A Corda Christmas Reading List 2020

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

Last Christmas on a whim I pinged off a couple of messages to the people I know in the Corda space to ask them if they’d read any books that year that they’d recommend (as well as a Happy Xmas), and from them I put together a little reading list and published it. Well, I was absolutely delighted by the response and the enthusiasm with which it was met, so I thought I had better do it again this year!

So whilst we prepare to do Christmas all over again, what follows is a list of recommended books I have been sent not just by the CTOs, CEOs and Heads of Dev that run companies in the Corda ecosystem, but also the rank and file developers. I have already bought one of these books to read This Christmas, and I hope you find it useful too.

Finally, I’d like to wish everyone a merry little Christmas. Many of us cannot be together this year, so whether you are 2000 miles away, driving home for Christmas or perhaps close to home this year, I wish you all, in Dulci Jubilo, Peace on Earth and the power of love at this holly jolly time of year.

Books about people you should know

• Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman Adventures of a Curious Character Feynman recounts his experiences trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets-and much more of an eyebrow-raising nature
• Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Harry Brown In this fascinating, revelation-packed biography, the full story of one of the most daring, enigmatic, and reclusive power brokers America has ever known is finally told.

And books about people you probably don’t….

• Who Is Michael Ovitz? By Michael Ovitz Once you get through the name-dropping, it’s a very interesting look at the inner workings of the entertainment industry.
• Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life in Music Ted reveals the inner workings of his professional and personal relationships with some of the most talented and successful recording artists in history, including Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Eric Clapton, Lowell George, Sammy Hagar, Linda Ronstadt, David Lee Roth, and Carly Simon.

Books about making it

• Black Box Thinking: Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance by Matthew Syed The inside story of how success really happens — and how we cannot grow unless we are prepared to learn from our mistakes.
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance and what drives it using rigorous statistical methods
• The Mystery of Banking by Murray N Rothbard — Banking demystified
• Distributed Systems for practitioners by Dimos Raptis how you can design your systems for increased performance, availability and scalability
• Competing in the age of AI — Marco Iansiti and Karim R Lakhani
• Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
• Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders by David Marquet. No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet’s approach to create a workplace where everyone takes responsibility for their actions, people are healthier and happier — and everyone is a leader.
• The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
• Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action by Simon Sinek based on the most watched TED talk of all time
• Brand Famous: How to Get Everyone Talking about Your Business by Linzi Boyd
• Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently by Dawna Markova and Angeline McArthur; experts at getting brilliant yet difficult people to think together. They have been brought in to troubleshoot for Fortune 500 leaders in crisis and managers struggling to inspire their teams.
• The Cryptocurrency Revolution: Finance in the Age of Bitcoin, Blockchains and Tokens by Rhian Lewis the essential guide for those wishing to understand the threats and opportunities of the changing world of payments and finance.

And books about what happened when they made it

• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman
• Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble by Dan Lyons

Books about the world back then

• A Line in the Sand by James Barr (Audible): Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East, How in 1916 two men secretly agreed to divide the Middle East between them in the middle of the First World War
• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead an odyssey through time as well as space, Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.
• The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford The tale of a visionary leader whose conquests joined backward Europe with the flourishing cultures of Asia to trigger a global awakening, an unprecedented explosion of technologies, trade, and ideas
• A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean by Irad Malkin where separation is measured by degrees of contact rather than by physical dimensions.
• Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, by Shashi Tharoor Impassioned polemic which slices straight to the heart of the darkness that drives all empires … laying bare the grim, and high, cost of the British Empire for its former subjects. An essential read
• The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan
• City of Thieves by David Benioff In the depths of the coldest winter in history, through a city cut off from all supplies and suffering appalling deprivation, man and boy embark on an absurd hunt.

Books about the world today

• Flash Boys by Michael Lewis (Audible) ; how one group of ingenious oddballs and misfits set out to expose the madness that has taken hold of the financial markets today and declare war on some of the richest and most powerful people in the world
• Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World by Peter Zeihan Opinionated and gloomy but interesting analysis of the absolute state of things as the established world order fragments. It’s a tough read but worth it for the insights.
• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo Lodge Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race relations in Britain today.

