A few years ago, I read “Crisis? What crisis?”, which is about Britain in the 1970s. This is the follow-up book about the 1980s [affiliate link], though, as its author Alwyn W. Turner points out, the timelines are never quite that precise. It’s more accurate to say that this book follows Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in 1979 to her downfall eleven years later.

Despite living through the Eighties, there’s a surprising amount of this book that I have very little recollection of. It makes me realise how little of what’s going on now that my kids are likely to remember.

I got a new iPad to replace my 2018 iPad Pro. Let me complain about it first.

It bothers me that it’s a computer, yet I can’t easily write my own software on it¹. Sure, there is Swift Playgrounds, but I don’t really want to use Swift. And even if I did, it’s not a proper IDE, it doesn’t support basic features like a debugger. It’s not 1985 any more. There are other languages (Pythonista looks good, though I’ve not tried it), but the vast array of languages that are available on Linux and on the Mac are missing.

I’ve read a lot of Moren’s words over the years, but mostly in Macworld and Six Colors¹. I picked “The Caledonian Gambit²” entirely arbitrarily.

His fiction is… fine. It’s a bit too military to my taste, but with a bunch of spy and action for good measure. There’s some family backstory that feeds into it, leading to a well rounded story. It didn’t fully engage me but I did keep reading, and wanted to know how it ended. There were a few phrases where I thought “he’s trying too hard” but, otherwise, it’s well written.

“How not to be wrong: The art of changing your mind” [affiliate link] is a follow-up to James O’Brien’s earlier book, “How to be right” The idea this time is that he walks through a number of areas where he has been wrong in the past and has changed his mind.

It’s such a simple concept, but, as a society, we have difficulty doing exactly that. Politicians are criticised for doing the wrong thing and then again for doing a u-turn. Tribal loyalty means that people won’t change their minds if that would mean agreeing with “the enemy.” I’m not putting myself above this¹, sadly, and neither does O’Brien.

I have a problem with this book [affiliate link]. Now that I come to write some notes on it, I find that there is so much that I want to quote that I may as well copy and paste the whole text.

I’m not going to, but here are a few.

I hate competitiveness, because I know I’m better than that.

And.

People say I’m self-deprecating, but I don’t think I’m very good at that.

I’m biased. As Mulder did, I want to believe. Except, I want to believe that being a generalist can work. And that’s what “Range” [affiliate link] by David Epstein, claims. It’s subtitle is, “How generalists triumph in a specialised world.”

It’s not a challenging read. There is a lot of anecdata, examples of people who took a broad path and still succeeded. In that sense, maybe it’s like “Quiet,” which is about introverts. It doesn’t tell you how to succeed, only that it’s possible and that you’re not alone. Maybe that’s enough?

Every year I try to complete the Advent of Code. Every year I fail to finish. I get about halfway through, and the exercises start taking longer to complete than I have time.

Every year I think about Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls¹ [affiliate link], because the same kinds of challenges you find in Advent of Code can be found in the book. The main difference being the quality of the answers. At least in my case². In the words of the preface: “Programming pearls whose origins lie beyond solid engineering, in the realm of insight and creativity.”

“Radical Candor” is one of those phrases that I’ve heard and wondered about. Is it another vacuous management phrase? Does it mean anything? I saw it in the library and thought I’d find out. I’m cynical about these things but it doesn’t mean I’m closed minded!

The pitch is “Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity” which sounds positive but I don’t manage people at work. Even if it contained genuine insight, would there be anything I could use?

A couple of years ago I did a conference talk called “On Cloud Nine: How to be happy migrating your in-memory computing platform to the cloud.” I wish I’d had “Cloud Without Compromise” back then. It covers much of the same ground but, as you’d expect in a book rather than a forty minute conference talk, in much greater depth. More importantly, it puts some concepts into context much more clearly that I did, either by explaining it better or by giving it a good name.

I failed to reach my target of reading twelve books in 2021 by quite some margin this year. I finished only ten books, and that’s including the cheat of counting two short stories as two books!

Despite my objective of reading more fiction, I also failed with that (just the one novel and the two short stories).

While the volume was down both on previous years and my target, the quality was actually pretty good. From the story of the company behind the BlackBerry to the story of the Seventies, how to build a computer and how computers were made. All were worth a read.