 

Book and Audio book recommendations from Me and my Team


booksDiscussing good book (and audiobook) recommendations here is my recommendations, and those added by my team at work.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

What really happens in a disaster, people help each other, but there is still plenty of disagreement. set in the near future.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

As the book starts the main character is dead, but then his retribution starts. The title refers to a Unix Daemon…

Ready Player One by Ernst Cline

When online game worlds become the world. with a nostalgic tour through the game worlds of the past. Read the book in preparation for the Film next year.

Mark Sutton

Listen to This by Alex Ross (Recommend Audio Book)

Music correspondent of the New Yorker, accessible insights into how to listen to music from Bjork to Beethoven.

Salka Valka by Haldor Laxness

Sean Wiles

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Earth is dying. Thousands of workers, who live in the vast caves beneath Mars, mine the precious elements that will make the planet habitable. They are Earth’s only hope. Until the day Darrow learns that it’s a lie. Mars has been habitable – and inhabited – for generations. Darrow disguises himself and infiltrates their society, intent on taking them down. But the surface is a battlefield – and Darrow isn’t the only one with an agenda.

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, Michael Hofmann (translator)

Berlin, 1940. The city is paralysed by fear. But one man refuses to be scared. Otto, an ordinary German living in a shabby apartment block, tries to stay out of trouble under Nazi rule. But when he discovers his only son has been killed fighting at the front he’s shocked into an extraordinary act of resistance and starts to drop anonymous postcards attacking Hitler across the city. If caught, he will be executed.
Soon this silent campaign comes to the attention of ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich, and a murderous game of cat-and-mouse begins. Whoever loses, pays with their life.

Wool by Hugh Howey

An epic story of survival at all odds and one of the most anticipated books of the year. In a ruined and hostile landscape, in a future few have been unlucky enough to survive, a community exists in a giant underground silo. Inside, men and women live an enclosed life full of rules and regulations, of secrets and lies. To live, you must follow the rules. But some don’t. These are the dangerous ones; these are the people who dare to hope and dream, and who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple and deadly. They are allowed outside. Jules is one of these people. She may well be the last.

Ender’s Game by: Orson Scott Card

Ender Wiggin is Battle School’s latest recruit. His teachers reckon he could become a great leader. And they need one. A vast alien force is headed for Earth, its mission: the annihilation of all human life. Ender could be our only hope. But first he must survive the most brutal military training program in the galaxy…

Foundation by: Isaac Asimov

Long after Earth was forgotten, a peaceful and unified galaxy took shape, an Empire governed from the majestic city-planet of Trantor. The system worked, and grew, for countless generations. Everyone believed it would work forever. Everyone except Hari Seldon.

Matt Kemp

Non-fiction:
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L Shirer

Excellent account of the Nazi regime taken from Nuremberg Trial papers and interviews, letters and telegrams during the war from the Nazi and Allied vaults. Warning LONG!

D-Day Through German Eyes (1 & 2) by Holger Eckhertz

Excellent account of D-Day from a German perspective, via interviews with German troops and narrative.

I have many more war related ones I’ve read if you’re interested.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Excellent run through of scientific history and discovery.

Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings by Peter Kropotkin.

A little hard going, but interesting views on society and anarchism.

Fiction:

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

Fantastic re-telling/re-interpretation of a lot of short Norse mythologies. Good fun

Enchantress (The Everman Saga Book 1) by James Maxwell

Some excellent fantasy reading and part one of a decent series.

The Odyssey by Homer; Alexander Pope

The classics are the best.

Ice Station by Matthew Reilly

1st in a series of absolutely mad crazy-paced action novels. Reilly books barely leave the action for a split second and something to read if you want a break from something heavier.

Nigel Worthy

Some I’ve enjoyed this year ………

Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood  (or anything by Murakami)

Ted Chiang – Stories of your life and Others

Neil Gaiman – The Ocean at the end of the Lane.

Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita

Kazuo Ishiguro – The buried Giant

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment, The Karamazov Brothers

Michael Faber – The book of small things

William Gibson – All his books!

Claire North – The first fifteen lives of Harry August   (recommended to me by Jo-Anne and it’s excellent!)

Plato – The Republic

David Mitchell – The Bone Clocks

Brian Krebs – Spam Nation

Jonas Jonasson – The one hundred year old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

Bogdan Dragomir

Here’s one I know you’d enjoy Be Fast Gone Critical Management. Don’t let the title mislead you it is far from being a boring project management book.

In the same vein I would mention The Phoenix Project
A novel about Agile development methods and Dev-Ops, that is not boring.

Petros Theodorakis

I am currently reading Off to be a wizard which is fun. It’s supposed to be something between “Ready player one” and Terry Pratchett’s fantastic books. Being a comics collector since a kid (a long time ago in a galaxy NOT far far away…)

I would also recommend Rock candy mountain.

And after that I am planning to read The Four

Chris Tommasi

I missed this list but thought to add for fun…

some GREAT looking recommendations from everyone… thanks

Matt – the odyssey; wow heavy… good call but heavy dude, well done

to expand Sean’s suggestion to Asimov Foundation (presume series, great btw, thumbs up) to include the Robots Series (Caves of Steel, Naked Sun etc)

Nigel’s great nod to Gibson… and to push it forward. if adventurous then the Shadowrun novels (some hit and miss with different authors) bring a fun blending of cyberpunk and magic…

Add to that a couple of my all time favourite novels… Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Diamond Age (I could gush over this novel all day long) – but if you’re after a little less cyberpunk and more cyber then Cryptonomicon

Petros (the four looks interesting) you mentioned Pratchett – love it or hate it, it’s all good… if you do like that type of thing the BBC has recently re broadcast the radio version of Good Omens a fun collaboration with Neil Gaimen (book is better, but radio fun light listen)

talking radio

finally, if I’ve not forced this on you before then try out Patrick Rothfuss: The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle he reads it here (skip to 39:40’ish), it’s only about 10 minutes, but you need to watch, something short but fun to get your teeth into

Advertisements

One Response to Book and Audio book recommendations from Me and my Team

  1. Martin says:

    Great,thanks for the list, added your post to my book reading list 🙂

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://stuartward.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/book-recommendations/
stuartward.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-13
85191
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:EQH5TBVO2R73VQHJNBHKSOMCOPFELATQ
<urn:uuid:c6818410-c119-4f09-9bd1-a211e8a0a8bc>
2018-03-18T05:56:59Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:46DVDJCQ254T7ODPLDJXUNFP2RT3WETV
<urn:uuid:ad4ae518-3722-4d8f-bc49-87561c8e8d95>
https://stuartward.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/book-recommendations/
length
response
<urn:uuid:d5646e3f-8e7e-48d0-9165-3e82c386a989>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-148-29-247.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-13
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf