Books I read in 2023

Here is a recap of all the books I read in 2023.

El Italiano

Through an accidental encounter between an Italian soldier and a Spanish woman, and the events that followed, El Italiano (Spanish for “The Italian”) tells the adventures of an elite scuba diving unit from the Regia Marina and their sabotaging operations around Gibraltar during the II World War.

The novel is quite engaging and took me on a carousel of emotions, from the suspense of Italian navy operations to the calmness of a quiet conversation between two lovers.

I have a weakness for historical accounts in general, but I found the way Pérez Reverte narrates these events surprisingly refreshing. Especially how they are intertwined so naturally with the personal stories of the protagonists.

Talking With Tech Leads

In Talking With Tech Leads Pat Kua compiles the struggles of people that have transitioned to a tech leadership role in their careers.

Assuming these stories are representative of the industry, my conclusion is that at the end of the day you’re on your own. There doesn’t seem to be a well known path or training track one can follow to learn what the role entails. Instead, it’s all about picking resources from authors you trust, following your gut feeling and making progress through trial and error.

Fortunately, the book showcases some recurring themes that anyone wanting to step into this role should bear in mind. One of them is mentoring: without the proper support from current tech leads in your company, you will be lost more often than not.

Alimenta El Sueño Para Un Cerebro Sano

I’ve been struggling with sleep issues since I almost had burnout in 2019. I usually sleep “well”, in the sense that I go to bed and wake up more or less at the same time, spending around 7.5 hours in bed.

But as soon as something worries me, either at work or in my personal life, my sleep patterns start to change. For example, I would wake up several times during the night or have a restless sleep. Sometimes I would wake up just once, as if my body were telling me it’s time to start the day, but way earlier than usual.

So I decided to read listen to Alimenta El Sueño Para Un Cerebro Sano to try and find a way to sleep well even when my life is going through difficult times.

While the book is a bit repetitive, going through the same concepts over and over and making the narrative unnecessarily longer, it helped me understand several aspects that can affect my sleep patterns. I emphasise “my” because one of the things I learned is that every person has its own particularities when it comes to sleeping.

Other things that I learned were:

• Being more disciplined with the time I go to bed and wake up, and how to find these moments
• Not bringing any smartphone, tablet or similar devices into the bedroom. Because that’s the place for sleeping, resting and related human activities
• Not forcing myself to sleep if I can’t. Instead, I get up and go to some other place in the house until somnolency kicks in again, if ever

The book also goes into other aspects that I personally took with a grain of salt, like using alternative medicine or recommending specific nutrients or changes in your diet. Even when the author states that a professional should be consulted in all cases, I still consider that a bit irresponsible. Messing around with your diet without proper supervision is dangerous and can have a serious impact in your life.

Leaving that aside, I’m happy to tell that this book has helped me and the quality of my sleep increased during 2023.

Effective Java

I remember reading Effective C++ when I was writing my master’s thesis and learning a lot of practical things from it. Somehow I was expecting a similar experience when I started reading Effective Java, but I have the feeling that I didn’t get as much out of it.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is a great resource. I particularly like the fact that the insights I took away are a good balance between practical techniques I can apply and conceptual guidelines to simply keep in mind. But somehow it didn’t have the impact on my understanding of the language that Effective C++ had back then.

I’m pretty sure this is because I read Effective Java at a more advanced stage in my career. And having learned other programming languages, many concepts in the book were already familiar and didn’t feel that noteworthy.

Still, it’s telling that I have found myself going to the bookshelf from time to time and open it to read specific topics again. So all in all it’s a good resource to keep around.

Revolución

Revolución, another book from Pérez Reverte, tells the story of a young Spanish engineer that gets involved in the early days of the Mexican Revolution and sees his life changed by it. And as with El Italiano, I truly enjoyed reading this novel too.

First because of the story itself, which is incredibly entertaining, combining moments of action and adventure with short but profound reflections about human behaviour. Everything surrounding the revolution serves as a backdrop to let us see that, when people are faced with extreme situations, what we initially thought of black and white suddenly becomes full of nuances.

But above all, I enjoyed the book because it happens during a period in history that I barely knew. And now I understand it a bit better. Somehow it felt as if I had filled a gap that Pérez Reverte himself had described:

Eso es muy español, no mirar hacia allá. Mientras que en México miran hacia España, miran continuamente. Toda Hispanoamérica mira hacia España continuamente, es una referencia, para bien o para mal, pero siempre están mirando. Aquí lo ignoramos, aquí estamos vueltos de espaldas¹