What I'm Reading #3

Books

Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

I'm only halfway through this book, which gives a detailed history of the development of the UK computing industry since the first computer, Colossus. (To any American readers, let me save you some time: ENIAC was NOT the first programmable electronic computer. Get over it.)

In particular, it focuses on the social history of the computer, and how the first computer operators were all female, and how the gender of the workforce changed as computers became more important in business and government. An in-depth and fascinating read.

Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View

I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but my son is currently obessed by the Lego Star Wars cartoons, so I picked up this anthology of short stories based on the initial film over Christmas. It was very a different read to what I had enviaged. It consists of 40 short stories (one for each year since the release of Star Wars in 1977), each story giving the viewpoint of a minor character in the original film: one of the scrap droids in the Jawa transporter, Wuher (the barkeep in the Mos Eisley catina), the Dianiga in the Death Star's trash compactor, one of the rebel X-wing mechanics. In each story, you get to see how they become, in some small way, part of the larger saga. Some were strangely moving, like the one discussing Obi-Wan Kenobi's desert vigil - I had never thought of it as a test of his religious faith before. Recommended, even (or perhaps especially) for those who didn't enjoy the film.

Articles

Have we reached ‘peak international students’ in the UK?

This article asks a question that I had also recently started asking myself - have we reached peak international student numbers? Given the recent shameful reporting that some international students have been forced to use food banks, I suspect that we have.

How Cyberpunk 2077 Sold a Promise—and Rigged the System

I'm not a gamer, but one of my brothers is. He gave me the heads up about this story, which shows how the company behind Cyberpunk, CD Projekt Red, managed to manipulate the reviews of the game and led to the choru sof disapproval from gamers on actually playing the title.

David Squires on ... Marcus Rashford v the Tory government

A classic...

Built To Last

An interesting read on the attempts of some US states to blame the COBOL programming language (and the lack of COBOL programmers) for unemployment systems not being able to cope with the increase of unemployment claims due to the pandemic. And how it relates to the wider issue of a lack of investment in critical infrastructure.

What I'm Reading #1

The first in a series of posts detailing the best of what I'm reading both online and offline:

Books

Wolf Hall

I'm re-reading Hilary Mantel first novel on Thomas Cromwell, in preparation for reading the recently released third book in the trilogy.

Articles

Racist intimidation in the Village in south Belfast "going on for years"

As the protests in the United States continue over the violent death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, it might be tempting to think we don't have a racism problem in Belfast. Think again. This report from the Detail gives examples of ongoing racist attacks in the Village area of Belfast.

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

An interesting read on the cut-throat world of food delivery.

'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University

An essay on the impact of the current pandemic on the use of educational technology, and a look at the long history of the development of this technology.

Building an automated monitoring tool to track how many people are at the office by using Unifi network gear and Azure Logic Apps

Jussi Roine details an interesting side project using the Unifi Network's APi and Azure Logic Apps to track who is in the office. I was particularly interested to read about using the Remote Development extension for VS Code.

How Becoming A Dad Has Changed How I Work

Mike McQuaid, leader of the HomeBrew open source project, describes how having a family changed his work-life balance.

What I’ve Been Reading…

I’ve always loved reading. I can remember (aged 6-7?) looking forward to every Thursday afternoon, when my sister and I would be taken to a local newsagent for a comic. My first reading material consisted of The Beezer, The Dandy and The Beano.

At the age of 9, my mum left me for an hour in the local library. By the time she returned, I was hooked on books. I can still remember the first library book I took out on my new library card - Gorilla Adventure by Willard Price. I was enthralled by this story of 2 teenagers who travelled the world capturing wild animals. I ended up reading most of the titles in the excellent Adventure book series (I seem to recall it being called ‘The Adventures of Hal & Roger’ – a UK printing possibly?).

With the recent migration of my data from Shelfari, I wondered – what have I actually been reading?  After importing the data into a local database, I decided to take a look.

Since November 2011 (when I signed up to Shelfari), I’ve read 332 books. 29 of these were second readings, so this brings the total down to 303 unique books. So, how many books do I read per year?

So I vary from 56 to 91 books per year (over the 4 full years of data, 2012 to 2015), averaging at around 74 books. If we look at the type of books (fiction/non-fiction), does this help explain the variability in the number of books read? I would expect the number of books to decrease if I’m reading more non-fiction in a given year. My impression is that it takes me longer to complete a non-fiction book, and I’m also less inclined to start a new book after I finish.

And looking at non-fiction books as a percentage of the total number of books read each year:

There doesn't appear to be a clear relationship between the amount of non-fiction I read and the total number of books. What other trends can we see in my reading? Looking at my fiction reading:

Author	Number of Highly Rated Books
Patrick O'Brian	18
J.K. Rowling	8
George R. R. Martin	6
Paul McAuley	6
Stephen Baxter	6
James Clavell	5
Robert Harris	5
Stephen King	5
William Gibson	5
Neil Gaiman	4

Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed reading Patrick O’Brian’s amazing Aubrey–Maturin series (think Jane Austin on the high seas), the Harry Potter books, A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series on which the TV series Game of Thrones is based on), as well as several science fiction series from the talented UK writers Paul Mcauley and Stephen Baxter. The Asian Saga from James Clavell is a series I return to time and again.

As you can probably tell from the list above, I like reading complex novels, preferably in a series, with intricate plots and multi-facetted characters. One author who is not featured above is Frank Herbert – I still consider his Dune series the best writing I have ever read. I plan to read it again soon. I especially enjoy science fiction (Macauley, Baxter, Gibson - Neal Stephenson just fell outside the top 10) and Fantasy (Martin, Gaiman and Rowling).

In my non-fiction, I’m tend to read more widely – the topic interests me more than the author. There are a few exceptions:

Author	Number of Highly Rated Books
Fergal Keane	2
Jared Diamond	2
John Briffa	2
Max Hastings	2
Michael Lewis	2

I’ve particularly enjoy reading Fergal Keane’s books, in particular his epic story Road of Bones, about the battle of Kohima in 1944. I’ve also recently enjoyed Jared Diamond's books for their unique mix of anthropology, ecology, geography and evolutionary biology

What about books I didn’t like? Here is a list of the worst from the past 4 years:

Title	Author	My Review
Antifragile	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	‘Vainglorious and pompous nonsense. Read about 15 pages and gave up, not on the ideas being conveyed, but on the arrogance of the author.’
American Sniper	Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, Jim DeFelice	Very poor, jingoistic fare.  Tells a completely different, and much grubbier, story than the film of the same name.  I found this book very depressing reading indeed.
The Bone Clocks	David Mitchell	Very disappointing. After enjoying the wonderful Cloud Atlas so much, very let down by this novel. It read like a terrible 1950's pulp Sci-Fi novel. Yet there was the odd glimpse of some great writing.  Such a pity.
Slow-Tech	Andrew Price	Rubbish.  The author has a very poor understanding of sound engineering principles.  The book reads more as a left wing diatribe, as opposed to a serious discussion of how to improve design choices.
A Discovery of Witches	Deborah E. Harkness	A truly dreadful book.  I threw the book away after approx. 30 pages. Dire stuff.

I regret putting David Mitchell in the above list – he is a fantastic author (Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green), but Bone Clocks was a great let-down.

At some point, I hope to spend some time analysing the hashtags I associated with each book in my reading list. I’ll update this post with the results. Until then, happy reading!