An incomplete list of books I’ve read or will read shortly

TODO: Redo in Dewey Decimal?

Novels

Currently reading: Contact, Carl Sagan

• Some signal processing, encoding, or cryptography knowledge required to truly appreciate some of the signal.
• An open and imaginative mind for the societal implications in the books.
• And of course, an appreciation of real physics, so that you understand the infeasibility given current understanding, of interstellar alien travel.

Science fiction

• 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
• 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke
• 2061: Odyssey Three, Arthur C. Clarke
• 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
• The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
• The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
• The Martian, Andy Weir

Enqeued

Bought, loaned, borrowed, etc.

• The Foundation series, Asimov
• The Expanse series, James S. A. Corey
• The Stand, Stephen King
• The Minority Report and other classic stories, Philip K. Dick
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• The Disposessed, Ursula Le Guin
• Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
• All systems red, Martha Wells
• Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• A canticle for Liebovitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
• The way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson
• The ultimate hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy, Douglas Adams
• The call of Cthulu, H. P. Lovecraft
• Ready player one, Ernest Cline
• Speaker for the dead, Orson Scott Card
• Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
• All of Dune, Frank Herbert
• Artemis, Andy Weir
• Hail Mary, Andy Weir

Detective

• Almost all of Sherlock Holmes, with the original illustrations by Sidney Paget, including all the novels.
• Two of Rebus, Ian Rankin
• Some of Morse, Colin Dexter:
  • Last Bus to Woodstock
• Some of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie
• And then there were none, Agatha Christie

Must still get: Vera.

Space opera

• Thrawn, Timothy Zahn
• Revan, Drew Karpyshyn

Enqueued

• Star Wars
  • X-Wing, Michael A. Stackpole
  • Specter of the past, Timothy Zahn
  • Vision of the future, Timothy Zahn
  • The last command, Timothy Zahn
  • Dark force rising, Timothy Zahn
  • Jedi search, Kevin J. Anderson
  • I, Jedi, Michael A. Stackpole
  • Children of the Jedi, Barbara Hambly

High fantasy

• The Witcher series, Andrzej Sapkowski:

  1. Sword of Destiny
  2. Sword of Destiny
  3. The Last Wish

• Tolkien’s works:

  • The Hobbit
  • The Lord of the Rings
  • The Silmarillion
  • The Unfinished Tales

• Dragonlance, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman:

  1. Dragons of Autumn Twilight
  2. Dragons of Winter Night
  3. Dragons of Spring Dawning
  1. Dragons of a Fallen Sun
  • Wizard’s Conclave
  • The Odyssey of Gilthanas

  And more that I likely forgot. Will have to skim every synopsis.

Enqeued

Bought, loaned, borrowed, etc.

• The Witcher series, Andrzej Sapkowski:

  4. Time of Contempt
  5. Blood of Elves
  6. Baptism of Fire
  7. Tower of the Swallow
  8. The lady of the Lake
  9. Season of Storms

• The Princess Bride, William Goldman

Children and Young adult Teen fiction

Why did some of these go on or finish only after I was an adult and my tastes changed?

