November 2022 Reading

This month, I read five and a half books.  I probably shouldn’t count the half, but it was a slog, so I want to reward myself.

 

Nonfiction first:  Continuing my education in preparation for helping Brent write a book on Incident Response required me to read two more books.  One of them was Site Reliability Engineering:  How Google Runs Production Systems edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy.  Some parts of the book were more relevant to what I needed than others, but it was a good introduction to a way of thinking that I needed.  The book is a collection of essays, so, naturally, some are better than others, but overall, the writers are engaging, competent, and even sometimes funny.

 

The Practice Of Cloud System Administration by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, and Christina J. Hogan (note:  I know two of those people in person and the other’s spouse.  They are lovely.) is essentially an extension of their work on system administration to keep up with the times.  As I said about them last time, they write clearly and well.  I am not qualified to evaluate their technical expertise, but I have every confidence in their good sense and their abilities to create systems that work for machines, businesses, and even the humans that have to work with the machines and businesses.

 

Having dealt with my responsibilities, I got to turn to fiction.  I finished the Finishing School series by Gail Carriger (I also know her in person and she, too, is wonderful!), polishing off Waistcoats and Weaponry and Manners and Mutiny.  The books did exactly what I wanted them to do:  they amused me and fed my need for satisfying outcomes.  Bumbersnoot is still my favorite.

 

It took me a while to get around to reading Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People.  I think it was the title.  The book is laugh-out-loud funny despite being about a bank robber and a hostage situation with a theme of suicide woven throughout.  It, too, has a highly satisfying ending.  Two thumbs up.

 

Now about that half.  This is the Year of Don Quijote.  I finished reading it in both English and Spanish earlier in the year, which meant I could pursue side quests.  One of those was to read Cervantes’s earlier work, La Galatea.  I got it in English, because reading in Spanish is still a laborious process for me.  Turns out, so is reading in English when a work is translated by someone who should be—I’m trying to weed the violence out of my language, so bear with me here—sent to Hawaii forever.  It was horrible.  If I had been enthralled by the story, I might have persisted, but I confess that pastoral is not my favorite genre ever.  I would kind of like the literary sheep people to get over themselves and their love trials.  Life is short and there are lots of books to read, so I don’t need to finish this one.

 

Month total:  5.5

Fall to Date:  21.5

Year to Date:  89.5