Skip to main content

2016 Books


I read 28 Books in 2016.


2016 favorite:

"Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania," by Erik Larson



2016 Most Educational:
"The Right To Vote The Contested History Of Democracy In The United States," by Alexander Keyssar


2016 Best Horror:
"A Head Full of Ghosts," by Paul Tremblay

2016 Best Cybersecurity:

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win," by Gene Kim

I recommend:
"Anathem" by Neal Stephenson
"The Magicians" by Lev Grossman
"Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson

Personal Challenge Complete:
All eight books of Stephen King's Dark Tower fantasy epic.

Goodreads (Facebook for book Lovers):
Check out my bookshelves on Goodreads - where you can see what your friends are reading.
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2016?cc=4f19e7eb


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Books You Should Have Read By Now

When I started Terebrate back in January 2010, I always intended it to be a place to put my book reviews on whatever I was reading. Since then, a lot has happened in my professional life. I changed jobs, twice. I presented my collection of cybersecurity book reviews at the annual RSA Conference and suggested that the cybersecurity community ought to have a list of books that we all should have read by now. My current employer, Palo Alto Networks, liked the idea so much that they decided to sponsor it. We ended up creating the the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame  for cybersecurity books. We formed a committee of cybersecurity experts from journalists, CISOs, researchers and marketing people who were all passionate about reading. My collection became the the candidate list and for the past two years, the committee, with the help of community voting, has selected books from the candidate list to be inducted into something we are calling the Cybersecurity Canon. It has be

Book Review: The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (1989) by Clifford Stoll

Executive Summary This book is a part of the cyber security canon. If you are a cyber security professional, you should have read this by now. Twenty years after it was published, it still has something of value to say on persistent cyber security problems like information sharing, privacy versus security, cyber espionage and the intelligence dilemma. Rereading it after 20 years, I was pleasantly surprised to learn how pertinent that story still is. If you are not a cyber security professional, you will still get a kick out of this book. It reads like a spy novel, and the main characters are quirky, smart, and delightful. Introduction The Cuckoo’s Egg is my first love. Clifford Stoll published it in 1989, and the first time I read it, I devoured it over a weekend when I should have been writing my grad school thesis. It was my introduction to the security community and the idea that somebody had to protect these new-fangled gadgets called computers. Back in those days, author

Book Review: Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen (2011)

Executive Summary Kingpin tells the story of the rise and fall of a hacker legend: Max Butler. Butler is most famous for his epic, hostile hacking takeover in August 2006 of four of the criminal underground’s prominent credit card forums. He is also tangentially associated with the TJX data breach of 2007. His downfall resulted from the famous FBI sting called Operation Firewall where agent Keith Mularski was able to infiltrate one of the four forums Butler had hacked: DarkMarket. But Butler’s transition from pure white-hat hacker into something gray—sometimes a white hat, sometimes a black hat—is a treatise on the cyber criminal world. The author of Kingpin , Kevin Poulsen, imbues the story with lush descriptions of how Butler hacked his way around the Internet and pulls the curtain back on how the cyber criminal world functions. In much the same way that Cuckoo's Egg reads like a spy novel, Kingpin reads like a crime novel. Cyber security professionals might know the