• Airman, Eoin Colfer
• Much of Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
  1. Artemis Fowl
  2. The Artic Incident
  3. The Eternity Code
  4. The Opal Deception
  5. The Lost Colony
  6. The Time Paradox
• The Supernaturalist, Eoin Colfer
• Some of The Power of Five (The Gatekeepers), Anthony Horrowitz:
  1. Raven’s Gate
  2. Evil Star
  3. Nightrise
• Some of Alex Rider:
  1. Stormbreaker
  2. Point Blanc
  3. Skeleton Key
  4. Eagle Strike
  5. Skorpia
  6. Ark Angel
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
• All of The Flying Dutchman, Brian Jacques
• Much of Redwall, Brian Jacques:
  1. Lord Brocktree
  2. Martin the Warrior
  3. Mossflower
  4. The Legend of Luke
  5. Outcast of Redwall
  6. Mariel of Redwall
  7. The Bellmaker
  8. Salamandastron
  9. Redwall
  10. Mattimeo
  11. The Pearls of Lutra
  12. The Long Patrol
  13. Marlfox
  14. The Taggerung
  15. Triss
  18. High Rhulain
• The Tripods, John Christopher:
  1. The White Mountains
  2. The City of Gold and Lead
• Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis
• Holes, Louis Sachar
• Tales of the Trojan War, Kamini Khanduri
• The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke
• Assorted Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys on the way to the cottage at Cape Cod. Was bored out of mind and read sis’ books.
• No Problem, Eileen Browne and David Purkins
• The Ultimate Paper Airplane, Richard Kline
• The World Record Paper Airplane Book, Ken Blackburn and Jeff Lammers
• Les Chevaliers d’Émeraude et quelque passages ici et là des livres que je ne possèdait pas, dont Les Représailles dont je me rappèle des arraignées géantes.
  1. Le Feu dans le ciel
  2. Les Dragons de l’empereur noir
  3. Piège au royaume des ombres
  4. La princesse rebelle
  5. L’Île des lézards
• Les Six Compagnons, Paules-Jacques Bonzon:
  • La radio libre
  • l’Homme au gant
• The Silverwing Trilogy, Kenneth Opel
  • Silverwing
  • Sunwing
  • Firewing
• The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter
• Mensa Presents Secret Codes for Kids, Robert Allen
• The Big Book of Crazy Canadian Trivia, Pat Hancock

TODO, classify

• Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
• Macbeth, William Shakespeare
• A midsummer night’s dream, William Shakespeare
• King Lear, William Shakespeare
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Two Solitudes, Hugh MacLennan
  • I ended up loving this unlike the dread we felt at the start of the course.
• Robin Hood, Henry Gilbert (1994 soft cover first print)
• The Crucible, Arthur Miller
• The Masque of the Read Death, Edgar Allen Poe
• The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe
• The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe
• Cue for treason, Geoffrey Trease
• All of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin:
  1. A Game of Thrones
  2. A Clash of Kings
  3. A Storm of Swords
  4. A Feast for Crows
  5. A Dance with Dragons
• To kill a mockinbird, Harper Lee
• Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
• L’Avare, Molière
• La Maison aux Esprits, Isabel Allende
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• 1984, George Orwell
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Persuasion, Jane Austen
• Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
• The Mammoth Book of Inside the Elite Forces, The Secrets of the Special Forces - Their Winning Tactics & Exploits, Nigel Cawthorne
• Everest book, assorted stories, possibly Everest: Eighty Years of Triumph and Tragedy, Peter L. Gillman
• Tom Clancy
  • Hunt for the Red October
  • Patriot Games
  • The Cardinal of the Kremlin
  • Clear and Present Danger
  • Executive Orders
  • Rainbow Six
  • The Teeth of the Tiger
• Tom Clancy’s Op-Center, Jeff Rovin
  • Op Center
  • Mirror Image
  • State of Siege
  • Mission of Honor
• Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals, Diane Duane
• True Spy Stories, Paul Dowswell and Fergus Fleming
• Daring book, same series
• Swiss Family Robinson, Johann David Wyss
• Le Compte de Monte-Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
• Les Trois mousquetaires, Alexandre Dumas
• Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
• Lord of the flies, William Goulding
• The Long Earth, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
  • But not the rest of the books yet.
• Band of Brothers, Stephen E. Ambrose
• All of Harry Potter
  • The Philosopher’s Stone
  • The Chamber of Secrets
  • The Prizoner of Azkaban
  • The Goblet of Fire
  • The Order of the Phoenix
  • The Half-Blood Prince
  • The Deathly Hallows
• Nuclear terrorist book, the (airpot novel?) with a nuclear fireball and an SR-71 blackbird flying away from it, even if it makes no sense.
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell:
  • Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell
  • Operation Barracuda
  • Conviction
  • Endgame
  • More?
• La Métamorphose, Franz Kafka, traduit par Claude David Gallimard (la traduction qui dit « cancrelat »)
• Thérèse Desqueyroux, François Mauriac
• Les Belles-sœurs, Michel Tremblay
• To the Top of Everest, Laurie Skreslet and Elizabeth MacLeod
• The velocity of honey: and more science of everyday life, Jay Ingram
• NOLS Wilderness Navigation, Gene Trantham and Darran Wells
• The Pigman, Paul Zindel
• The Last 100 days, John Toland
• The Runner, Cynthia Voigt
• Charlie Wilcox, Sharon E. McKay:
  1. Charlie Wilcox
• Jeanne, Fille du Roy, Suzanne Martel

