The books I enjoyed reading

Posted February 14, 2016 by Santh

My reading habit with non-academic books started as a small boy when I ended up with three dozen “Phantom” comics novels that was gifted by one of my seniors when he shifted out of town. I avidly finished reading the entire lot during my summer vacation. As a teenager, I remember reading a few Hardy boys novels but that was all.

I finally took to reading habit when I was about 21 and in my fourth year of engineering. My first novel was a fiction “Negotiator” by Frederick Forsyth. The very next book was Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”. It took several hours across several weeks to finish the book and I became a Ayn Rand fan. I followed it up with her “Atlas Shrugged”.

Between 1999 and 2001, I was into fiction novels and should have read about two dozen of Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follet, John Grisham and others. After that my interest in books and particularly fiction tapered off. For the next 10 years, I was a sporadic reader and my reading was limited to non-fiction. I read whenever I stumbled upon an opportunity to pick-up a book. A few books I remember from that time are “Good to Great” by Jim Collins and “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I started as a keen reader again in 2011 as I wanted to explore my interests in Anthropology. It changed to Agile, Software Development and Leadership in 2013. I would have read more than 50 books during the three year period from 2011-14.

As I started with my interests in running and cycling coupled with a new job in November 2014, my reading routine took the back seat once again. But I put in the effort to list down more than 100 books that I remembered reading since 1997. I have listed some of my favourites under Anthropology, Agile, Software Development and Leadership. I hope I get sufficient time to grow this list over the years.

The ones I enjoyed…

Anthropology:

Guns, Germs, And Steel: The Fates of Human Societies	Jared Diamond
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive	Jared Diamond
Origin of Species	Charles Darwin
The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal	Desmond Morris

Agile:

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development using Scrum	Mike Cohn
Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game	Alistair Cockburn
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit	Mary Poppendieck
Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation	Jez Humble Dave Farley

Software Development:

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master	Andrew Hunt & Dave Thomas
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship	Robert C. Martin
Design Patterns	Erich Gamma & Team
The Mythical Man Month	Fred Brooks

Leadership:

The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization	Peter Senge
The Human Side of Enterprise	Douglas McGregor
The Speed of Trust: The one thing that changes everything	Stephen M.R. Covey
Good to Great:Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t	Jim Collins
Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates us	Daniel H. Pink
Outliers	Malcom Gladwell
The other 90%	Robert Cooper
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Out of the crisis	W. Edwards Deming
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies cause great firms to fail	Clayton M. Christensen
How to get your point across in 30 seconds or less	Milo O. Frank
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World	Stanley A. McChrystal

3 events in 10 days

Posted February 14, 2016 by Santh

2016 began with a lot of action on running and cycling front. Alankrita run was scheduled on Jan 3rd and I did not want to miss the opportunity to complete a half marathon after 4 months. It was my best run so far. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to run the entire distance at a good pace completing half marathon distance in 2 hours 12 minutes.

I got a chance to ride through the countryside on Jan 11th. The pleasant winter weather made it special and the flower garden was the icing on the cake!

Then the hectic schedule began. I covered 130Km as part of TAF Republic Ride on January 26th, following it up with EGS 10k run on February 6th and Club run (half marathon) on February 7th. I ended up running almost 50Km from February 1st to 7th and that took a toll on my knee. It reminded me to maintain a balance between running and strengthening routine.

Q3 2015

Posted February 14, 2016 by Santh

The last quarter of 2015 was a bit disappointing for my fitness goals. I was not up to the mark with swimming that I had to drop my original plan to try Olympic Triathlon as part of Hyderabad Triathlon. It was more disappointing that I could not even try Sprint Triathlon. To compensate, I wanted to try becoming a super randonneur by completing 300, 400 and 600 Km brevets. But I dropped that plan as well as I was not prepared to ride all night upsetting my biological clock.

I did finish a few events successfully though. I completed my third 200Km brevet on Nov 14th in my best time so far, in 12 hours 8 minutes. That was more than an hour better than my earlier attempts, aided by tailwinds during the first half and relatively pleasant winter weather for the entire duration.

I ran Hyderabad 10K on November 29th along with my daughter. We took 1 hour 23 minutes to complete 10Km and had a good time chatting and encouraging my daughter.