Winter reading
I read more in the winter — shorter days, fewer reasons to be outside. Here are three from the last couple of months that I keep thinking about, in no particular order.
The Pragmatic Programmer
A reread, and it held up better than most books from its era. What strikes me now isn't the specific advice — some of it has dated — but the underlying posture: treat your craft as something you keep deliberately, not something that just accrues. The chapters on not repeating yourself and on leaving things better than you found them have quietly shaped how I work without my noticing.
The Order of Time
Rovelli writes about physics the way some people write about music, and this short book on time was the most enjoyable thing I read all winter. I won't pretend I followed every argument, but the central idea — that the steady, universal "now" we take for granted doesn't really exist — stayed with me for weeks. It's the rare science book that's also a little bit sad, in a good way.
A novel I won't name
I also got pulled into a long novel that I'm only halfway through, so I'll save it for another time. Half-finished books are their own kind of pleasure: there's still somewhere to go. If anything, that's the note I'd end on — it's fine to read slowly, and fine to leave a bookmark in for a month.
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