Weird, wacky, and cringe

• The Apocalypse Watch, Robert Ludlum
• The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum
• Robert Ludlum Covert-One series
  • The Paris Option
  • The Hades Factor
  • The Tristan Betrayal
  • The Ambler Warning
• The Bob Lee Swagger series, Stephen Hunter
  • Point of Impact
  • Black Light
  • Time to Hunt
  • The 47th Samurai
• The Legend of Zorro novelization of the second movie.
• The Cellular novelization
• Un roman que j’ai lut en dixième année sur un tueur à gages fictif après la mort de sa conjointe et avec un adversaire qui se servit d’abeilles entrainées

Comics

See also comics.

See also webcomics.

Textbooks

Presence here does not imply that I read them in their entirety.

• Computer organization and architecture or Operating Systems: Internals and Design principles, William Stallings
  • Red Hardcover, edition unknown, and can’t even remember where I bought it.
  • Served me well as an introduction to how a CPU works, ahead of class.
  • Gave my copy to Jaime Vives a few dozen blocks down the street. Lost track of it after that. I just hope he’s doing well abroad. Should have been a better friend.
• Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach, John L. Hennessey and David A. Patterson
  • I.e., Hennessey and Patterson, not Patterson and Hennessey which is the Compute Organisation book, which I did not enjoy like this one.
  • I spent way too much time having fun reading the appendices, comparing instruction sets for obscure architectures people care little for these days, and other topics.
• Cryptography Engineering, Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, and Tadayoshi Kohno
  • Was a good primer back then to what cryptography meant for me, rather than the most solid mathematical foundation.
  • Not as relevant today, though still much in there is. Just not output feedback mode and other block cipher modes instead of authenticated cipher modes (just use XChaCha20-Poly1305 m’kay?), Serpent and Twofish, and so on.
• In Search of Database Nirvana, Rohit Jain
  • Highly recommend.
  • A good primer on the design of databases themselves rather than the data therein.
  • Felt slighted by perceived shade thrown on RDBMSes like PostgreSQL. Oh well.
• IPv6 Essentials, second edition, Silvia Hagen
  • Ages ago. Probably read on the bus back from GENBAND or from university.
• Tangled Web, Michal Zalewski
  • So much more to read about these days, but helped then.
• Security Engineering, 2nd edition, Ross Anderson
  • Highly recommended.
  • Great book, but people just don’t sufficiently appreciate even chapters 1 and 2, though I would argue that the majority of programmers not only do not know or understand enough, but are most indictable for not being sufficiently motivated, critical, diligent, and caring.
  • Not done reading.
• Learning the UNIX Operating System, 4th edition, Jerry Peek, Grace Todino, and John Strange
  • How it all started.
• The Art of UNIX Programming, Eric S. Raymond
  • How I learned to start thinking about moderate scale software design and principles, not just basic programming.
• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, Kevlin Henney
  • I did not sufficiently appreciate, in or out of context, the content of this book then, but it got the ball rolling, made me think, and continue to think to this day.
• Low Tech Hacking, Jack Wiles et al.
• Practical Lock Picking, Deviant Ollam
  • And I still can’t pick a clear practice lock but that wasn’t the point anyhow. The point is to better understand the security of your systems.
• Yet Another Haskell Tutorial, Hal Daumé III
• Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!, Miran Lipovača
• TODO: ECOR 1010 textbook

TODO

• Wheeling Through Toronto: A History of the Bicycle and Its Riders, Albert Koehl