📚 Books I read in October 2024
📚 Books I read in October 2024
A new issue of the monthly segment about books I read. October was all about non-fiction books. Find your next read in the article!
Here comes the Monthly segment on the books I read the previous month. October was almost entirely dedicated to non-fiction books, with some caveats that you'll understand as you read through the reviews.
I also have a special note about a book I didn't fully read, but it's still worth mentioning. You'll understand why when you get there.
As usual, I cover the books in the order I finished them during the month, and you'll find affiliate links in case you'd like to get a copy of one of them.
Happy reading!
📙 Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère
380 pages, First Published: August 27, 2020
I recently realized Carrère is an author whom the more I read from, the more I appreciate; that's why I started the month with another of his books.
This one is set on a topic I found engaging and fun to read about: after having practiced meditation and yoga for decades, Carrère signed up for a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in the middle of nowhere. The book is supposed to mix a chronicle of that retreat and the author's reflections on the practice of yoga and meditation.
This subject resonated with me at a personal level. Though I haven't done the 10-day retreat, I am very familiar with the concept. I know people who've done it multiple times, and I've been practicing meditation on and off for quite a few years.
That's why I found this small, smiling, and subtle book about yoga—as the author himself repeatedly calls it throughout the book—particularly enjoyable. I love it when my favorite authors write about topics I'm familiar with and do so in a way that makes me see them from new perspectives.
A few pages into the book, things start veering off track. A dramatic event forces Carrère to leave the retreat after a couple of days, and we follow him through how he deals with the situation and its aftermath. Among other things, Carrère is hospitalized, goes through electroshock, and is diagnosed with Type 2 bipolar disorder.
Not exactly what you signed up for when you bought the book.
Though the book's tone and subject shifted significantly from its beginnings, I became increasingly engaged in the reading. Carrère has an impressive ability to discuss deep, personal topics in a way that is simultaneously self-aware, pretentious, hilarious, and fascinating. All this was done unapologetically while sharing potentially embarrassing aspects of his life with a broad public. That takes courage and a total devotion to the art of writing.
As with the book I read last month from the same author1, I struggled to define its genre yet again, and I keep defaulting to literary non-fiction, if that is even a thing.
There is something in his style that I profoundly resonate with. I find it impressive and unique, always floating meters above mediocrity, yet something about it eludes me. I still cannot put my finger on how exactly Carrère achieves this result. To figure it out, I'll need to read more from him.
You have been warned!
📘 Free Time by Jenny Blake
Free Time by Jenny Blake
336 pages, First Published: March 22, 2022
I must admit I had very high expectations for this book as it has blurbs from two authors I follow and respect: Oliver Burkeman and Cal Newport.
Unfortunately, as the expectations were high, the encounter with reality failed to meet them. This is an OK book, with some parts that are undoubtedly good. But it doesn't pass the bar for being a great book, at least not for me as the audience.
Let's start with some facts.
This book aims to help business owners who feel overly busy and overwhelmed find a better balance while maximising impact. The premises are great, and I think there is clearly an audience for it: people who are drowning in the flow of daily obligations and have no idea where to start to help themselves out of it.
It follows a very simple and intuitive structure, divided into three alliterative parts: Align, Design, and Assign.
The first part, Align, is all about preparing your mind to work differently. It involves understanding your values, energy, and strengths. The core idea is that your work should align as much as possible with all three elements. If that's not the case, you'll need to devise strategies to phase it out.
Part two, Design, focuses on designing processes and systems to streamline your work and reduce friction as much as possible. At the core of this section is the idea of building what Blake calls a delightfully tiny team: a small team—2 to 4 persons—that you trust and can work as autonomously as possible. Ideally, this team should be part-time, as the author believes in working about 20 hours a week as the ideal target.
The final part, Assign, is about delegation. How to avoid becoming a bottleneck yourself by capturing all tasks, assigning clear owners, and having clear expectations on when things will be done.
Having read almost all of Newport and other foundational books in the space, such as Essentialism and Company of One, I found a lot of repetition in Free Time and some truly novel ideas.
The introduction of the time-to-revenue ratio (TtRr) metric as a better KPI than pure revenues or a traditional PnL was something I found constructive, as it aligns well with the way I intend to structure my professional life. Similarly, I found the Free time escape velocity concept and questionnaire insightful. Funnily enough, both those topics were introduced and, I'd say, glossed over in the book's introduction and rarely referenced in the main sections.
Another concept that caught my attention, present through sections 2 and 3 of the book, is the idea of a Delightfully tiny team mentioned earlier. Solopreneurs tend to believe they need to do everything by themselves, and I'm no exception. Blake argues that the alternative to that is not to have a bunch of full-time employees and have to accept the headaches of payrolls. Instead, she suggests surrounding yourself with a few trusted part-time contractors. People with a high degree of autonomy and experience that will require little handholding to get things done. As the CEO, you should focus on creating systems to reduce friction and enable them to do the right thing in the right way at the right time.