Books about the world tomorrow

• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — an old classic, but great for a re-read as VR and AI continue to improve. Enter the Metaverse — cyberspace home to avatars and software daemons, where anything and just about everything goes.
• The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace WellsIn crystalline prose, Wallace-Wells provides a devastating overview of where we are in terms of climate crisis and ecological destruction, and what the future will hold if we keep on going down the same path. Urgently readable, this is an epoch-defining book

Books to understand useful concepts

• Debt- the first 5000 years by David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, and one of the organisers of Occupy Wall Street, presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that long before there was money, there was debt.
• Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail. Written over 40 years ago Gall affirms, without showing any uncertainty, that all the systems created by humans are intrinsically flawed

Books about how technology affects humans

• The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight by Satchin Panda
• Agency by William Gibson. Autonomous military AI technology and people using it to change our possible futures.
• The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo the editor/founder of The Defiant, and as one of the best journalists in the crypto space, she has great insights into the personalities and events that shaped the growth of Ethereum. Even people who aren’t particularly interested in crypto will enjoy the rollercoaster.

Really weird books that people recommended

• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into a spectacular and neglected world, and shows that fungi provide a key to understanding both the planet on which we live, and life itself.
• The Mechanical Turk: The True Story of the Chess-Playing Machine That Fooled the World” by Tom Standage an accessible way of examining the complex relationship between magic, man, mind and machine, from the Enlightenment to the computer age.

Books to make you laugh

• Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said sleeping partner up . . . He’s damn good’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Books to make you think

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Beautiful and powerful writing on a subject that is as important as ever before
• The Agony and the Ecstacy (Irving Stone’s bio of Michelangelo). Great book — parallels with the terribilità of great software developers.
• Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman shows how believing in human kindness and altruism can be a new way to think — and act as the foundation for achieving true change in our society.
• Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science by Stuart Richie

Escapism after a year in lockdown

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America’s heart.
• Redshirts by John Scalzi, winner of the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel tells the story of the support crew onboard the Universal Union Capital Ship, Intrepid, and all the perils they face on a daily basis.
• The Commodore: from the Hornblower series by C.S. Forrester. 1812 and the fate of Europe lies in the hands of newly appointed Commodore Hornblower . . .Dispatched to northern waters to protect Britain’s Baltic interests, Horatio Hornblower must halt the advance of Napoleon’s empire into Sweden and Russia
• We are Legion We are Bob by Dennis E. Taylor book 1 of the Bobiverse series; the brave new world of corpsicles, artificial intelligence, interstellar space probes, and space colonization.
• The Kunda Kids collection — a children’s book collection written to inspire the next generation of young people about ancient and modern African history and culture.
• The Martian: Stranded on Mars, one astronaut fights to survive by Andy Weir — just like in the movie.
• A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

Books that require concentration

• The Codebreakers by David Kahn (comprehensive history of cryptography). It’s a heavy tome, so may be more of a dip in, put back, dip in again. Fun to code up some solvers for the old ciphers.
• Deep Learning by Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville (more of a textbook, but one of the first really good texts, so reads well for someone that has learned piecemeal)
• Interest and Prices — A Study of the Causes Regulating the Value of Money by Knut Wicksell

Books that don’t require concentration

• Utopian Avenue by David Mitchell A multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness and grief; of stardom’s wobbly ladder and fame’s Faustian pact
• Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher A Gereon Rath Mystery
• the three-body problem, the dark forest, death’s end, the wandering earth by cixin liu
• Brother Athelston books by Paul Doherty — fun medieval mystery series
• The Chemical Reaction by Fiona Erskine she is a senior chemical engineer by day and writes with fascinating technical depth whilst still being really good thrillers

In Case you Missed It…

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac A hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream.

And if you need a bit of ‘self-help’ after all of that….

• Slow at Work How to work less, achieve more and regain your balance in an always-on world by Aoife McElwain
• Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

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.