Initially I planned to include this into the “year in review” post, but this section felt too long, so I separated it into another post.
This year, as tracked by Goodreads, I read 21 books (hmm, apparently they included 2-3 books that I didn’t finish reading). The number is comparable to the previous 1 or 2 years. When I work from home, there isn’t a set time to read book, so usually I don’t read. However, when working in office, I usually use the time for commuting to either listen to podcast or to read. Even so, this year, I felt less motivated to read books, but I discovered and read some great books.
Some great non-fiction books I read this year:
- Immune by Philipp Detmer, which explains really well in simple terms how our immune system works. When done well (and not for exams), it’s really fun to learn. While reading this, I keep imagining White Blood Cell from Cells at Work anime is doing his work.
- Jet Stream by Tim Woolling, which explains the global jet stream, which exist due to the planetary size and rotation. Because of the jet stream and geography, it affects the weather of different places. It explains how some places have low rainfall and how some others have high rainfall. I don’t like that at times, the explanation can be slightly technical (like a scientist talking to another scientist), but if I weather through that, I understood the explanation perfectly.
- Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, which is a combination of the author’s life story, David Starr Jordan (Stanford University’s first president)’s biography, and taxonomy of “fish”. I don’t like that it’s mixed with author’s life story, but the other two stories are really interesting. The conclusion wasn’t that solid, since the explanation of why dish don’t exist is just simply taxonomy field have evolved. It’s like declassifying Pluto as planets, now in taxonomy, there is no one branch that is called fish.
In terms of fiction books, I absolutely loved these:
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. The characters were relatable since it felt like they were just ordinary people growing up. The author exposed us to many popular culture of the 80s and how the characters worked really hard in creating video games. The book title itself is a quote from the Shakespeare play Macbeth, which at some point in the book will be referenced to. Apparently this book is awarded the best book of 2022 from Goodreads.
- Greater Good and Lesser Evil by Timothy Zahn. They’re the second and final titles in the Star Wars Thrawn Ascendancy series. I’ve been following the Star Wars novel series for a long time. These novels showed how Thrawn sacrificed himself to save his people while being played in the dirty politics of his nation.
- The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End by Liu Cixin. This is a legendary Chinese science fiction series and I finally had the chance to read the translated version. I really like how imaginative the author was in imagining what will happen if humanity have contact with alien civilization.
So yeah, with work arrangement changed back to work in office by default, I foresee that next year I’ll be reading more compared to this year. Looking forward to another year in reading!