What I Read in 2010
Continuing what I started last year, here’s the list of books I managed to read this year. I read slightly fewer books this year than last (33 compared to 38). I didn’t exactly aim high (in last year’s post I said I wanted to read at a “similar pace”) so I guess I didn’t fail that miserably. I’m slowly reducing the amount of movies and TV I watch, so hopefully that will provide a little more room to read a bit more in 2011.
As I stated last year, I don’t finish books that I am not enjoying, so each book in the list below I’d recommend to varying degrees. If I’m picking favorites, I’d have to go with Ender’s Game, The Gun Seller and Daemon for my favorite fiction reads. My top three non-fiction books this year (excluding the web-related ones) would be Amusing Ourselves to Death, Flow and Better Off.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
Essential PHP Security by Chris Shiflett
Infoquake by David Louis Edelman
Good to Great by Jim Collins
Blindness by Jose Saramago
The Search by John Battelle
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Natural-Born Cyborgs by Andy Clark
The Forest and the Trees by Allan G. Johnson
Better Off by Eric Brende
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
Alice In Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
97 Things Every Programmer Should Know by Kevlin Henney
The Time Machine by HG Wells
Glasshouse by Charles Stross
Rapt by Winifred Gallagher
The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Emil Frankl
Daemon by Daniel Suarez
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vigne
Rework by Jason Fried
Forever War by Joe Haldeman
HTML5 Up and Running by Mark Pilgram
Flashforward by Robert Sawyer