Internal Time divides the discussion of time into 24 chapters. It presents a number of fictional and semi-factual stories of people in various "odd time" situations as it discusses how time impacts us in our lives. The human clock is almost set to 24 hours. However, there are slight differences, and the body relies on external queues (sunrise) to guide us on the daily schedule. Teenagers tend to arise later, and gradually arise earlier each year until late middle age. (Women actually start this schedule a little ahead of men.) Birds use an internal clock in order to guide their long migrations. Some people may have conditions that cause them to wake up much earlier than normal. Without sensory perceptions, it can be hard to accurately keep track of time.Time is quite an interesting phenomenon. Mammals may have even evolved to dominate the night (since the air, sea and land were already taken.) Being warm blooded allowed them to be active when other cold blooded animals lacked energy. Later, mammals went back to the day time. However, man was still created innovations like houses and light to continue to dominate the night.
Programming Interviews Exposed is one of the earliest of the genre of "programming interview books". I had read the third edition, though the fourth edition is now available. It covers the entire interview process from job search to salary negotiation and the actual interview. For coding interviews, it discusses good practices and provides some sample questions and types. However, the goal is not to provide a library of possible questions, but rather to cover some high level topics and guide the thinking process. In doing so, it does a good job of helping you to mentally prepare for the programming interview, including some of the curve balls that may be thrown.
Shawshank Redemption is a Stephen King novella that was later made in to a movie. A ton of King books have been made into movies, yet very few have been bona fide box office hits. However, they are often cheap to produce, so the low revenue may be justified by the low expenses. The story is narrated by Red, a convicted murderer who grew to know another convicted murderer, Andy, in prison. Andy was a well-to-do banker who continued to claim his innocence and refused to let prison get the best of him. He had to endure many horrible situations (which were described too graphically), but always fought through and refused to adopt the "institutionalized" mentality. He used his knowledge and skills to help the inmates and the guards (including providing account support for various scams.) Alas, the staff found him too valuable, and when evidence surfaced from another inmate that would identify the true murderer, the inmate was quickly transferred away. In the end, Andy realized he would have to help himself, and managed to carry out an escape on his own. In doing so, he never forgot his friends. The story is very engaging and hard to put down. One theme in the novella is that prison helps to make prisoners. After being institutionalized for a long period of time, people have adapted to the "rules" of prison life, no matter how harsh they are. Freedom can appear to be a new burden as it presents new challenges and new decisions that were not required while incarcerated. (Red in particular had trouble adjusting to his "new" life after gaining parole.) This contrasted significantly with Andy and his strength to avoid letting his sole get institutionalized.
Liberals met the election of Donald Trump with "fear". The author attempts to analyze her own fear as well as the roll of fear in human society and development. She had grown up in a conservative "by the bootstraps" family, and then married into judaism, adopting the social justice tenants into her life, and retaining the identity even after divorcing. 
History has been understood to some extent long before Franklin and his kit flying. There was some confusion in how it worked (with Amber and electricity seeming similar.) This audiobook presents a quick run through of the discovery and understanding of electricity. A basic understanding was used for a traveling sideshow performances. (Of course - entertainment is the first venue for new tech.) The audiobook provides dramatized voicing to help enliven the history. Unfortunately, it comes across as just a rushed recitation of facts rather than a coherent story.
When posits the thesis that "when" you do something can be as a more important than how you do it (or what you do.) Sometimes, bad timing can result in significantly different outcomes. Somebody that begins their career during a recession is likely to end up significantly behind somebody that started during an economic boom. Similarly, time of day can impact the decision making process. (Perhaps the Lucitania was sunk because the captain was not thinking well during the afternoon.) Different people have different times of peak decision making ability. Finding the time can help to make better decisions. Naps can also be very helpful in increasing productivity. (The author laments the ending of the Spanish siesta.) People like to hear the "bad news" first before hearing the good - yet we tend to preface bad news by telling the good. There are many other areas that can be helped by paying head to "when" things are done.
Oathbringer is a long book, even by Brandon Sanderson standards. The story centers around the arrival of the voidbringers, and the negative implications on society. The world consists of humans as well as other living beings with different attributes. In this universe, eye color determines social class. Even after a great upheaval that would negate any previous social standings, people would still revert back to their old ways. 
Radical Candor explores the best ways to give feedback to others in constructive ways. It uses a few different quadrants to identify types of employee trajectories as well as the means of giving feedback. "Radical Candor" is feedback given in a truthful, empathetic manner. An alternative is being blunt and mean without being empathetic. This is actually preferable to being too empathetic, but not telling people what they are doing wrong. (You may think you are being kind, but this often just postpones the big nasty confrontation and doesn't give the person the chance to change.) Employees trajectories use different axes of performance and growth. Some employees want to become excellent at what they are doing and do not want to grow to other positions, while others want to grow. Different life events can impact the phase that an employee is in. Bosses need to understand that and give appropriate feedback.
