A 2024 Reading Recap

For the last eight years I’ve set myself a reading goal of twelve books a year. I started this practice the year after I dropped out of a humanities graduate program - I was a voracious reader as a kid, and was reading a ton in graduate school, and then I left graduate school and found that my reading just sort of … stopped. So I started tracking what I was reading, and started setting an annual reading goal, in the hopes of keeping up the habit.

In my post-school adult life, though, it’s been hard to make time for reading. In eight years of goal-setting, I’ve met my twelve-book goal only twice, and in one of those years I read no books at all (!!).

This year, I read 13 books, exceeding my goal by one. Here’s what I read in 2024:

Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet (finished on January 22)

I’d seen this book recommended in the engineering leadership circles I frequent and finally read it myself. It’s great - it’s a short, easy read that’s easy to digest, and I came away feeling like I really understood the book’s content - I felt like I was able to apply lessons from the book pretty much immediately.

I wish I’d found this book several years earlier, really. In early 2020 I became the lead, then manager, for a maintenance/operations-focused engineering team. I’d arrived at some of the strategies in this book on my own (intent-based leadership, mainly) but would have loved to have the other strategies from this book in my toolkit then too.

Another reason I like this book is because I have a cousin who is an officer on a nuclear submarine. This book gave me a little glimpse into what his world is like.

On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor (finished on March 31)

This book was incredible. We rented a little cabin in the ozarks for a week during my son’s spring break, to give our kids (ages 5 and 2 at the time) their first taste of camping. The cabin had a few books in it - this was one of them. I devoured in just a day or two (thank you, time pressure of not being able to take the book home!). Partly I just really love this genre of nonfiction - a sort of anthropological/historical/scientific look at something that’s part of daily life, but this book also really left me with a ton of new ideas about platform engineering, which was very unexpected.

We talk a lot about “paved roads” and “golden paths” in platform engineering. On Trails helped me gain a fuller understanding of where reads and paths really come from - of the hidden and implicit constraints on their creation and use. That understanding has helped me build better conceptual models of the platform engineering domain.

Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination by Robert Macfarlane (finished on May 31)

I had read Underland: A Deep Time Journey by the same author a few years ago, and loved it. I think I saw Mountains of the Mind cited in On Trails and read it shortly afterwards. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. It’s about Mount Everest, and our human interest in it. It was published in 2003 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the first known summit of Mount Everest (by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hilary), but oddly (in my opinion) the book doesn’t cover through that 1953 event - its narrative ends in 1924 with George Mallory’s last expedition.

So Good The Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work you Love by Cal Newport (finished August 21)

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport (finished on August 29)

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport (finished on September 7)

A World Without Email by Cal Newport (finished on November 10)

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport (finished November 25)

(I’m reviewing these Cal Newport books together here, even though it means the list gets a little out-of-order as a result. Sorry.)

Early this year I changed roles - I changed from senior engineering manager to a principal engineer. One effect of that change was in my schedule - I went from a manager’s schedule with lots of meetings, every day, to a maker’s schedule with few meetings, and some days with no meetings. This took a lot of getting used to. Apparently I had become accustomed to doing “maker work” in small chunks, in between meetings, and to relying on meetings (meetings which were mostly scheduled by other people, not by me) to structure my days. Losing that structure required some adjustments. As I started to research more about time management in knowledge work, Cal Newport’s name kept coming up. I ended up deciding to read his books in publish order (although I skipped his earlier student guidebooks¹), in the hopes that I’d gain some clarity about managing my time and energy more effectively.

I like what Cal Newport has to say, but I think his writing style generally leaves something to be desired. His books become monotonous in a particularly academic way - “Here is what I am going to tell you in this chapter. Here is me telling you (in this chapter) what I said I was going to tell you. Here is me restating what I just told you in this chapter” - it gets old.

But looking beyond his writing style, I think there’s a lot to like about his content. I’ve always been someone who gets into something and works hard at it to the point of overdoing it. (One cafe I worked at named their mopping method after me in the company handbook because I was so particular about doing it a certain way, to get road salt off the floor in the winter). This has led me to some periods of overwork (six/seven years ago especially, in the “hungry startup” phase, I worked some crazy hourse to meet go-live targets), and it’s hard to escape that mindset. Putting in long hours in the past is something that has created opportunities for me - it’s difficult to set that aside, even knowing now how unsustainable it is.

