It was a good year for science fiction. I stupidly avoided the genre until I picked up “Ender’s Game” in late 2014. Avoiding sci-fi was a mistake. These books are phenomenal - the Foundation trilogy most especially. Asimov left an imprint that I am not ready to put to words. Until then, “perspective”.

Meditations and Illusions will be re-read, perhaps in succession. Despite roughly two millennia between the writers, they play well together. You cannot read these straightforward statements on stoicism and humility without becoming a better person.

I started reading Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky this week and am revisiting The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. I omitted a couple technical books (Blue Team Handbook by Don Murdoch and RTFM by Ben Clark) because I used them as references instead of reading cover-to-cover.

  • Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
  • The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
  • Dune, Frank Herbert
  • Junky, William S. Burroughs
  • Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  • Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov
  • Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  • Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonneget
  • Illusions, Richard Bach

The most important read of 2015, Richard Feynman’s Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle, isn’t a book at all. This was an appendix in the Rogers Comission Report on the Challenger disaster in 1986. The short paper explores more than a dozen issues related to ethics in engineering, project management, and common sense. This is a must read for technologists, creaters, and leaders.