Batched Books Reviews: #2024.3
Published in
3 min readApr 28, 2024
Non-fiction
- Botanical Curses and Poisons (2+/4) — Random facts and stories about plants. Some of them are interesting, but none of them seem useful. I expected something more from pop-scientific, got folk tales instead.
- Building Microservices (4/4) — Baseline for any backend developer. Comprehensive and wide, hence not particularly deep. It covers almost anything you can think of when building systems based on microservices, from communication between them, through deployments, discoverability, storing code, feature flags, observability, security, and much more.
- Great World Religions — Buddhism (3+/4) — More scientific than other books I’ve read on the topic. Goes beyond the teachings of the Buddha and gives context to it. Discusses Buddhism across countries and times. Explains different flavours and the difference between them. A really nice supplement to the more philosophical positions.
- Product Management in Practice (3+/4) — Book about all the ways you can fail as a PM. Politics, conflicts, talking with senior stakeholders, talking with users, how data-driven approaches can trick you, and much more. A good addition to the more “sunshine and roses” ones like Inspired.
- Software Engineering at Google (4-/4) — 80% of great content about software engineering, 20% of stuff specific to Google. To be honest, I was worried this book would be about Google, and I'm happy it turned out to not be the case. “Software engineering is programming applied over time” is the motto of the book. It covers almost anything that relates to that, which means it focuses more on humans developing the code and practices they follow rather than the code itself.
- Seven Years in Tibet (3/4) — Tibet travelogue. Interesting and kind of classic at this point. Gives some decent insight into culture and world most of us will never see. But I think I don’t like travel books — information density is a bit too low for my taste.
- The Bed of Procrustes (-/4) — I’m not sure it’s a book. Hence no rate for it. But if you look for a nice collection of proverbs to inspire some thinking and philosophical considerations, this one is great.
- To Save Everything, Click Here (2+/4) — I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it a lot. Probably more than I should, because my list of notes why I didn’t like it is longer than most of my notes from the books in general. But to make it short: it’s just a rant, held in prevocational tone, without any data to back most of the claims. Assumes things are “bad” without actually explaining why. Has very little structure. Some points make sense individually, but the author tries to make a single thesis out of it and that thesis doesn’t hold water. It’s one of the books that will play well with people who already agree with the thesis but will not convince anyone who doesn’t.
Fiction
- Defiance of the Fall 12 (3+/4) — Another Defiance of the Fall, another great one.
- Fizzlesprocket (3/4) — Most gruesome fantasy I’ve read. It’s not a quality book. It's full of almost-porn, low-quality humour, morbid scenes and other things you don’t find in books that often. But sometimes that’s exactly what you need to reset your brain. It’s enjoyable, different than anything else and rather fun.
- The Last Light (3+/4) — Another one from Wandering Inn, another great one.
- Swordheart (3/4) — A romance in an interesting world. I didn’t like the plot that much, but I liked the world. I didn’t like the first half but I really liked the second one. I didn’t like the romance, but I still enjoyed the book. A good piece of fantasy.
Stats:
- Books read this year: 29 (+12)
- Books on the shelf: 22 (-4)
- Books on the wishlist: 203 (-4)
