A Quarter of Mostly Fiction, With a Side of Systems Design

My reading over the last few months of 2020 leaned heavily toward fiction, with a couple of notable technical and historical works mixed in. Here’s the rundown.

Novels and Stories

Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield stood out as the highlight. It’s a semi-autobiographical, first-person novel with a cast of richly drawn characters that recur throughout the narrative. I enjoyed it more than most of his other work, with the possible exception of Oliver Twist. One observation: while Uriah Heep is the designated villain, I found Dora far more irritating—a character choice that may have landed differently in late 19th-century England but reads as chauvinistic today.

John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a brief, melancholic folk tale about a poor Mexican pearler and the consequences of his discovery, told in the author’s unmistakable style. In a different vein, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery chronicles the coming-of-age of an orphan adopted by an unmarried brother and sister on Prince Edward Island. It’s charming and suitable for all ages, though aimed primarily at younger readers. The writing and humor are strong, but the ending feels rushed—particularly since this is the first of eight books.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility offers a typical Victorian portrait of people with no productive occupation, living in mortal boredom. There’s plenty of soap-opera romance and intrigue, but the prose is excellent with deeply developed characters.

History and Engineering

Brian Kernighan’s UNIX: A History and a Memoir is a concise biography of the operating system, its creators, and Bell Labs in the 1960s–1980s. It’s a well-written, fascinating account of the people and environment that shaped modern computing.

In The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, Mark Arax explores the state’s agricultural history and its fraught relationship with water from early European settlement to 2017. The central argument is that California’s water usage is unsustainable and trouble is inevitable. It’s an interesting read, though longer than it needs to be.

America’s Bank by Roger Lowenstein focuses narrowly on the political maneuvering behind the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. For that specific topic it’s a good treatment, but if you want a broader understanding of the institution, look elsewhere.

Software Design and Space

John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design is a short book emphasizing simplicity and good taste in system design. Its minimalist approach is a refreshing departure from other texts on the subject, and it reflects the author’s considerable experience in systems programming.

Rob Manning’s Mars Rover Curiosity offers an inside account from the rover’s chief engineer. It’s a compelling look at the real-world challenges of designing, building, and deploying a spacecraft, and a great description of what engineering actually involves.

Nonfiction and the Long Haul

Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, the third volume of his LBJ biography, covers Johnson’s years in the Senate. At roughly 1,200 pages, it’s an epic undertaking. The writing and attention to detail are superb, but that same detail makes it slow going at times. Reading a 1,200-page biography on a Kindle is notably more demanding than listening to an audiobook, especially in the quieter stretches.

John Steinbeck’s America and Americans, and Selected Nonfiction collects his newspaper and magazine pieces from the 1940s–1960s. The quality is variable—some pieces are excellent, others merely passable.

For younger readers or quick introductions, Neal deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry works well as a digestible overview of the field.

Re-reads

This quarter also included revisiting three older favorites: Richard Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality, Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys, and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.