Reading list

Below is a list of the various books, book series and manga series I’ve read and the works on my “to read” list, with my favorites at the top.

For each one that I’ve finished, its entry will include a short summary of my thoughts about it.

Feel free to contact me if you have any comments or suggestions for future reads, I’ll be happy to receive them!

Favorites

• The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

  A classic. Somewhat hard to get into at first, with numerous long-winded and verbose descriptions all throughout the story. But once I got used to it, I was drawn in and the books became hard to put down.

• Tokyo Ghoul - Sui Ishida

  My favorite manga series by far. A very dark, unsettling and mature story, but beautifully told and drawn in my view, whether it be through the various characters or the action sequences. Also one of the few stories where I do not like the protagonist.

• Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

  Great science fiction story that I read during my childhood. I distinctly remember the lack of explicit character descriptions which leave a lot to your imagination, as well as the main plot twist that impressed me so much.

Other finished works

• Glucose Revolution - Jessie Inchauspé

  A good educational read about the influence and power of glucose, with some tips about how to balance out your blood sugar for overall better health.

  While a bit commercial and sensationalist in its style, the concepts are well explained and easy to understand. I’m trying out some of the suggested tips and they seem to work well.

• La Horde du Contrevent - Alain Damasio

  A very original and well told story, that mixes dystopian science fiction and fantasy. It is hard to follow at first due to all 23 members of the Horde taking turns narrating the story, each with their own expression style and unique symbol that is displayed when the point of view shifts to them. The writing style is also unfortunately heavy and almost pretentious at times.

  Nevertheless, the story is unlike any other I’ve read so far, and is in my opinion a remarkable feat of imagination that is worth reading at least once.

• The Rust Programming Language - Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols

  The book that got me started with Rust. It does a very good job of progressively introducing the features of this complex language and its advantages over others, in a casual and easy-to-follow style.

  That said, it does assume that the reader already has some knowledge in computer science and experience in programming, which makes sense as Rust would probably prove needlessly complex as a first programming language.

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman

  A brilliantly written introduction to computer science, that uses Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) to illustrate all of the introduced concepts.

  I’ve read this to brush up on the basics that my school curriculum unfortunately didn’t sufficiently cover, and it does a great job of explaining some fairly deep and advanced topics in a clear and concise fashion, and offers some well thought-out exercises to practice.

• The Belgariad - David Eddings

  Fairly standard fantasy story of a boy destined to become “the chosen one” and save the world from the big, bad, god of evil, that I read during my teens. Where the series really shines though is through its style and excellently written characters, which keep the story engaging from start to finish.

Works to read

• Mémoires d'Hadrien - Marguerite Yourcenar
• Dune - Frank Herbert
• Rust for Rustaceans - Jon Gjengset