2026 Books
What this is about
I started reading a bit! Below are some of my thoughts after reading a few books. This document will be updated throughout the year as I finish more books.
Trudeau as Statesman
A short book that uses the lens of Trudeau to view Canada, this being the first Trudeau. I don't usually like reading history books, probably because I've never read a good one. But this one was rather engaging. It's interesting to imagine a Canada without Quebec, which we were very close to getting. Quebec in the 60s and 70s get kinda glossed over in textbooks, but get a spotlight here. It doesn't really go in-depth about the different reasons why the separatist movement was the way it was (which probably would have been a bit boring for me), but it strung events into a comprehensive narrative. A good introduction to a majority of Canada's history.
Terra: a Journey
When you think of the writing in Arknights, you would conjure 2 images. One would be the writing in the first 6 chapters of the game, which was tedious, wordy, and hard to read. The other would be the more modern writing, such as all the chapters after 9, certain post-year-3 events (e.g. Lone Trail (my favourite!), Ato, So Long, Adele: Home Away From Home). With a book that espouses itself as the official lore compendium, and the fact that it was published after year 3, you'd think they'd have the writing down. The compendium is written by an in-universe character: E. E. Erikson, a "renown scholar and traveler", so you'd think that it would be informative, full of diagrams, maps, and figures. Unfortunately, it is a bit of a letdown.
The way the information is presented doesn't help. You either get text or an image. Diagrams are rare and simple, and are scaled to be weirdly small. Main text margins are suitable, but certain sections with green backgrounds don't have any margins, making it painful to read. Kaltsit's notes are a nice reprieve from all the reading, but is still not the best because she's Kaltsit. Image descriptions sometimes have a level of snark that doesn't seem appropriate given that the author is an academic. The landscape-mode timeline is bizzarely bland with only text. I'd expect a bit more colour and maybe a few images. In general, the way the writing and non-writing bits are presented are bland and formulaic. It would do better with more formatting options and layout options. Let's move on to the text itself.
In-universe, while you do not expect anyone to be a jack-of-all-trades (master of one), I'd expect certain topics to either be present with a certain amount of content, or not at all. As a scholar, wishy-washy words like "appears to" (page 3), "is still unknown" (page 3), "However, much work remains to be done" (page 24) should not be anywhere near the book. If you don't know about a thing, either do some research on it and cite your sources, or don't include the topic at all. Note that this mostly applies to earlier chapters about Originium, since the topic is not as well known (though it should be).
Overall, the writing is somewhat enjoyable sometimes, and somewhat unbearable at other times. The occasional respites from reading the main text is usually reading a different text that feels the same and doesn't provide respite at all. Diagrams and images that should provide larger respites from reading are few and far between, and are basically filler and are quickly glanced over.
I only slightly regret this purchase.
Zero to Production in Rust
While I do know how to write code, setting up infrastructure along with best practices are hard to come by, and I don't have much experience with that. This book gives a small program (a server with a connected database) and shows how you should set everything up to minimize pain. A lot of the advice is applicable to other systems (making the easiest way the correct way of doing things), and I can't wait to start applying them in my job! Or rather, I wish I could start applying them to my job.