Books read in 2023
I only read three books on 2023 and I am surprised that I even had the energy to read something longer than a single paragraph. This year was by far the worst I ever lived, marked with tragically failed plans that only brought unsavory misery and bitter sadness.
These books, together, paint a clear picture of what happened.
01 - ‘Salem’s lot, by Stephen King.
The coolness in the air was sharper now, and tomorrow the leaves would be blooded.
If the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.
The sandwich was bologna and cheese, his favorite. All the sandwiches he made were his favorites; that was one of the advantages to being single.
Once, when his father had caught him listening at the door in their old house-Mark had only been six then his father had told him an old English proverb: Never listen at a knothole lest you be vexed. That meant, his father said, that you may hear something about yourself that you don’t like. Well, there was another one, too. Forewarned is forearmed.
There is no life here but the slow death of days.
These are the town’s secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face.
The folk here are still rich and full-blooded, folk who are stuffed with the aggression and darkness so necessary to… there is no English for it. Pokol; vurderlak; eyalik. Do you follow?
There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.
Matt sighed. ‘Lucidity doesn’t presuppose sanity-as you well know.’ He shifted in bed, redistributing the books that lay around him. ‘If there is a God, He must be making me do penance for a life of careful academicism - of refusing to plant an intellectual foot on any ground until it had been footnoted in triplicate.
This is the first fiction book I read from Stephen King and I was not disappointed at all. A modern take on vampirism that still manages to feel archaic, mysterious and terrifying.
02 - Unbroken: A World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand.
Louis Zamperini had an interesting and hard life, to put it mildly.
I often had to stop reading just to fully grasp how can somebody go trough so much pain and misery without giving up.
When I visited a holocaust museum in Germany, I was disgusted by the human ability to destroy the lives and dignity of other people. But at the same time, I was disturbingly happy, suspecting that I have then seen the very worst that mankind has to offer, knowing that we cannot be even worse than that. However, when I read this book I was sadly surprised again by learning that the human mind can design even more ways to humiliate and destroy a person’s self-worth, all in the name of a twisted superiority ideology.
It seems the only thing that can compare to human resilience is human cruelty and injustice.
This is definitely not an easy book to read, but it made me remember that some people have survived far worse problems than I could probably have in my entire life.
03 - Docs for developers: An engineer’s field guide to technical writing, by Jared Bhatti.
The creative act of writing isn’t the same as the analytical act of reviewing and evaluating text.
Just as you can have bugs in code that passes a linter perfectly, you can have grammatically perfect documentation that fails to help your users.
When giving feedback, follow the rule of plussing: only critize an idea if you also add a constructive suggestion.
Beware anyone who tells you that videos are the solution to any software documentation problem.
Pretty standard advice about software documentation, however, the “documentation” I’ve had to read during my career reminds me that common sense is not that common, and that many developers do not consider writing documentation as something important, even when it avoids outages and saves so much time in the long run.