# Favorite books read in 2016 ## Science fiction **Revelation Space series** by Alastair Reynolds _Revelation Space · Redemption Ark · Absolution Gap_ Hard scifi space opera. Greatly enjoyable, with memorable characters, backstory, science, history, and of course the requisite galactic-scale threats. **Culture series** by Iain M. Banks _The Player of Games · Consider Phlebas · Use of Weapons · The State of the Art · Excession · Inversions · Look to Windward · Matter · Surface Detail · The Hydrogen Sonata_ I read the entire ten book series over the course of 2016. The Culture series is set in the distant future where enlightened AIs run society and humans, freed from a life of labor, have to deal with the rest of the galaxy. What is life like when material want is eradicated? What about encounters with less enlightened aliens? Or perhaps backward planets lagging in development? All this and more is thoughtfully and philosophically dealt with in this amazing series. My favorite out of the ten books was the brilliant Matter, but I’d recommend starting with Player of Games. **Hainish Cycle** by Ursula K. Le Guin _The Left Hand of Darkness · The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia_ Continuing in my classic SF adventures, I tore through several of Ursula Le Guin’s novels. She writes with a poignancy and precision that makes her prose sing, and treats with themes that are larger than what’s typically encountered in science fiction. Among the books in the cycle, The Dispossessed stood out for me as a moving tale of two civilizations riven by decades of animosity. The entire work itself is beautifully and carefully framed, making it a work of art in its composition and form. ## Business **First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently** by Marcus Buckingham A timeless classic, dating from before the first tech bubble burst (written in 1999), this book contains advice that’s useful not only to active and aspiring managers, but to all those who report to a manager. Through the lens of encouraging self-discovery, it emphasizes the need for understanding as the engine for growth and provides a set of questions to help drive a career forward. **Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager** by Michael Lopp I’ve long been a reader of Rands in Repose, the author’s blog. This book contains some of the best essays from that blog, plus more, and provides a useful set of rubrics and lenses through which to view software engineering specifically and the technology industry more generally. Read this understand how giant tech companies actually get work done and the vital importance of middle managers: “A successful organization is built of layers of people that are glued together with managers. Each layer is responsible for a broad task, be it engineering or QA or marketing. Between each layer is a manager whose job it is to translate from one layer to the next . . . in both directions. He knows what his employees want. He knows what his manager wants, and he’s able to successfully navigate when those wants differ.” This book teaches how to be most effective as a manager in the middle between all those overlapping layers. ## Humanities **Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City** by Matthew Desmond Painstakingly researched through applied field research, the author embedded himself in Milwaukee to understand eviction, both from the perspective of tenants and landlords. Devastating, heart-wrenching, and depressing, but powerfully and evocatively told through moving, sonorous prose. **Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)** by Ta-Nehisi Coates Written as a letter from father to son, this book features beautiful, almost lyrical prose, filled with heart and feeling. A moving, powerful work on a difficult-to-read-about topic. Poignant, almost private, it is a gift to be able to read this and take steps on the path to a better understanding. ## Memoir **Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley** by Antonio García Martínez Irreverent, dark, sardonic, at times caustic — yet compelling. This tale of one man’s adventures at a Silicon Valley startup tells it straight up. Viscerally honest, replete with unexpected wisdom and surprising amounts of heart. Also, as a bonus, contains the most lucid explanation of advertising tech that I’ve come across. Read this to understand part of what makes this Valley run. **Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis** by J.D. Vance The tale of a Yale-trained lawyer and his childhood in the hard scrabble backcountry of southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, used as a prism through which to view hillbillies, white working-class America, and the middle class. An illustrative collision of cultures, and of the havoc those collisions can bring upon lives. ## Design **Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion** by Alan Flusser Only available in hardcover, but worth it. Beautiful photos and timeless principles for permanent fashion. Focused pretty heavily on professional attire (think law firms more than tech companies, let alone startups), but the underlying principles (color matching across skin tone/eye color/clothing/accents) apply everywhere. As a bonus, it delves into how many of the “standards” have come about, with fascinating history lessons into why things are the way they are (when in doubt, blame the Duke of Windsor). I don’t wear a suit to work nowadays, but this book was still a fascinating, eye-opening, and ultimately quite useful read. ## Fiction **The Neapolitan Novels** by Elena Ferrante _My Brilliant Friend · The Story of a New Name · Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay · The Story of the Lost Child_ Told in an evocative, warm, almost conversational style, this quadrilogy compellingly tells the story of the life of two girls who grew up in Naples, and all that life brought them to bear, and all they brought to bear to life. Moving and meaningful. ## History **The Silk Roads: A New History of the World** by Peter Frankopan What would history look like if we placed the Middle East at the center of it? How did the events of the centuries impact that region? This book does that, and does so brilliantly, resulting in a lovely, wonderful, endearing, immensely scoped tale. Follow the history of an entire region across the span of thousands of years. The threads of the narrative pull together so well as to have kept me turning the pages. A tremendous work of scholarship and an enlightened insight into a region that, to this day, continues to be a locus of history. ## Politics **Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?)** by Seth Godin Available as a free PDF, this book takes a hard look at what education is for, how it got to the way it is now, and why it needs to be different. Powerfully written and easily digestible in small chunks, this is a thought-provoking read that looks forward to imagine what schooling/education/learning could and should look like in this Internet-enabled, connected world. --- From [@dominik](https://biblioqueue.com/@dominik/2016) on biblioqueue.