From my perspective, this is the main idea in the book. It is not completely novel, as already made popular by Tim Ferris in a 4-hour workweek, but articulated in a way that helped me see better how to make it a reality.
Lastly, though I appreciate books with additional resources, these were advertised too often throughout the book. I sometimes felt I was reading a free ebook downloaded via a lead magnet rather than a book I had paid for.
This might be considered normal in certain circles and countries, but I found it mildly annoying.
Do I recommend the book? It depends.
This could be a good starting point if you have limited exposure to the literature on the topic. If you're already comfortably on top of your game, you might be better off consuming it via an online summary.
📕 Vallée du silicium by Alain Damasio
Vallée du Silicium by Alain Damasio
336 pages, First Published: April 1, 2024
Another French book to close October's list. This one is from an author I was unfamiliar with until I read La Vallée du Silicium (Silicon Valley). Alain Damasio is primarily a Sci-fi author, but with this book, he tried something different: it's a collection of seven essays followed by a short sci-fi fiction novel. Both essays and the novel touch on the same themes of excess dependency on technology in our daily lives and how this impacts social interaction and the sense of self.
La Vallée di Silicium can inscribe itself in the techno-critique tradition.
As someone interested in technology's impact on culture and society, Damasio visited Silicon Valley at multiple stages and engaged with local representatives of the high-tech industry and iconic areas of San Francisco. He mixes an essay on the “new” Apple headquarters, the Ring, and how it mimics the nature of the company that operates within its walls — A closed circle that wants to give the impression of openness — with explorations of the Tenderloin neighborhood in SF — famously known for hosting a big community of homeless and drug addicts, just a block away from some of the most iconic high-tech headquarters downtown.
He covers the hidden implications of self-driving cars, the nature of life that only exists through their connections in the virtual world—from social media to more advanced AR/VR realities—and the life of software engineers working on advanced AI models.
His perspective is profoundly French and European, placing him miles away from the dominant techno-optimism narrative in the Bay Area while also being significantly different from shallow luddite approaches that just believe every machine is evil and needs to be destroyed.
The style can sometimes sound pedantic, as he likes to employ nontrivial words, often even introducing his own words generated through contraction, assonance, or superposition of existing terms. As this is the first book I read from Damasio, I can't tell whether this is the style he usually employs through his fiction books or if it's a very deliberate choice, given the nature of the book and the subject it covers. It references philosophers who have explored the intersection of technology and society, with particular attention on the American context, and he builds on those same ideas. He doesn't try to make them accessible to the masses. This book is the opposite of divulgation if that's even a thing.
In a world where content is becoming increasingly average and shallow, as machines regurgitate and simplify whatever content they're fed, this book reminds us that writing can have two purposes that are not at odds with each other.
On the one hand, the goal of writing is to be understood. Thus, there is no point in writing unnecessarily cryptic texts. At the same time, writing should promote thinking and reflection. It's hard to achieve that with generic language and short tweets.
I ignore if this was Damasio's intention, but it's undoubtedly my interpretation after finishing the book.
Finally, the short Sci-Fi novel at the end of the book has a disarming Black-mirror taste. After reading his reports of what he's been observing in the Valley, the scenario he presents in the dramatic novel feels very likely to become reality just a few years down the road.
It is definitely recommended to anyone who is interested in sci-fi and technology in general, as long as you can stand the mental and semantic exploration of an educated French intellectual who isn't afraid to make the reader feel uncomfortable at times.
Modern C++ Programming Cookbook, 3rd Edition by Marius Bancila
Modern C++ Programming Cookbook, 3rd Edition by Marius Bancila
818 pages, First Published: February 29, 2024
In September, a representative from Packt contacted me to ask if I'd be interested in reviewing this book. I found this an exciting opportunity to explore, and I accepted. For full transparency, I am not being paid for this review. I only received a free PDF copy of the book to review.
Though I haven't been actively using C++ in the last decade, I enjoyed reviewing the book. It's not a book you want to read in a single session and then put aside, but rather a reference book you will consult when needed. That's why I only read a few interesting chapters and focused on the structure and clarity of the explanations.
As a non-expert in modern C++, I found that the book does an excellent job at a few things:
It thoroughly explains the underlying standards and what has evolved through different revisions.
The code examples are not trivial, yet easy to understand and relate to
It covers different revisions of the C++ standard, with the main focus being put on C++11, C++17, C++20, and even the most recent C++23
It is aimed at experienced C++ programmers, not beginners, and I'd say particularly those who want to take full advantage of modern C++ constructs and capabilities.
If you've been using “old-style” C++ and would like to master its more modern incarnations, this book will surely help you get there.
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