2019 Reading List

As the end of 2019 is approaching, it’s time to reflect and take a look at the books I read this year (here is the last year’s list).

This year I read a total of 22 books. That’s about inline with what I average. I don’t plan it this way nor do I have a specific reading goal set, but I always end up averaging around 2 books per month for years now. Another pattern that stayed true: I had a summer reading lull once again with zero books read June/July/August. Again, I don’t plan it this way, but almost every year my summer has zero books. Outdoors time seems to replace the indoors reading time.

I don’t think I have a prohibitive favorite as I did the last year (Bad Blood). I stayed on course with mostly non-fiction books. Not as much psychology books. I think I have reached a threshold where they are starting to repeat themselves.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the list.

January

• Thinking in Bets — (3/5 rating) I was on a big sports betting streak and this book fit right in with its advice and general discussions on the gambler’s mentality and the pitfalls that come with it. The key message I took away from this book: outcomes are not 0 or 100, black or white, but plenty of gray in between and you are better off thinking in outcome ranges and probabilities. Another great reminder from this book: we tend to confuse skill with luck and wise versa. Keep an eye out for this trap.
• Advances in Financial Machine Learning — (4/5) again, related to my gambling/sports betting investigations, took a hard look at this book to try to understand, at least conceptually, different ML approaches that can be used for predicting outcomes. The book was a bit too advanced to really become of use but never less provided many pointers to areas to investigate.
• Factfulness — (5/5) I actually finished this up right at the end of 2018 (here is my review) but I went back and reread parts of it in Jan and marked it with Jan completion date. HIGHLY recommended.

February

• Natural Causes — (1/5) this one was a random pick up from my library. I saw it next to some other books I liked so decided to give it a shot. It started out good enough and then quickly devolved into unreadable mess. I rarely rate books below 3 stars, but this one received a 1. My summary: a feminist raging about doctors and mindfulness (!!!) with no clear offer for alternatives or solutions.
• Tears in the Rain — (3/5) a fiction book. If I do read fiction, it’s almost always a sci-fi book and this one is no exception. It was decent, in my notes I wrote “not boring” :)

March

• Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha — (3/5)another random library run-in. The packaging and tone of the language was a bit out of my taste range (too much “bro”) but it contained lots of useful information on diet, exercising, and plenty of myth busting. Recommended if you are a younger male in your early 20s looking for better way to live, exercise, and live.
• The Smartest Kids in the World — (4/5) now that my kids are approaching the school age, this seemed relevant. The book summarizes and highlights educational differences between US schools and schools in other countries. It matched my experiences coming from Lithuania and comparing the schools here to the schools over there. The US education is less focused on sciences, with one clear reason why: US does not have this one single exam that will separate haves from have nots. You can get a decent but not great SAT and still get into good school and get a good job. In many other countries, you don’t max out that one single exam in your senior year and the top universities and jobs are out of your reach. So much time and focus is spent on that exam that very little time is left for sports, and other activities.
• Designing Bots: Creating Conversational Experiences — (3/5) meh, it was OK, very shallow overview of what’s important in the bot design.
• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety — (4/5) I knew nothing about this accident, it was a very cool story that led me to more research into this area. Very entertaining read.
• The Signal and The Noise — (4/5) this book was on my to read list for years and I was happy to finally read it. It did not disappoint as the author gave me some food for thought and ideas for validating ML models and just in general provided great thoughts around modeling concepts. Also, decent amount of the book talks about sports betting.
• Kids are worth it! — (5/5) high rating as I really loved this book. It’s full of advice on how to empower your kids, how to treat them with respect, and help them grow up as independent thinkers that work through their issues. I thought the advice in the book was superb.
• The Cartel — (5/5) it’s a fiction book, but pretty much all the stories are from the real life, juts connected in a fake timeline. I have read many non fiction books on cartels and the topic interests me greatly. This book presents the inner thinking of cartel players and various examples of how they go about their business. If you want to blame governments for war on drugs, you should read this book and see how multifaceted the problem is. By the way, in my opinion, the consumer does not get enough blame for all the deaths, hardships and financial drain the whole system has put on different people.

April

• Be Excellent at Anything — (4/5) very dense book. Pretty much every common self-development advice you hear is in this book, condensed but explained thoroughly enough.
• Mars Rover Curiosity — (3/5) another random run-in in the library and I decided to take a look. It was fascinating to see how immense a project such as a rover lander is. The amount of code, teams, coordination that goes into it was beyond my wildest imaginations. I don’t think NASA gets enough due for their multiple successful trips to Mars. And not only going to Mars, but actually surviving and operating on the surface. Incredible!

May/June/July/August

No books! Again, it’s not uncommon for me to do zero reading during the summer days. I spent more time outdoors and going on trips, etc so the books don’t have the same pull on me as they do in the other times of the year. May is a bit of anomaly, where usually I still put in a decent amount of reading in, but our family was moving that month and the time was limited.

September

• Boomtown — (4/5) a completely random pick up based on the recommendation I heard on a basketball podcast. The book is about the origins and history of Oklahoma City, and OKC Thunder are a part of it, so it fit my interest area where history and basketball intersect. It was a very entertaining read and a great diversion from my usual, more serious, reads.
• Piano Book for Adult Beginners — (5/5) this summer I decided to teach myself how to play piano and this book was my guide. It’s excellent and I learned a ton. I could not recommend this book enough for the beginners out there.
• The Social Engineer’s Playbook — (3/5) a book on computer/infrastructure security, describing a mix of techniques and tools for breaking into computer networks/infrastructure, etc. It was decent, a bit shallow, but interesting never less.
• The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed — (5/5) investing was a big theme with me this summer/fall (it replaced last year’s gambling interest). It’s amazing how a book written so long time ago is still relevant and accurate. The book taught me to avoid doing my own investing for average results, and rely on tools like betterment.com that pick index funds. But it gave me ideas and pointers for areas that I wanted to explore outside of index funds.
• Piano Lessons For Beginners — (1/5) absolutely terrible. I want to mention this book for one reason: advice potential buyers against purchasing it. It reads and feels like something that was assembled by an ML algorithm.

October

• Billion Dollar Whale — (4/5) not as good as Bad Blood, but close in its style, a true story of a current event that’s still developing: a single person fooling the Malaysian government and spending billion+ of dollars on personal projects, interests, and parties. Very interesting how one big beneficiary was the Hollywood industry and Leonardo DiCaprio specifically. I know nothing will happen to Leo in terms of being held responsible in the scheme as he was not directly involved, but some sort of accountability needs to be in place if one takes millions of stolen dollars for their own movie projects.

November

No books

December

Pro .NET Benchmarking — (4/5) a computer science book that discusses the best practices of running benchmarks for software programs. I loved the stats portion of it. Overall a really good and informative book.

The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for The Thoughtful Investor — (4/5) another investment book that highlighted numerous aspects that are important when investing with money, especially in stocks. It was very enjoyable to read, split into easy to digest bits, each bit valuable on its own but also interconnected into a large theme of how one builds a mindset and a system for a successful investing approach. Highly recommended.

That’s the list! I am happy to see the reading habit continue and I am excited to find out what 2020 will bring.