A Corda Christmas Reading List 2019

– a collection of what the great and good of the Corda DLT sector has been reading this year. Collated by Martin Jee

For a bit of Christmas fun I decided to fire off a couple of texts to some of the CTOs and heads of dev I know who are leading Corda projects and ask them if they had any book recommendations for me over the Christmas holidays. After they came back to me with some pretty interesting books, and said they were keen to see the final list, I thought I’d see who else I know in the Corda world who would have some good recommendations. And this is what they came up with:

Each book has a link to the Amazon page and what format it was read in if they included it (paperback, kindle, audible, etc).

Books to inspire you

• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by S. Jerrold Kaplan (Kindle). Rises and fall startup books are always great (and good reminders!)
• Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin (Paperback)
• Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work, by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal (Audible) How the afore mentioned groups have been harnessing rare and controversial states of consciousness to solve critical challenges and outperform the competition.
• Play Bigger: How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson (Kindle). If you want to build a legendary company, you need to design and build a legendary category at the same time, and dominate it over time.
• Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh. Blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. The objective of Blitzscaling is not to go from zero to one, but from one to one billion -as quickly as possible.
• 747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation by Joe Sutter, Jay Spenser (hardcover). We joke that the ultimate engineering dogfooding is to build a place and then be on it’s maiden voyage! Talk about alignment of incentives

Books about making it

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz. Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, is brutally honest about how hard it is to run a business.
• The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore (hardcover). Great historical fiction about the ‘current wars’ between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikolai Tesla.
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro (huge paperback…it isn’t available on Kindle!). Essential reading if you are or have been a New Yorker. It is soooo long tho!
• Duveen: The Story fo the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time, by S.N. Berman. A startling number of masterpieces now in American museums are there because of the shrewdness of one man, Joseph Duveen, art dealer to John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and William Randolph Hearst.

and books about what happened when they made it

• Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle by Matthew Symonds (paperback). Nice perspective on the earlyish days of Oracle and how much politics and infighting there was.
• Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff which I read a few years ago.
• Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (Audible) the story of how a journalist took down Theranos from a multibillion dollar company to being exposed for frauds.
• Super Pumped, by Mike Isaac. A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

Books about the world today

• Alternative War, by J.J. Patrick. In Alternative War, former police officer turned investigative journalist James Patrick tackles Russian interference in the UK’s Brexit referendum and the US election of President Donald Trump
• Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth. Oxford academic Kate Raworth identifies seven critical ways in which mainstream economics has led us astray, and sets out a roadmap for bringing humanity into a sweet spot that meets the needs of all within the means of the planet.
• The Psychopath Test: A journey through the madness industry, by Jon Ronson. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues.
• Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, by Carlota Perez. Perez presents a novel interpretation of the good and bad times in the economy, taking a long-term perspective and linking technology and finance in an original and convincing way
• The People Vs Tech by Jamie Bartlett (Kindle) an enthralling account of how our fragile political system is being threatened by the digital revolution, and how we should become active citizens to defend it.

Books to understand useful concepts

• The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford (Audible) In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they’ll never view IT the same way again.
• Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, by Geoff Colvin (2nd Edition). Colvin’s book about how greatness doesn’t come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades.
• Influence the Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini Discover the six universal principles to becoming a skilled persuader. Understand why people say yes, and learn how to counteract these persuasive tactics when they are used in an exploitive manner.
• A conflict of visions, by Thomas Sowell. Sowell’s classic analysis of the centuries-long debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power
• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold (Kindle) a cleverly illustrated and eminently comprehensible story — providing a real context for understanding today’s world of PCs, digital media, and the Internet.

Books about how technology affects humans

• The Butterfly Effect, by Jon Ronson (audio book) What happened when the tech industry gave the world what it wanted: free porn. Lives were mangled. Fortunes were made. All for your pleasure.
• 21 lessons, by Yuval Noah Harare. What is the future of our species? What are the challenges and problems we are facing today? Do you know where technology is taking us? Will religion play a part in the future? Does climate change matter? What is terrorism? What is the post-truth era?
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Is Google Making Us Stupid? Learn what the digital era is doing to our brains. The internet is so powerful, we don’t have to ponder how to resolve the problem.
• The Master Switch — Tim Wu (audio book) Could the Internet — the entire flow of American information, come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? Part industrial exposé, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age.

