I decided to make a small analysis of the books that I read in 2021. This might be interesting to revisit my habits and the content that I consumed over time.
Metrics for 2021
- Goals of books to read: 26
- Quantity of books read: 17
- Achievement rate: 65%
- Average rating: 3.68
- List of all the books:
- “The Bogleheads’” by Taylor Larimore
- “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien
- “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari
- “Shadow and Bone” by Leigh Bardugo
- “Faça fortuna com ações” by Décio Bazin
- “Show Your Work!” by Austin Kleon
- “Fluent Python” by Luciano Ramalho
- “Atomic Habits” by James Clear
- “The Book of Why” by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie
- “Google BigQuery: The Definitive Guide” by Valliappa Lakshmanan, Jordan Tigani
- “Siege and Storm” by Leigh Bardugo
- “The Enterprise Big Data Lake” by Alex Gorelik
- “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” by Martin Kleppmann
- “The Emotionally Intelligent Manager” by David R. Caruso, Peter Salovey
- “Business Intelligence Guidebook” by Rick Sherman
- “HBR Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman, Annie Mckee, Bill George, Herminia Ibarra
- “Fundamentals of Business Intelligence” by Wilfried Grossmann, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma
Summary
The initial plan was to read one book every two weeks. As you can see, I didn’t get too close. Only 65% of the goal was achieved. There were some months that I went very well (like January and October), but what affected me was the months that I didn’t continue with the habits (like March, June, July, November) or I did keep reading, but it was a long/big book:
When I analyze the areas by each book read (I’m using my classification here), is possible to notice a few things:
- I went for several technical books, related to a programming language and computer science.
- I read a good quantity of “self-help” books, which I believe that help me to create better habits this year.
- Finance and fantastic fiction are close in the third area.
I always give a personal rating for every book that I read, and here is the result comparing them:
- Good news: I didn’t read any book that is 1 star (or at least, I didn’t finish since I would prefer just drop it instead of wasting time).
- The rank that I mostly read was 5, although the average was far from that.
Top books for 2021
The main readings that changed me this year were:
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The big ideas behind reliable, scalable, and maintainable systems.
- Author: Martin Kleppmann
- Area: Technology
- Personal Review: Excellent book, has some solid elements about scalable systems. In my opinion, this content here is essential for anyone that works with big platforms (from data engineers to DevOps).
- Google BigQuery: The Definitive Guide
- Author: Valliappa Lakshmanan, Jordan Tigani
- Area: Technology
- Personal Review: This book is more specific to the Google Cloud Platform environment, especially to talk about BigQuery, which is a data warehouse tool. I learned a lot with the content and was also interested to learn how the platform works under the hood.
- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
- Author: James Clear
- Area: Self-help
- Personal Review: There was a lot of hype over this one, so I decided to take a chance and read it. In my opinion, the content of the book is not that ‘life changing’, but it provides some solid advice and “frameworks” to build better habits. I recommend it because everyone has a habit to develop or even eliminate, and this book shows several practical steps on how to assist you with that.
- The Bogleheads’: Guide to Investing
- Author: Taylor Larimore
- Area: Finance
- Personal Review: Great book changed a lot of my vision about investment. The main focus here is to make finance “boring” and “simple”, to avoid making several choices which eventually leads to losing time and to the worst performance in the market. The advice here is just ideal for someone that doesn’t plan to have your life dedicated to investments but wants to have a solid return. The only critic that I have is that the books are way too focused in the US. This might be the objective, but I would like to see other stuff beyond those markets, like for international investors.
- The Hobbit: Middle-earth Universe
- Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
- Area: Fantastic Fiction
- Personal Review: I wanted to start with the “Tolkien Universe”, but without going too much into details and all the books from it. So, I start with a small step, with “The Hobbit”. I loved the book on how the author builds the relationship between the several characters. I got passionate when I ended the book to continue later on with the “Lord of the Rings”, in the future.
I read some other great books on the year (like “Fluent Python” from Luciano Ramalho and “Clean Code” from Robert C. Martin), but I decided to bring a small list and recommend only my top 5 books.
Next step
A few key learnings after this analysis are:
- I want to implement a few more metrics, like days reading each book or subcategories.
- Keep reading 26 books in the whole year, does make no sense to increase this value right now.
- Go back to the e-reader/paper: I have created this habit to read using the desktop/tablet/phone, while I noticed that this didn’t help me to read the books since the light in the screen felt a bit annoying over the time reading it. So, I intend to use something less “irritating”, like paper, to facilitate the habit and reading a bit more.
- I want to read other types of books, beyond only technology elements, like history, politics, philosophy, math, and others. I would like to see more of the classics of humanity also.