Books Worth Your Time: Career Growth and Escapism
I'm a big fan of the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres, but have also dipped a toe into some horror-adjacent literature over the years. Reading is one of those low-energy self-care activities that compounds quietly, and I've found that keeping the habit going (even when work and family make it hard) pays dividends in both professional growth and personal decompression. What follows is a handful of books I've genuinely enjoyed, split between the career-focused reads that shaped how I think about leadership, and the fiction that reminds me why reading is worth protecting time for.
My primary medium is a tablet with all distracting apps removed, running Google Play Books. Audiobooks fill the gaps during workouts and commutes (the Wheel of Time series has been my long-running companion there). I do have a physical book collection, but the convenience of digital keeps me reading more consistently.
Career-Focused Books
I wouldn't be a knowledge worker with a growth mindset if I didn't continually read about both my profession (i.e. IT) and the management principles surrounding it. Here are some of the books that have stuck with me, and why.
Team Topologies (Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais)
Well written, with great examples of how team and org structures affect a product's outcome and maintainability. My greatest learnings from this book were around cognitive load and managing workloads within teams. I've witnessed the differences in outcomes for teams with a wide-ranging set of responsibilities versus those with a more narrow focus, but never before had I seen the problems with a "jack-of-all-trades" approach described with such clarity.
When we talk about cognitive load, it's easy to understand that any one person has a limit on how much information they can hold in their brain at any given moment. The same happens for any one team by aggregating all the team members' cognitive capacities. However, we hardly ever discuss cognitive load when assigning responsibilities or software components to a given team. Perhaps because it's hard to quantify both the available capacity and the incoming load. Or perhaps because the team is expected to adapt to what it's being asked to do, no questions asked.
IT professionals, in my experience, tend to never want to say "no" to additional work when their cognitive load is already nearing maximum. As a profession we need to curb this piling-on mentality so that we can focus on what is important and drives the business towards growth.
Managing Oneself (Peter F. Drucker)
This is a short Harvard Business Review essay on understanding your own habits, learning, and growth. I've read it multiple times over the years, and it always surfaces some new truth about my own habits that I can either improve or need to move on from. Getting feedback, concentrating on your strengths, and improving upon those same strengths will provide the largest bang-for-your-buck when it comes to professional growth.
The essay makes a point that stuck with me: first-rate engineers tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people, while human resources professionals often pride themselves on their ignorance of quantitative methods. Both are self-defeating. Being well-rounded to fully realize your primary strengths does not mean you have to be a jack-of-all-trades. It just means you need to be competent in most areas, with a specialization on top of that.
Let's Talk Business (Don Jones)
Not as timeless as the HBR essays, but has a great conversational feel to it. That approachability makes for a quick read, and gives IT professionals who tend to be heads-down in technical work a glimpse of how businesses operate and view their results.
Making Work Visible (Dominica DeGrandis)
Making work visible is often talked about in other business books (and it's something I've written about in practice), but this one really goes the full mile in describing why knowledge workers need to put effort into it. By having a visual representation of work being done (or where it has hit a roadblock), non-technical management can make business-level determinations more easily to help with those blocks. Transparency and awareness of what is going on can be very ethereal and hard to grasp unless you can make things visible, and this book does a great job providing ideas on how to accomplish this for your team, department, or organization.
The Pragmatic Programmer (David Thomas & Andrew Hunt)
A bit of a slog cover-to-cover, and maybe it's better as a reference book for individual topics. There is a lot of overlap with other books I've read on programming or IT in general, but if you're just starting out in IT or development fields, this is a great primer on just about everything. Some of the principles like "Don't Repeat Yourself" are nice to have a name for concepts already engrained in my mental approach to PowerShell and Python work.
Reading for Leisure
You'll see a trend here of mostly Fantasy or Sci-Fi. I've tried other genres and tend to get hit with a "slog" feeling that makes me unable to finish. Reading is my escape, and my escapes tend to be fantastical or outlandish, with a tinge of real-world relativity or morality in such a setting.
The Collapsing Empire Series (John Scalzi)
After finishing his Old Man's War series, I picked up this trilogy for a family vacation and finished the whole thing in a matter of days. The Sci-Fi concepts feel unique, the politics are engaging without feeling too over-the-top, and the story as a whole is satisfying. The final book felt slightly rushed (I can't put my finger on why), but satisfying all the same. Even got my wife to read this series, and she got through it just as quickly if not faster.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman)
I've read this one twice now, which is very rare for me. The illustrated physical copy is gorgeous. The story is engrossing, emotionally resonant, and sits right at the intersection of nostalgia and dread that Gaiman does so well. This is my go-to recommendation for anyone asking why I love fantasy books.
Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)
I'd never read anything by Susanna Clarke before, but she has a devotee now. The world of Piranesi took me over by storm. The fantastic and eerie atmosphere, the psychologically confusing portions that turn into horrifying clarity as the story goes on. This book got a hold of me and did not let go until it was done, and will probably be a re-read at some point.
Redshirts (John Scalzi)
Light-hearted, very Sci-Fi heavy, and reminiscent of some of the crazier plots in Star Trek with a very meta-approach to those same kinds of shows. If you're a fan of Star Trek and want to exercise wrapping your brain around some interesting concepts about the universe, this is a fun and quick read.
The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic (Terry Pratchett)
At a certain point I need to stop picking up book series with a crazy number of entries (looking at you, Expanse and Wheel of Time). But where the other large universes have 800+ pages per book, Discworld is bite-sized at around 200 pages each. Easy to approach a familiar world without committing to something massive. I often read one between larger novels as a palate cleanser. Pratchett's prose flows nicely and has a lot of humor that makes for great storytelling.
Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)
A page-turner with Sci-Fi closely locked in with reality and physics we're all familiar with. The mechanisms to inform the reader slowly about what happened in the past, and the interactions in space, all have that "probable-in-our-reality" sense. While we only see a tiny bubble of space in this universe, the plot and characters make for a beautifully well-rounded story. I think this might be my favorite single novel on this list.
Relic and Reliquary (Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child)
Picked these up at a friend's recommendation when I said "looking for something not completely fantasy, but just a little bit." The authors do a good job grounding fantastical elements in scientific terminology that sounds plausible enough to suspend disbelief. I found myself really liking the cast of characters, the suspenseful situations, and the investigative feel as the story grew. After Reliquary I also wanted to read more about subterranean New York, where fantasy meets reality in fascinating ways. Kept reading about Agent Pendergast after these two.
The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny (Andrzej Sapkowski)
Having played The Witcher 3 and watched the TV show, I picked up the first two books. I can't recall the last time I read something that felt like a primary character's side-quests, but that's what each chapter feels like. Geralt goes here, things happen, and then he continues on his way. Some elements flow between stories, and seeing the connectivity between book and TV adaptation is half the fun in this universe.
Keep Reading
The backlog never shrinks (if anything it gets longer), but the consistency is there now in a way it wasn't always. I'd encourage anyone who fell out of the habit to just pick up something short and fun (and keep it unmonetized while you're at it). The momentum builds itself, and there's no better low-cost reset after a long day than disappearing into someone else's world for a while.