- Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel. I haven’t read many novels yet this year, but this is my favorite. Subtle and engaging.
- Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. I’m finding this to be really good. It’s famously hard to measure software developer productivity, but they make the best arguments I’ve seen for their measures.
- Peter Ackroyd, Dominion: The History of England from the Battle of Waterloo to Victoria’s Diamond Jubiliee. The last in his series.
- Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life. This book is, frankly, a bit slow. But… I find this perfect reading for the end of the day. It’s a different world completely removed. It’s an activity that stretches out time, as opposed to an activity that accelerates time, like watching TV or even programming, where at the end the time has disappeared and I don’t know where it went. It’s also a reminder of just how much knowledge there is out there, and how you can keep digging down in an area and discovering more at seemingly the same amount of complexity and detail. This is a 600 page book, well-researched and well-written (taking years of work), about a historical figure that at the first approximation no one cares about or remembers today. I find this comforting and amazing.