📚 Books I read in May 2025

Reading is calisthenics for your brain. I hope you'll find your next read in today's article.

Jun 11, 2025

Welcome back to the monthly segment on the books I read last month.

In May, I took the plunge and decided to learn a new programming language: Rust. Well, Rust itself isn't new, as it turned 10 years old precisely this last May. It's new for me, though, and as it has been a while since I invested a significant amount of time learning a new programming language, I found the experience very refreshing.

That's why this month's book highlight is related to Rust programming.

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Before we get into the specifics of the book, a few words about why I even decided to learn Rust. There are three main reasons behind that decision:

Your brain is like a muscle, and learning new abilities and skills is like exercising. This is especially true in an era where the pervasive introduction of AI into every sphere of our lives makes it convenient to become mentally lazy. I predict that we humans will need to become more deliberate about training our brains in the upcoming years, as we have to do with physical exercise, as our jobs have become more sedentary. Learning a programming language is one way to exercise the thinking and learning brain, one that is fun as it's related to one of my interests since an early age.
My own background. In the old days, I used to do a lot of C and some C++ programming. While I keep pushing the boundaries of my abilities with web frontend development as I build CTOBox1, I find the comfort of familiarity in thinking about memory management, concurrency, and systems programming. Together with Golang, Rust offers many of the capabilities of the old days low-level programming languages while providing higher-level abstractions that make its use more efficient
The Language itself. Rust has many characteristics that make it attractive, starting with the fact that it's a compiled language with great compiler ergonomics. As I made progress through the book, I got to experience firsthand the benefits of having a picky, strict, pedantic, and highly informative compiler to assist me in the process. Seeing how informative and helpful error messages are when compiling Rust as opposed to more traditional compiled languages made me realise how that contributes to a great developer experience. But there is more to Rust than just the compiler. Its memory management model is probably what it's most known for, and it's indeed very innovative. The crates system, runtime performances, and the mature community are other aspects that make it an appealing choice for anyone interested in picking up a new programming language.

These are the reasons why, in May, I spent a significant amount of time going through the following book.

💫 Book Highlight: Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches, by David MacLeod

Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches by Dave MacLeod
425 pages, First Published: April 30th, 2024

If you're familiar with the Rust ecosystem, this book choice might surprise you. Why didn't I start with "the book", as the open-source The Rust Programming book is often referred to in the community?

The reason is simple. I intend to buy a paper version of that book as soon as the third edition comes out, as it will cover the 2024 version of Rust. The second edition, available for purchase at the moment, came out in 2022 and doesn't cover some of the important evolutions of the language happened in recent years.

Moreover, I found the format for Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches attractive, as it's targeted to readers who might want to learn the language in short sessions spread across an entire month (or more). As the book has been published in April 2024, it's decently up to date on the latest evolution of the language.

That seemed to align well with my needs, and I decided to pick this option among the many offered in the online O'Reilly catalog.

MacLeod covers a lot of ground in the book, starting from the basics of using the online Rust playground to run your first hello word, to memory management and the borrow-checker, all the way to parallel and concurrent programming leveraging multi-threading or async Rust with Tokio. He introduces every concept with clarity and an abundance of helpful analogies where needed. The language is precise and seemingly very accurate, all the while avoiding a dry prose that is often found in technical books. MacLeod's style is easy to read, engaging, and sprinkled with funny references here and there. A reminder that technical writing doesn't need to rhyme with tedious prose and pretentious language.

I found the author's choice of sticking with the online playground until very late into the book, instead of starting with the all too common introductory chapters about installing the language on your computer, to be both innovative and effective. By delaying the setup aspect, the user gets to play immediately with the language and focuses on the higher-level concepts and immediate interaction with it. This is just one of the many decisions MacLeod baked into the book that made it an effective and pleasant read for me. Concepts that are notoriously considered complex or difficult in Rust are introduced with such a high degree of clarity that makes them look surprisingly simple… at least until you need to use them in practice a few weeks later!

An important disclaimer applies to any book about programming languages, frameworks, or other technologies.

You don't learn a new programming language by reading a book about it, as you don't learn to swim by watching videos of people swimming. Learning comes with practicing the language hands-on for an extensive period. The book serves a different purpose: it helps you understand the language, its core concepts, and navigate its ecosystem. I think Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches does a great job at that, and it gets you started on the next steps.

The last two chapters in the book — 23 and 24 — introduce a total of 6 prototype projects leveraging different aspects of the language. For each project, the author proposes a handful of evolutions that are left to the reader to implement. That's part of what I'm going to do during June, as I'll focus more on practicing the language. I found the author's idea to include these unfinished projects very smart, as they offer an immediate next step for the reader, sparing them the often tedious process of figuring out a small project to build with the acquired knowledge. A process that often leads to productive procrastination, as all the energy and time go into finding just the right project to work on.

