How’s Goodreads going for me ?

Well, Goodreads is going fine and dandy. The impossibru reading challenge I’ve set upon meself in the beginning of this year was 90 books. I will read 90 books this year. It means roughly reading and finishing a book every 4 days. Here’s my profile.

While it seems unlikely, it’s actually pretty easy. I just finished Angus Croll’s If Hemingway wrote JavaScript. It’s 196 pages, but it takes about an hour to read it, because it was a pretty easy book, and almost half of it was code, so it’s pretty easy. It was a fun book too.

Now, I’ve finished 13 books this year. Most of these books are the A Series of Unfortunate Events books, and on average they are like 200–220 pages. I didn’t read past third book when I was a kid, so I wanted to read them all now. To be honest, quite a disappointment. I mean what the hell is VFD anyway?

Now, I’m reading Code Complete, I’ve read one tenth of it today. Quite amazingly simple in my opinion, and every software engineer says every software engineer should read it so as an imposter software engineer I’m willing to listen to software engineers.

I also started reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, I’m willing to give that man another chance after the horrendous The God Delusion fiasco, I’m hoping this one is better.

And the best to the last. I’m reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Now this is a very controversial book, it may very well be the most controversial book of all times. And I’m two-thirds done. I totally understand as to why this book was banned in many countries and there was a fatwah for Rushdie’s assassination. Holy Jesus Christ this book is amazing. I mean Rushdie blabbers a lot with words, and they are the best words, but sometimes a little bit too much best words. However, the story and the symbolism behind the book is unprecedented. I really liked it, and I can understand why some people would not like it. It really contains a lot of taboo ideas inside for many people, and for that I understand why it got so much reaction.

Now on the horizon, we’ve got a lot of Swift books, and advanced algorithms, data structures books, because I want to remember what my precious Monte Carlo algorithms looked like, and as part of the new year’s resolutions/revelations, I’m doing the Swift thing. I already finished a video course that was like 20 hours. I need to fresh up in design patterns a bit so I can refactor some old code and get back in business.

Also in the fiction department, I really want to re-read Dan Brown books, like, all of them. I still have not read Inferno (I read like the first 50 pages but don’t remember anything of course) and while I’m at it, I can do the whole Robert Langdon saga again. Also in the fiction department, I’m going to speed-read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Bluebeard, later this month.

Well I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to fulfill my 90 books in one year challenge. I mean there are books, just like the JS book I mentioned above, that are like 200 pages but they last an hour. I’ll be reading a lot of 200–300 pgs. books, they’ll last couple hours at most, so I’m hopeful.