Vegard Stikbakke

Books I read in 2023

January 6, 2024

I read 11 books this year, slightly cheating since I read the last 20 pages of Poor Charlie’s Almanack on the morning of January 1. In total 4488 pages.

I would recommend all of the books in bold. That turned out to be almost all of them. Below the list I’ll group the books and talk a bit about each book.

• How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future (2022) by Vaclav Smil
• A Promised Land (2020) by Barack Obama
• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (2020) by Nadia Eghbal
• Crafting Interpreters (2021) by Robert Nystrom
• Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (1994) by Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (2012) by Jon Gertner
• Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (2000) by Michael A. Hiltzik
• A Mind At Play (2017) by Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman
• Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck
• American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger (2005) by Charles T. Munger

History of technology

• Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (1994) by Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos. This was sadly underwhelming, I ended up slogging through it. It has a really high ranking on Goodreads (4.4), and several people have said it’s one of their favorite books. I found it to be long winded and lacking a good narrative throughout. It would have benefited from better editing. Ben Rich’s was the director of Lockheed from 1975 to 1991, and Lockheed developed stealth airplanes that were crucial in the Cold War. So it was still interesting to learn about Lockheed and the stealth airplanes they developed. Crucially they did this with a capable and nimble team unimpeded by bureacracy, and I think this is what makes it popular. A lot of this thinking has clearly influenced a lot of tech companies.
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (2012) by Jon Gertner. This is a must read if you’re into the history of tech! Super interesting, very well narrated, about the research lab that all big companies dream of emulating. Bell Telephone was a monopoly, the only (?) phone company in the US, which made a lot of money. Luckily they used a lot of the profits to fund basic research at Bell Labs. So much of the technology that the modern world relies on was invented at Bell Labs. To list some out of a long list:
  • The transistor
  • Laser
  • Quality control theory
  • Information theory
  • Computer music (in 1957!) and digital computer art (1962!)
  • The fast Fourier transform (FFT)
  • Unix
• Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (2000) by Michael A. Hiltzik. Not as gripping as The Idea Factory, but still enjoyable. Xerox failed to commercialize their innovations, but PARC invented so many things we take for granted in computers, and many went on to be crucial at Apple and Microsoft.
  • the graphical user interface (GUI)
  • WYSIWYG text editing
  • object-oriented programming (OOP)
  • Ethernet

Programming

• Crafting Interpreters (2021) by Robert Nystrom. Highly recommended if you’re a programmer! It walks through implementing a programming language using two different approaches and languages. Good prose with fun illustrations and analogies, which makes it extra fun to read. I followed along by typing in all the code. This is a long book (865 pages) so that was time consuming, but really educational.

Biographies

• A Promised Land (2020) by Barack Obama. I honestly don’t remember much of this. I listened to it as an audiobook, maybe that’s why? It covers his campaign and his first term as President.
• A Mind At Play (2017) by Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman. Great read. Biography about Claude Shannon, the mathematician who came up with information theory while at Bell Labs. Brilliant and very strange guy.

Other non fiction

• How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future (2022) by Vaclav Smil. You should really read this if you want to know about climate change and what is actually required to transition away from carbons. It’s very dense, but very interesting, and just ~250 pages. Chock full of numbers and sentences like “In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds.” Smil has a holistic systems thinking view of the world which seems obviously correct. Again, read this.

Reading Vaclav Smil's new book How the World Really Works. Great book. Very effective at conveying how thoroughly dependent we are on fossil fuels.

— Vegard Stikbakke (@vegardstikbakke) February 4, 2023

• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (2020) by Nadia Eghbal. Recommended reading if you’re a programmer. About open source and the various models of open source projects that exist.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger (2005) by Charles T. Munger. This was just re-released by Stripe Press. They keep publishing bangers. Essentially a collection of speeches by Charlie Munger, the lesser known partner of Warren Buffett. Munger is well known in certain circles for his focus on mental models. He has a lot of interesting takes on “the psychology of misjudgment”, essentially biases, which he claims he’s used to good effect over the years. And his (Berkshire Hathaway’s) record speaks for itself.

“If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have mental models in your head.”

Fiction

Two books by prominent American novelists. I really enjoyed both of those, although I’m not sure I will reread any of them.

I’d been wanting to read something by Philip Roth, who is one of the great American writers of the 20th century. This turned out to be the first book in a trilogy. I’m definitely going to read the next one.

• Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck. I’ve had this in my bookshelf for a few years. Short and heart warming and sad.
• American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth. Very funny and interesting.

Just posted my annual roundup of the books I read last year.

Some tech history, some biographies, some fiction, and a programming book.

Don't read Skunk Works.

Do read Vaclav Smil, you'll be more informed on climate change. pic.twitter.com/6ymMzMSkwV

— Vegard Stikbakke (@vegardstikbakke) January 6, 2024