My Favourite Books of 2020

I’ve been trying to read more this year, and due to getting stuck inside for most of the year I think I’ve been pretty successful. I’ll use this post to keep track of some of my absolute favourite discoveries from the year.

Maybe this should be called “My favourite books I read in 2020”, since I don’t think any of these books were published this year. Alas.

Rememberance of Earth’s Past Trilogy

(Liu Cixin)

While The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest and Death’s End had their flaws and relied on some leniency from the reader in telling a coherent or believable story, I really enjoyed this series. Long-form works of science fiction spanning multiple centuries are some of my favourite reads (I can also recommend Aurora, The Foundation Trilogy and The Mars Trilogy). The story warps and twists so much throughout its ~1500 pages that there is really nothing in common between the start and end of the story beyond a few key characters.

The Earth Abides

(George R. Stewart)

I read this in March as the entire world was falling face-first into a global pandemic. While it didn’t make me feel any better, it was a really fascinating read which kept my mind occupied during those anxiety-filled first few weeks. This book turns 71 years old this year and its clear that its had a huge impact on modern post-apocalyptic fiction. I really like the dark, realistic angle that Stewart took when describing collapse of civilization and the collapse of modern civilization and the slow, anticlimactic loss of the final traces of the modern world.

Stories of Your Life and Others

(Ted Chiang)

I went into this collection of short stories without knowing that Story of Your Life was the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival, so it was a really weird experience to realize a few pages in that I knew how this particular story would end (for what its worth, I found the written verson a lot more enjoyable than the movie). Personal highlights for me were Hell is the Absence of God and Liking What You See: a Documentary.

Deep

(James Nestor)

I don’t read a ton of non-fiction, but I found this book completely fascinating cover-to-cover. Its not super long and it is the product of an immense amount of research and work by the author. Having never thought to much about freediving, I was suddenly obssessed and found myself timing my own breath holding along with the Author.

Misery - Stephen King

(Stephen King)

This book was really, really scary. I was amazed at how stressed, anxious and uncomfortable I became while reading, but at the same time I couldn’t put this book down. I can’t recommend this enough if you’re looking for a dark, disturbing and disgusting book.

As an aside - I also read The Stand this year and contrary to its critical acclaim and high ratings, I thought it was really, really bad. I’m going to be taking a long break from Stephen King books.

Bad Blood

(John Carreyrou)

I didn’t hear much of the Theranos scandal while it was happening (not entirely my fault - I was 7 when the company was founded and 19 when the scandal broke) so it was great to have a complete history contained in one book. The whole story is pretty unbelievable and it paints a wild image of the kind of fraud and dishonesty that the hyper-competitive world of venture-funded startups can inspire.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

(Martin Kleppmann)

I picked this book up on the recommendation from some co-workers and started reading one chapter at a time when I had some free time. Kleppmann managed to pack an immense amount of useful information into this pretty compact book by both assuming a certain level of background knowledge from the reader and passing over details or specifics. As a relatively new engineer on a data engineering team, I think that I was the ideal audience for this book and it filled in a lot of holes in my existing knowledge.