As per 2020, some things I read in 2021 (albeit written up nearly three years later), along with some brief opinions/recommendations.

I still wasn’t travelling much in 2021, which disrupted when/how I usually read, and this left me in a bit of a reading funk. But despite the delay I figured I’d catch up, and I definitely enjoyed looking back!

All categorisations are approximate at best and will probably cause some kind of contention.

Fiction

• Lisa McGee’s Erin’s Diary: An Official Derry Girls Book - I loved Derry Girls - I didn’t get anywhere near as much out of the book, but it was still fun to read
• Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War
• Steven Hopstaken and Melissa Prusi’s Stoker’s Wilde West
• Peter F. Hamilton’s The Confederation Handbook - The Night’s Dawn trilogy was great - I’m not sure I got so much from reading this several years later, but it did remind me that I’d like to revisit the series at some point
• Yoon Ha Lee’s Phoenix Extravagant
• Rosie Claverton’s The Amy Lane Mysteries (1-5) - very fun - boy meets girl, girl is super hacker, they fight crime - I devoured the series
• T. Kingfisher’s A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking - Bob the sourdough - really enjoyable YA fun
• Terry Miles’s Rabbits

Non-Fiction

Life

• Derek Sivers’s Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing, Your Music and People: creative and considerate fame and How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion - I really enjoy Sivers’s books - short, to the point, but highly thought-provoking
• Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge - a little bit “one idea and a lot of talking around it”, but in a good way
• Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights - I don’t usually go in for (auto)biographies, but my wife recommended it, and it was both fun and insightful
• Chris Wayne’s How I Stopped Being a Fatty (On the Outside) - I worked with Chris at Canonical so picked this up, and it’s a pragmatic and thoughtful - while also funny - tale of his weight-loss journey, with interesting points and considerations

Work

• Mike Julian’s Practical Monitoring: Effective Strategies for the Real World - interesting thoughts on monitoring and approaches
• Aviv Ben-Yosef’s The Tech Executive Operating System: Creating an R&D Organization That Moves the Needle
• Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success - great read with many thoughtful points - particularly about the nuances of gender and other considerations
• Giles Turnbull’s The agile comms handbook
• Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing

Radio

• Steve Nichols’s Stealth Antennas - having finally started doing more with amateur radio this was great for some thoughts on getting an antenna up without going for a whole mega mast setup

Misc

• Timothy Clifton’s Gravity: A Very Short Introduction - having done a year of undergrad physics, I had the basic idea, but this is a really nice overview and summary
• Magic: The Gathering : The Pocket Players’ Guide - I pored over this in the late 90s when I played Magic at school, and it was enjoyable to revisit - interesting stories of how the game first evolved