We’ve reached the winter solstice once more, so it’s time for my reading list. In 2022, I was seeped in writing the upcoming Security Chaos Engineering book – a tome dedicated to resilience in software – but still managed to squeeze reading into the nooks and crannies of my life.

I averaged exactly 3 books per month in 2022, lower than both 2021 and 2020 – but the number of books I wrote skyrocketed (the aforementioned O’Reilly book and the second draft of my fiction novel). So, seems reasonable all-in-all.

In last year’s post, I noted I read nearly 10 papers per month but this year I lost track of how many I crammed into my brain, so an exact tally shall remain a mystery. The number of research papers I wrote with esteemed collaborators is far easier to count (3); they cover action bias in incident response; the ROI of security chaos engineering; and the “sludge” strategy for systems defense. Our research article on Deception Environments was also published in the June 2022 edition of Communications of the ACM, although we wrote it last year.

As always, I am not rating or recommending any specific works in the list below. With that said, I dedicate considerable effort to screening books beforehand since time is the most precious, fleeting resource we possess and we must protect it like a dragon hoards gold.

If you’re looking for more science fiction, speculative fiction, pretentious literary fiction, philosophical navel-gazing, or non-fiction recommendations, check out my reading lists from prior years:

Fiction

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F Kuang

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora by Sheree R. Thomas

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

Figuring by Maria Popova

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

Moby Dick: Or, the Whale by Herman Melville (re-read)

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Orlando by Virgninia Woolf

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Tempest by William Shakespeare (re-read)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

Winter in the Blood by James Welch

Non-fiction

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System edited by Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman

Bolivar: American Liberator by Marie Arana

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen by Zoe Chance

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow

Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World by Nina Kraus

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott (re-read)

The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals by Chiara Marletto

What is Life? by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection by Stephanie Cacioppo

Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time by Dean Buonomano