With the homework provided by MacLeod, I'll have plenty of coding work to practice the language while I come up with some great ideas on what to build with it!

📚 Other Books I Read in May 2025

📓 M: La fine e il principio, by Antonio Scurati

M: La fine e il principio by Antonio Scurati
362 pages, First Published: April 8th, 2025

I had been waiting for the fifth and last book in the M series ever since I flipped the last page of the fourth chapter, M: L'ora del destino, back in January2, and it didn't disappoint.

This tome covers the final and possibly the most decadent part of Mussolini's trajectory: from his incarceration in 1943, to the escape and the subsequent chapter as the leader of the collaborationist Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) in the north of Italy, its capitulation and Mussolini's death surrounded by an aura of mistery.

It's the period during which Mussolini has lost most, if not all, of his leadership and has become little more than a puppet controlled by his former ally, Hitler, as he is gradually losing his foothold against the Allied forces. Poverty and misery are the face of Italy as the internal resistance plays a key role in fighting against the German forces that are driving most military operations in the country.

An important part of the book is dedicated to the reconstruction of what happened in the last few days of the RSI and Mussolini's life. As is usual with Scurati's books, all the events are thoroughly documented, and when that's not possible, he's always very clear about the uncertainty surrounding the events. That's the case for Mussolini's execution, as there have not been any official witnesses or declarations ever made on how that took place exactly.

The book closes with an impactful last scene, which is purely the product of invention, as Scurati's disclaimer at the beginning of the book announced. It's a monologue pronounced by Mussolini's hanging dead body in Piazzale Loreto in Milan.

It's how the author imagines the way the former dictator would bid farewell to his country and history.

Here is an excerpt from it.

And so, he will return. You will sever that rope, but the corpse will remain hanging forever from the pylon of this gas station, unfinished, ready for use, cursed and cursing. He will return with every bad harvest, in the unbreathable dog days of August, in the sadness of the sun setting towards the west, in the melancholy of a new century that promises nothing and, for that very reason, keeps its promise.
He will return in the pathetic bronze busts, passed down from father to son, displayed with coquettish boasts in bourgeois living rooms, but, above all, he will return in the base life, reduced to its humors – rancor, resentment, betrayal – and in its greatest passion, fear.
He will return every time you invoke the strong man that you are not nor ever will be, the Leader capable of guiding you by standing behind you, fanning your discontent, every time on the brink of darkness you will whimper for a bedtime story – one more, daddy, one more, please. He will return and will always repeat the same old song to you: I am the people, the people are me, and to hell with all the rest; evil does not exist, there are only evil men with their evil deeds; reality is not complex, it is simple, reality is a child, all problems are reduced to just one, that problem to an enemy, the enemy to a foreigner, the foreigner to an invader. And the foreign enemy invader can be killed, must be killed, a shot to the head and one to the heart.3

And with this, the pentalogy is over.

I deeply admire Antonio Scurati for the work he's done and the results I was blessed to read. I've already decided I'll re-read these 5 books regularly and as a reminder, as the 2020s carry too many similarities with the 1920s.

📘 Dans les brumes de Capelans, by Olivier Norek

Dans les brumes de Capelans by Olivier Norek
428 pages, First Published: April 7, 2024

Since discovering Olivier Norek in February this year, I've been reading most of his crime novels4. Dans les brumes de Capelans features the comeback of Victor Coste, the protagonist of the Code 93 trilogy written by Norek between 2013 and 2016.

Written in 2021, Dans les brumes de Capelans takes place mainly on the remote French island of Saint-Pierre, in the Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon archipelago. Apparently, Norek lived on the island for a couple of months as he was working on the book.

After leaving his police department in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, Coste is now working for the witness protection program in the French government, located on the remote island of Saint-Pierre, where he ensures the protection of witnesses or victims before they move on with their new identity and life.

His quiet life on the island takes a turn when he's asked to protect Anna, the victim of a serial kidnapper and killer recently freed from the house where he had been held captive for a decade. I won't spoil what happens after that, but I can guarantee you it makes for a pretty good read.

Once again, Norek defies the false dichotomy of good and evil and paints a more nuanced portrait of criminals and victims. All that was delivered in an unusual location I didn't even know existed until I read the book.

As I mentioned in previous articles, Norek is an author to follow as he has a lot of interesting things to say, has the discipline of a historian, and the style of great authors.

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