i wanted to write a little something about the books i am currently reading (as of January 2025), both technical and fiction. Don't expect a thorough review, i generally haven't made it past half of those. Some titles are in French, of course, because i am afflicted with a rare condition called "being French". It's terminal. Look it up online. Take some time to open a tab on Deepl as well.

Anyways, here it is.

IPv6: Théorie et Pratique

by Gizèle Cizault (O'Reilly) [9-782841-770854]

This book essentially goes over all of the technical and theoretical aspects of IPv6. It's a technical book, unsurprisingly, so a lot of it for me so far feels like a long list of various information about many aspects of the protocol. Getting into this book is made much harder by the fact that i have the second edition, which was published in 1999.

Fun fact: Gizèle Cizault does not exist. It's a pen name of the thirty or so researchers and academics who contributed to the G6 work group that authored the book, among other things. This happens more often than you'd think.

Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools

by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company) [9-780201-100884]

It's the dragon book.

If you don't know what the dragon book is, it's essentially the reference for every single (good) university class on compilers. At least the foundation. It goes over everything from what constitutes a token, to how to build parsers, to how to turn those into automata, and so on. Thing is, however, that the edition i have was printed in 1985. Compiler research has somewhat evolved since then, and the last edition, in the 2000s, does not go into great length into things like polyhedral compilers or how the rise of Symmetric MultiProcessor (SMP) and parallelism came into play in the late 90s.

But it's a good read. If you ever need a complete, thorough reference on the basics of how to make a compilers, and don't want to just open the LLVM codebase and inflict yourself with man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

Oh and it's also ridiculously expensive because it's technical and a class requirement.

Réseaux

by Andrew Tanenbaum (3rd edition) (translated by Jean-Alain Hernandez & René Joy) (InterÉdition Paris) [9-782729-606435]

Another old technical french book, this one from the 80s. Andrew Tanenbaum, who is kind of a big deal in the game of operating systems, essentially goes over all of the technical aspects of networking from the standpoint of someone who, in the 80s, might have had to use a computer to do technical things with it and the network, but also implement new things.

That book usually sits on my desk at work, as it comes from the library of the lab i work at. i go through it when i feel utter despair at the idea of doing the actual things i get paid for. Kind of like the next book in this post.

Système d'exploitation (2nd edition)

by Andrew Tanenbaum (translated by Jean-Luc Bourbon, Jean-Alain Hernandez & René Joly) (Pearsons Education France) [9-782744-070020]

Same deal as the previous book, except this is about operating systems in general. A lot of the principles described in there are still somewhat applicable, and some of those are still used in CS classes. This is not susprisingg considering that CS education tends to only talk about UNIX-like monolithic operating system kernels.

House of Leaves

by Mark Z. Danielewsky (2nd edition) (Pantheon Books) [9-780375-703768]

House of Leaves is a book about darkness, and sound.

House of leaves is a book about the life of a man that gets ruined by his progressively deteriorating mental health, increasing obsession with a delusional, gargantuous project, and the condition of the world around him beating him down until he is a delirious, shallow shell of a person.

House of Leaves is a book by Zampanó, who dies before the events of the book start taking place. In it, he captures the lives of people who have been touched by a small compendium of several pieces of film, writing, and interviews, detailing the story of the Navidson family, and, especially, head of the family William Navidson. The Navidsons moved into a quiet little house with the hope of being able to mend their marriage that's falling apart. That works, up until the family faces impossible geometry in the house in the form of walls that keep changing in length, alcoves and hallways suddenly appearing in the house , and the house revealing a path into a deep maze defying the physical world that swallows everything and everyone living in the house .

House of Leaves is one of the last possessions held by Will Navidson as he finds himself losing hope to escape the impossible darkness underneath the house . The other one is a box of matches.

I actually finished reading that book while this post was sitting in the queue, but i still included it, because it is a fascinating piece of literature.

The King in Yellow

by Robert W. Chambers [Project Gutenberg]

Another horror classic. A collection of short horror stories, and the most famous one is the first one (the only one i have read so far).

Imagine this book, that when you read it, confers you with unspeakable horrors. The narrator is unreliable, the story is just plain odd in the way that makes the horror very subtle and diffused throughout the narration.

This book is more notoriously known these days for being featured in the 2022 hit videogame Signalis.

Rust Atomics & Locks (1st edition)

by Mara Bos (O'Reilly Media) [9-781098-119447]

This book goes over all of the knowledge you need to handle parallelism and especially locking in Rust. It is written by Mara Bos of the rust library team. It does a very good job of introducing these problems from the start to people who already know how to write some Rust. It starts with the fact that we have threads that exist in the language, how to use them, and then everything that can go wrong when you try to manipulate data from multiple threads, and especially how to help that with locks. The rest of the book goes over how these things are implemented, and guides you towards creating small toy implementations of these locks.

Funnily enough, i started reading that book after coming back from Kernel Recipes 2024, and had the pleasant surprise of discovering that i had lunch there with the guy who wrote the foreword. Pretty neat fella who talked to me about RCU.

Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber (Les Liens qui Réveillent) [9-791020-907363]

This book extends the thesis that Graeber first put out into the world in the early 2010s: there are entire lines of work that are designed solely to keep the workers busy doing things that are depressingly useless and that even they cannot convince themselves are useful, even though they are required to keep the outward appearance that they are. Graeber is an anthropologist, and it is kind of fascinating for me to read a book written by an academic in such a distinct domain of research. Human sciences bring themselves to such different ways of presenting your thesis and the supporting evidence.

The book is essentially segmented as follows: what are bullshit jobs, what are the archetypes of bullshit jobs, why having a bullshit job hurts, what is it like to have a bullshit job, why do they keep proliferating, why is nobody doing anything about it, and what can we do about that problem. My bookmark tells me i'm somewhere between "what are the archetypes of bullshit jobs" and "why does it hurt so much to have one".

Des Électeurs Ordinaires: Enquête sur la normalisation de l'extrême droite

by Félicien Faury (Seuil) [9-782021-518948]

This book is a sociological study of a sample of people who are in favour of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. Most interestingly, the author chose to study people in an area of France that is not usually talked about for its high adherence to far-right ideologies. It is often thought that only former industrial regions ravaged by globalization were in favour of the party. Consequently, people only focused on these demographics repeat far-right talking points linked to loss of job opportunities and stagnating paychecks, somewhat justifying these ideas, which in reality are just masks used to mask more nefarious policies, which they also often justify with the first talking points (e.g. "migrants are stealing your jobs we should close the border").

As Faury shows progressively in the book, what really drives adherence to the RN in south-eastern France is not, in fact, just a fear of economic insecurity. The general take-away of the book is that a culture of racism and lack of diversity in the demographics, mixed with the feeling that people are not doing as well as they should in the social hierarchy, leads them to need to blame someone. These people look for a category of others, who are not them, who they feel like they can get away with blaming for the failure of the system that was rigged against all but the richest. Those people are often migrants, the poor, the disabled, irrespective of whether or not the people studied actually encounter them in their daily lives or not. The RN also points at migrants, queers, the poor, the disabled, etc, and says "those are the people responsible for the system not working how it should, who are stealing your job, stealing your money, going against your values". They promise to do something about it, which is more than any liberal or right-wing government has in the last 30 years or so, and that's all that voters need to hear.