Summer Reading

This summer, I’m working in San Mateo (at an awesome startup, Apture). I live in San Jose so the commute is a bit lengthy.

A few things have made this commute much more bearable. The biggest one is probably the express train that leaves at 6:57 and gets me home by 7:30. (Compared to leaving at 10:40 in the morning and getting into work around 11:50). Yes, I know, that’s less than 8 hours, but, I don’t take a lunch break, and I work at home. The other nice perk to taking the Caltrain is that I can read. A lot.

During the school year, I’m not really the reading type. That’s not technically true, but if you consider what most people consider reading, I do very little of it. I’m quite at ease reading textbooks or papers for classes but leisurely reading has pretty much been shut out of my school schedule. During the summer though, especially with a 1.5 hour train ride everyday, I can snuggle up long enough to actually finish books!

At the beginning of the summer, I read a lot of programming books. (Give me a break! They weren’t really techinical books anyways). I’ve been slowly transitioning into actual novels. Gasp, even a Pulitzer Prize winner! For lack of better things to say, I’m just going to list the titles now:

• More Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
• Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
• The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David Price
• More Joel On Software by Joel Spolsky
• Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I’m hoping to close off the summer with Flowers for Algernon. Actually, all of the novels, including Flowers, I’d started previously but never got around to finishing.