2016 was so far the best year in reading for me. I set out with (a rather naive) goal of 45 books and was able to complete 35. I know that not all books are equal but having a goal is motivating. Most of these books did come from my annual read list that I set out in Jan 2016 but I do pick up strong recommendations throughout the year.

I read 5 hardcopy books and 30 audio books.

You can view the complete list of books and authors is here.

Biographies

• Einstein
• Elon Musk

Both of these biographies are a must read. It becomes clear after reading the books that fundamentals of everlasting legacy are still hardwork, perseverence and curosity. There is no such thing as ‘genius’. Circumstances (bad, more than good) play a strong role in making strong people. Also, marriage and kids are not a barrier to productivity as most people believe. 

Space Exploration

If there is one human quality that would decide its future, it would be curosity. Curosity about what is out there, people who go after it,  and the tools, science and stories that enable it. These are very close to my heart. Col. Chris Hadfield (ex-commander of the ISS), Yuri Gagarin (first Human in space) and Adam Steltsner (team lead for EDL on Mars Curosity rover) are people to look up to in this curosity aspect. All of these books I highly recommend. 

• An astronaut’s guide to life onearth 
• Starman
• Right kind of crazy

Parenting

Problem with being an left-brained engineer is that you need to find a solution, a method to the madness, an optimal solution – any solution to almost every problem. Once you become a parent, you have a daunting challenge – a startup, maybe more than a startup! Learning from years of hardwork of other parents is my way of doing away with basics so I can add more value to my relationship with my daughter. 

Tina Payne and Dan Seigel have done a wonderful job in the first two books below. I highly recommend these books for parents with kids 3 and older. In fact, I reread whole brain child this year to refresh the ideas. Happiest toddler is for those parents who have kids younger than 4. A good book with solid advices. 

• No drama discipline
• Whole brain child
• Happiest toddler on the block

Self help and productivity

Now this is the most controversial section of any library – but its like cheesy pop songs, everyone hums them and likes them but no one admits to being a fan. Its like a guilty pleasure. Sometimes, you don’t want to miss out on something super basic and other times you just need validation for your ways. Either way, self help books are going to stay in my yearly reading lists. 

Here are the ones that I do recommend:

• Crucial conversations
• Effective engineering
• Will power instinct
• The startup of you
• The life changing habit of tidying up

Here are some that I couldn’t extract much value from. Maybe because Ive already heard the advice a lot of times (confidence gap) or I couldnt relate to it (way of the seal). Sometimes I cant invest or commit to the advice (mindfulness) and sometimes I will just sleep on it for now (rich dad)

• The confidence gap
• The way of the seal
• Mindfulness
• Rich dad poor dad

Business

• Creativity inc
• Derailed
• Zero to one
• The lean startup
• Effective executive
• Hooked

Science

Two categories from science made it to my list this year. Neuroscience and statistics (some would argue whether it is a science after all). Michio Kaku’s future of mind is a wonderful primer into knowing how far we have come to understand the most complex thing in the universe and where the research is heading. 

In better angels of our Nature, Pinker’s basic premise is that violence has declined in recent history. While the statistics presented are sound-ish, I still couldn’t come to terms with his research and day to day reality. It does give hope but …

• Better angels of our nature
• The future of mind
• Signal vs noise

Engineering

• The complete friday Q&A (iOS)
• Design and analysis of experiments
• Python data science essentials
• Data science handbook

Mike Ash is a great resource of iOS internal workings. He is a true hacker and someone I really look up to. The complete friday Q&A has great articles on internals of ObjEctive-C language and runtime as well as a lot of core Cocoa API. Some content is rather dated but is still useful in understanding a lot of concepts. 

Other books mentioned are great reference for getting started and motivated toward data science, experimentation and such things.

Politics

• Who rules the world (Noam Chomsky)

A brutal account of American imperialist and interventionist ways in south american politics and in general future of the world since WW2. It became so depressing I had to put it down. I do recommend it if you have the stomach for some hard truths!

Fiction

Dont watch the movie. Read the book. They ruined it in the movie.

• Girl on the train
• Herzog (incomplete)