anyway despite that, very much worth a read for the unique universe, consistent world building, and fun and interesting main character.

“Elder Race”, Adrian Tchaikovsky

Inoffensive and brief sci fi adventure about technological disparity between an anthropologist and his subjects. Very tightly written, well paced, good if almost predictable ending. Great for a quick done-in-a-week read.

“Tuesdays with Morie”, Mitch Albom

A book about a guy’s teacher dying slowly and publicly, and how the teacher turned it into a sort of lecture series for his former student. Pretty interesting, if a little unsurprising in the lessons he had to teach about: spend less time hating and more time loving, family is important, he thinks people rush around too much worrying about work too much, etc etc. He seemed strongly anticapitalist but I think the narrator / biographer doesn’t record this accurately. All in all worth the read just to get some interesting life lessons from someone that was already quite old when they started slowly dying.

“Getting Things Done”, David Allen

Cranked this within the first week of the new year in the hopes of finally fully implementing the GTD system in my own organization system. Used the new system throughout the year and am very happy with the results. I’m pretty content with my current organization system which has a nice long tail of things I can focus on, while being dynamic enough day to day to keep me on task with critical things. The only thing lacking is long project tracking perhaps, but I can augment well with kanban boards and the like. The book itself does have some more useful information that isn’t available in just the wikipedia article on GTD or the various articles describing it, so I think it’s worth a read.

“When Breath Becomes Air”, Paul Kalanithi

A book by a Neurosurgeon dying of cancer. It was good, and worth the read, and had interesting insights about what dying is like, in terms of choosing your priorities, and how to face life. The author has basically the perfect background to write this book, with degrees in literature, a lifelong fascination with philosophy, and as a doctor, spending a lot of time with dying people. That said, I feel like this book was like, 50% of what it could be, though that may simply be because he died before he could really finish it.

“The Song of Achilles”, Madeline Miller

Fun novel about Achille’s secret lover that everyone usually assumes was just his best friend (“and they were roommates!”). Just a fun fiction.

“Firewalkers”, Adrian Tchaikovsky

I hadn’t realized that Tchaikovsky was the same author my friends kept getting me to read in “Children of Time.” A fun and somewhat short scifi with classic class-warfare post-apocalyptic story, and some very freaky unanswered worldbuilding.

“The Wood Wife”, Terri Windling

Actual good artsy fartsy fiction / fantasy. Well written prose and an interesting story. Sort of a poetic desert mystery.

“China Mountain Zhang”, Maureen F. McHugh

Very fun fiction about “what if Communism in America”. I always love a good leftist “what if” although this seems to take a more boomer angle of “What if CCP but in America,” so not really a socialist utopian novel. A little winding and a little unresolved, still was enjoyable to read.

“The Poppy War”, “The Dragon Republic”, “The Burning God”, R.F. Kuang

A really unique fantasy series, taking place in fantasy feudal China. Infuriatingly, the first book was written when the author was like, 19, which makes me as someone that tried that path at that age feeling very inferior. For her age, excellent series. The main character’s motivations can be annoyingly undefined at times, and switches too much for my taste, but it’s really entertaining to read.

“Scholomance Series”, Naomi Novik

Everyone always touts this as “cool Harry Potter,” or “Harry Potter if it was written well.” It’s certainly pretty cool and written well, but I don’t think Harry Potter is at all a fair comparison. The world here is much more internally consistent and really even more interesting in many ways, but the scale is nothing near the level of Harry Potter, and as fuckweird as the Harry Potter books were, I think a reason a lot of us remember them fondly is the warm and fuzzies we got. I noticed a lot of people associate Harry Potter with Christmas, for example.

Anyway, a grim and unforgiving world, populated by a very fun main character and her somewhat hard to remember friends. Good characters and dynamics, good internal conflict, interesting magic mechanics that are central to the plot of the series. Worth reading.

“Gideon the Ninth”, Tamsyn Muir

The first of this series, Gideon the Ninth, was very fun. A little tumblr-ish, but still enjoyable to read. I’d never seen someone dive this deep into how necromancy might work in fantasy, and the fact that this is sci-fi as well makes it even more fun to explore. Further novels were also fun but unfortunately there was a weird manga effect happening, where the first issues is phenomenal, and then it takes three more books to drive forward the main story just a few feet. After Gideon the Ninth, every other book just repeats the same story: What if one of the characters got amnesia? It’s super duper weird. Still, at the very least the first one is worth a read.

“Angel Mage”, Garth Nix

Kinda cool fantasy about “what if warlocks, but summoning angels.” Interesting magical mechanics, pretty interesting protagonists and antagonists, a little cringe, but overall fun to read.

“Brief History of Black Holes”, Dr. Becky Smethurst

I actually barely remember reading this at all. I remember it was very accessible, though.