Gazettabyte is asking various industry figures to recommend key books they have read this year.
Andrew Schmitt, founder and CEO at Cignal AI
I didn’t read that much this year but I did read The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. That was outstanding. McCullough is a great historical author and wrote a book that was both a biography of the Wrights as well as a narrative of their efforts to build the first powered airplane.
I didn't know of all of the other simultaneous, better-financed efforts that fell far short of the efforts of two brothers from Dayton, Ohio. I also was unaware of how the effort transfixed the world when they did complete it.
There is so much chattering today about Lean Development and Devops (how many people use that word and really know what it means?) as if these are new developments. But the Wrights are a case study in lean development and simultaneous development and deployment. Read this and see Devops in action over 100 years ago and I'm sure there are lots more examples.
Rupert Baines, CEO at UltraSoC
This year has been rather frantic: starting a new role and being very full on has meant I've read less than I usually do. Perhaps that's wrong: a friend and mentor advises this precisely is the time to read more, for sanity and perspective. But she is wiser than I, or perhaps more self-disciplined.
Inevitably, reading less does not mean buying less! The Japanese have a term which is not yet a loanword but ought to be: Tsundoku.
Many of the books I have read have been non-taxing but fun (Trigger Mortis: the new James Bond; The Martian; Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy etc.) but I have read a few brilliant books worth recommending.
The Narrow Road To The Deep North by Richard Flanagan deservedly won the Booker prize last year and is a lovely, haunting, tragic novel. It describes an Australian surgeon who is captured and becomes a war hero as commander of a Japanese PoW camp - and the consequences for him and others after the war. It is not an easy read, harrowing and sad. But brilliant scenes, astonishingly vivid characters and insights on what it means to be "a good man" and the effect of war make the hard work worthwhile. A brilliant book.
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. I loved Wolf Hall (if you haven't read it, then do so) so read her earlier historic novel. Thank God for e-books because this is huge - and if I had realised how hefty it was I might not have read it. Set in the French Revolution, this describes in feverish intensity and hyper-real vividness the run-up to revolution, the Bastille and then the Terror. Robespierre, St. Just, Danton, and many, many more feature in utterly fascinating, compelling detail. There is a lot of information, and a LOT of pages but fascinating and enjoyable.
I really enjoy David Mitchell's novels. A clever, complex, interwoven set of stories (within the books and between them). The Bone Clocks was a fun novel: flitting through characters and decades (1984-2043) in a gripping science fiction/ adventure romp. Slade House is a shorter Halloween horror-ride of a creepy page-turner.
In non-fiction, it is interesting I haven't read much this year.
I finally read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. To be honest, it is a fascinating insight but suffers the fault of so many business books: it has one great idea, but that isn't enough to support a whole book. Reading it late and being aware of that idea I found myself turning pages rather fast as a familiar concept was explained and repeated. That is perhaps ironic in a book about modes of thinking and contrasting quick impressions with deeper reflection.
A slight cheat as I haven't read them yet (remember what I said about book piles?), are SuperForecasting: The Art and Science of Forecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner and Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader by Herminia Ibarra.
Both were highly recommended by several people independently. Both have travelled the world on my Kindle without being started yet. Maybe over the holidays.
For Part 2, click here