2020 Bookshelf
December 11, 2020 in #personal · 3 min read
This note is a list of books I attempted to read in 2020. I probably also read other books, but the ones in this list were explicitly mentioned in my journal entries over the past year. Note that I made up these categories — it is very possible that a more reputable source classifies the same book in a different genre.
Upon reflection, I wish I read more fiction and less “hustle porn.” In general, I wish I read more. I am also not very good at finishing everything I start, but I don’t think this is a good metric to optimize for.
Technical
- UNIX: A History and a Memoir (Brian Kernighan) **
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (Richard Hamming)
- The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks)
- The Alignment Problem (Brian Christian)
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Nir Eyal)
- [UNFINISHED] The Elements of Programming Style (Brian Kernighan)
- [UNFINISHED] Practical Statistics for Data Scientists (Peter Bruce & Andrew Bruce)
- [UNFINISHED] The Rust Programming Language (Steve Klabnik)
- [UNFINISHED] The Psychology of Computer Programming (Gerald Weinberg)
- [REREAD] Don’t Make Me Think (Steve Kruger)
- [REREAD] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppman)
- [REREAD] The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)
Fiction
- An Untamed State (Roxane Gay) **
- Pachinko (Min Jin Lee) **
- Pages for You (Sylvia Brownrigg) **
- Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi) **
- The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt)
- Transcendent Kingdom (Yaa Gyasi)
- The Farm (Joanne Ramos)
- American Dirt (Jeanine Cummins)
- Rodham (Curtis Sittenfeld)
- [UNFINISHED] Born Confused (Tanuja Desai Hidier)
- [REREAD] The Glass Castle (Jeannete Walls)
- [REREAD] Rules for Virgins (Amy Tan)
- [REREAD] Difficult Women (Roxane Gay)
- [REREAD] The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
Nonfiction
- Untamed (Glennon Doyle)
- So Sad Today (Melissa Border)
- Open Book (Jessica Simpson)
- Can’t Hurt Me (David Goggins)
- The Man Who Solved the Market (Gregory Zuckman)
- Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)
- Manic: A Memoir (Terri Cheney)
- A Promised Land (Barack Obama)
- Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
- The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
- The Wizard and the Prophet (Charles C. Mann)
- Bottle of Lies (Katherine Eban)
- [UNFINISHED] Merchants of Doubt (Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway)
- [UNFINISHED] Alone Time (Stephanie Rosenbloom)
- [UNFINISHED] Born a Crime (Trevor Noah)
- [UNFINISHED] Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
- [UNFINISHED] Hacking Darwin (Jamie Metzl)
- [UNFINISHED] The New Jim Crow
- [UNFINISHED] I Feel Bad About My Neck (Nora Ephron)
- [UNFINISHED] Ignorance (Stuart Firestein)
- [REREAD] The Last Lecture (Randy Pausch)
- [REREAD] Option B (Sheryl Sandberg)
Hustle Porn
- How to Fall in Love with Anyone (Mandy Len Catron)
- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Lori Gottlieb)
- Radical Candor (Kim Scott)
- 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week (Tiffany Shlain)
- Your Money or Your Life (Vicki Robin)
- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke)
- If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? (Raj Raghunathan)
- Overwhelmed (Brigid Schulte)
- [UNFINISHED] Swearing Is Good for You (Emma Byrne)
** Top 5 books that elicited strong emotions. I finished reading these in (at most) a couple of sittings.
Shreya Shankar likes systems and machine learning.