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 |