The “Deep Work” idea that Newport describes in his writing has been really helpful for me, in that it provides an alternative approach - not just “do less work”, but “do less work, but do higher-quality work”. I still have so much to work on in this area of “work-life balance”, but applying some of these lessons over the last few months has already paid dividends.

Sword-Dancer (Tiger and Del #1) by Jennifer Roberson (finished on September 8)

In July, my family and I did a big road trip around the western United States. We spent a week driving from home in Kansas City, Missouri out to Los Angeles, California (through Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Needles, and Barstow) to attend a friend’s wedding in San Pedro. Then we spent a week driving back home via a more northerly route (Las Vegas, St. George, Moab, Denver, Cheyenne, Rapid City, Devil’s Tower, Sioux Falls, Albert Lea, Kansas City). Our friend and his bride are both big nerds (the best kind of people) and they gave all wedding guests a gift: a pulpy 80s fantasy novel was placed at each table setting at the reception. I suspect they visited a used book store, pointed at the fantasy shelf, and told the cashier “we’ll take it all”. My wife and I were given the first two books in the Tiger and Del series by Jennifer Roberson. Sword-Dancer (the first in the series) was published in the mid-eighties. It, uh, has not aged well. It was hard to finish, actually - it’s full of unoriginal tropes and should come with a list of content warnings. But I did finish it, and I plan to read the second one (the other one we were gifted) as well. But I can’t imagine I’ll read any additional entries in this series.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (finished on September 16)

I checked out Range from my local library after seeing it recommend by Cal Newport in So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Range is an incredible book. Its central thesis is that if you specialize early, you’ll see benefits in the shorter term, but if you specialize late, you’ll see benefits in the longer term, and those benefits from late specialization are likely to be more significant - the career-making kind.

Depending on how you count them, I’m in my third career. My first was in coffee (longtime barista, including some competitions, then production roaster), my second was in academic linguistics (earned an MA, taught college Russian, started a PhD), and my third is in software. It’s so easy to feel like I’m well behind my peers in industry due to my “late start” - Range has done a great deal to help me shift my mindset in this area. Am I “behind” in measures like title, seniority, 401k contributions, compensation, etc, relative to my peers? Yes. But unlike those peers (who may have studied computer science in college and gone straight into a software engineering job after graduation), I have a much broader set of experiences that I can draw on, and these can be leveraged to not only “catch up quickly” to my peers but also to produce novel insights (someday, I hope! I don’t think I’ve produced any yet…).

Shortly after I left linguistics for software, there was a little article about me in the Startland News, because I’d come through a LaunchCode apprenticeship - LaunchCode was new to Kansas City at the time. Something I said in that interview was

Natural languages are tremendously complex and dynamic systems governed by processes which aren’t yet fully understood, and, well, so are computer programs. It’s not so much that I left one field for another, totally separate field. Rather, I became drawn to a different, more abstract sort of complex system.

On the whole I think that statement holds up well almost a decade later (although I would change “computer programs” in the first sentence out for “distributed systems” today, I think). Range has helped me understand this line of thinking more deeply, and I really strongly recommend it to anyone who has changed careers or is thinking about it.

Robust Python: Write Clean and Maintainable Code by Patrick Viafore (finished on November 16)

I’ve done more technical reading this year than just this one book, but I’m including this one in the list because unlike most technical books I read, I read this one straight through, cover to cover. A lot of my day-to-day work revolves around ownership of a large and complex Python application that’s full of legacy code. This book contains a lot of straightforward and actionable tips for working in that environment. I especially like that most of the chapters present working examples, and progressions through various stages of complexity. I need to see if I can expense copies of this for the rest of my team, I think it’s good foundational knowledge that we should all have.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (finished November 25)

I don’t know Anne Lamott as a writer, really - I hadn’t read any of her work previously - but Cal Newport mentioned this book in Slow Productivity and I was intrigued. I do like reading writers on writing. Bird by Bird is wonderful. Reading this book made me more human.

The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Bryce Upholt (finished December 1)

I don’t recall how I learned about this book. I think I just saw it in an Amazon recommendation. But I had some travel coming up and I read really quickly on planes, so I got it for Kindle and read it in a day traveling home to Kansas City from New York. This was a good, interesting book, but it also made me sad. Like so many stories, and so many American stories, the story of the Mississippi River is a story of the haves and the have-nots, and the haves come out ahead every time.