Really weird books that people recommended

• In the Darkness by Luke Smitherd. A strange novel with a twist at the end.
• Vurt by Jeff Noon. “A brilliantly innovative and highly entertaining novel from a literary pioneer”. Follow Scribble on his search for the Vurt feather, the most powerful narcotic of all.
• Exhalation, by Ted Chiang. A short story by an award-winning science fiction writer. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality.

Books to make you laugh

• Spud by John Van de Ruit. It’s 1990. Apartheid is crumbling. Nelson Mandela has just been released from prison. And Spud Milton — thirteen-year-old, prepubescent choirboy extraordinaire — is about to start his first year at an elite boys-only boarding school in South Africa.
• This is Going to Hurt — Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor — Adam Kay (Audible) A first-hand account of life as a junior doctor in all its joy, pain, sacrifice and maddening bureaucracy.
• 52 times Britain was a bellend by James Felton. A painfully funny history of Britain by Twitter hero James Felton, chronicling 52 of the most ludicrous, weird and downright ‘baddie’ things the Brits have done to the world.

Books to make you think

• Modern Manhood: Conversations About the Complicated World of Being a Good Man Today, by Cleo Stiller. Health reporter Cleo Stiller’s fun(ny) and informative collection of advice and perspectives about what it means to be a good guy in the era of #MeToo
• Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. Combining cutting-edge research with a healthy dose of good humor and practical advice, Sapolsky explains how prolonged stress causes or intensifies a range of afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more.
• Letters from the earth by Mark Twain. A series of short stories, published posthumously, many of which deal with God and Christianity and written from the point-of-view of a dejected angel on Earth.

Books to make you think about something else

• The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company, by William Dalrymple (Audible) The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders.
• Ghost in the Wires by Mitnick. Mitnick’s memoir paints an action portrait of a plucky loner motivated by a passion for trickery, not material game.
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. A compilation, and assessment of various weird and wonderful recorded descriptions of Venetian cities as Marco Polo described them to Kublai Khan.
• Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harare. Fire gave us power. Farming made us hungry for more. Money gave us purpose. Science made us deadly. This is the thrilling account of our extraordinary history — from insignificant apes to rulers of the world.

Books that require concentration

• The GCHQ Puzzle Book II, by GCHQ. The puzzles in this new book sit alongside stories, facts and photos from the first 100 years of the organisation that’s right at the heart of the UK’s security.
• Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table by Kit Chapman. Throughout, Superheavy explains the complex science of element discovery in clear and easy-to-follow terms. It walks through the theories of atomic structure, discusses the equipment used and explains the purpose of the research.
• Grassmannian Geometry of Scattering Amplitudes by Arkani-Hamed This is an essential introduction to the geometry and combinatorics of the positroid stratification of the Grassmannian and an ideal text for advanced students and researchers working in the areas of field theory, high energy physics, and the broader fields of mathematical physics!
• Astrophysics for people in a hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson (Audible). Tyson describes the fundamental rules and unknowns of our universe in his fun and witty style.
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Written by the Roman emperor for his own private guidance and self-admonition, the Meditations set forth principles for living a good and just life.
• The AI Does Not Hate You by Tom Chivers (Kindle) a book about AI and AI risk, and about a community of people who are trying to think rationally about intelligence, and the places that these thoughts are taking them, and what insight they can and can’t give us about the future of the human race over the next few years. Hard to finish.

Books that don’t require concentration

• Hilary Mantel — Wolf Hall & Bring up the Bodies The first two instalments of the trilogy. Tudor England andthe court of King Henry VIII, through the eyes and ears of Thomas Cromwell.
• John Le Carre books — modern espionage from the master chronicler of our age.
• Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King. In a high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands.
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Audible). Narrated by David Jason

Special thanks go to Molly for sitting so patiently on my lap, and her owner, Cate for her patience.

If you enjoyed this article by Martin Jee, then you can check out his other articles about Corda on Medium, contact him at martin@oxenburypartners.com for his CorDapp Developer recruitment and Corda Headhunter services or if you’re a programmer in London and you want to improve your CorDapp development skills you can join the weekly Corda Code Club he runs.