Their Eyes Were Watching God centers on the life of Janie Crawford, an African American woman who wanted to live her own life. She was raised by her grandmother Grandma, whoworked as a nanny for a white family. Janie did not realize that she herself has not white until she couldn't find herself in a picture of the kids playing. Even so, she did have some "white" features which would play a roll in her later life. Grandma had grown up as a slave and lived through the civil war. She longed to have the ability to sit on the porch and do nothing and desired that of her granddaughter. She wanted to make sure Janie was properly married off soon after she "Became a woman". Janie was soon married to her first husband. She had hoped to love him, but their relationship never grew. He wanted her to be able to work hard and help on the farm. One day while he was out another man appeared that showed ambition and wanted to treat her "right". She eventually left with him and went to a "negro city". This man would go to become the mayor and they would run the store and live the life of luxury. However, Janie missed that chance to talk with common folk. After her husband died, she met a younger man named "Teacake". They would eventually get married and spend some time living in the Everglades working as harvesting crew. This marriage was much more down to earth. They were respected working class and made friends with many people. During this phase, she encounters a "white black" lady who respects Janie because of her paler skin color and "whiter" features and talks down to the more crude darker skinned blacks like Teacake. Janie doesn't buy into this argument. One day a hurricane comes through. They ignore the warning signs, and then make a mad dash to flea the rising lake at the last minute. In the process a dog bites Teacake. This leads to him coming down with Rabies and going mad. He raises a gun to shoot Janie. She has another gun and ends up killing him. She is acquitted in the trial, with many of the black audience muttering that a black woman or a white can get away with anything.
What is time? That is a question the Alan Burdick tries to answer in Why Time Flies. Dictionaries often include a somewhat circular definition of time. We know what it is and we can sense its passage, yet it doesn't seem to be a physical sense like touch or smell. It feels that time passes slower when we our younger, but then speeds up as we get older. Some studies have "proven" this, yet there have also been flaws in the studies. "New" events do appear to take longer than repeated events. This may be do to the more resources that are spent processing the newness than are needed for reprocessing the old. The brain also does a lot of "tricks" to make the real world appear as we expect it. When there is a small delay between the time you touch a key and the character appears on a screen, the brain correlates those with being instantaneous events. If a character then appears instantly upon keypress, the brain will interpret that as happened. "Time" may pass in an orderly manner. However, their are a lot of "tricks" that the brain pulls in our interpretation of the passing of events. This book does a good job in investigating many of these tricks and pointing out that the science behind time is still in its infant stage.
In Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole, eleven-year-old Stella Rodriquez has been struggling with the loss of her father. She attempts to visit Carl Sagan at Nasa in order to have sounds of her father put on the "golden record". (The book takes place in the 1970s.) However, a small black hole follows her home. She gradually housebreaks the black hole. In the process, she discovers that anything eaten by the black hole is "erased" from ever having existed. She decides to use this to her advantage to remove all the "difficult" things form her life - including the memories of her father. Alas, her new puppy accidentally enters the black hole. She decides to try to rescue him. In the process she finds that bizarre things happen to things in the black hole (like the discarded sweaters coming "alive" and treating her diary as a religious text.) Through this process, she finally comes to peace with her father's death and her relationship with her family.
Getting to Yes presents "principled negotiation" as a negotiating strategy. Key to the strategy is a focus on interests and objective criteria rather than specific positions. Often "positional bargaining" can bring other sides to dig in and attempt to save face with their position. Instead, a principled negotiator will attempt to separate the person from the problem and acknowledge the common interests and let the solution suggest itself. Key to carrying out the negotiation is knowledge of "Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement". This differs from a "bottom line" in that it allows things to be adapted based on the result of negotiation. New ideas may be discovered during the process of negotiating that lead to solutions that were not intended earlier. Getting to Yes is filled with anecdotes of successful negotiating in action. Keeping your cool and resisting the urge to go into attack mode is an important part of the process. As the opposite party feels respected, they are less likely to come out with guns blazing. They can become more of a willing partner rather than an adversary. However, to succeed, they must also feel that the end result is valuable to them. If you come up with a result that is too beneficial towards you, then you may find yourself operating from a weaker standing in the future.
Pale Fire is written as a scholarly annotated poem by a dead poet. The "author" (Charles Kinbote) is a scholar neighbor of the dead poet, Shade. It consists of an introduction by the author, the 999 line poem and the commentary of the poem. The introduction gives you a clue that there is something else going on here. The "author" is very full of himself, and feels overly impressed that he is friends with Shade. The poem itself is a very basic, juvenile work. Nothing that would be really "good" on its own. 
The Nordic countries tend to show up near the top of well-being surveys. What can we learn from them for our own culture? As a big fan of Nordic culture, I expected to buy into everything in this book. Alas, I found myself being extra critical. Some of the ideas seem pretty clear, if counter intuitive. You want to increase women's pay gap relative to men? Provide for better paternity leave. 
After the discussions of Henry James in 
At times Moby Dick reads as a history of all things whaling. There are long descriptions of the different types of whales, the accuracy of whale's portrayal in art, the common procedures of whaling vessels and more. (He was convincing in saying that the whale should be considered a fish, even though it has lungs. This goes against are modern way of classifying, but is not made in ignorance, so much as a "sea-centric" means of grouping. 
Ace the Programming Interview is the "coding interview" book that always seems to be available at the library. I have never seen it recommended by a big tech company for interview prep. It was written by a European and has more of a British Focus. It also feels dated. 
Empathy is a key to raising a child today. How do we help children to develop empathy? The book provides a number of anecdotes (often in a classroom setting) showing how the research on empathy can be put in practice. Empathetic Children have a moral compass and think of "us" instead of "Them". They work for the betterment of everyone. Alas, there is a great tendency of children to focus on themselves and seek after their own personal desire fulfillment. It can require a lot of work to help teach them empathy. 
Soonish is a humourous take on the technology we can expect to see in the near future. It focuses on "almost there" technologies (like fusion) and describes how close (or far away) we are from seeing them in our lives. The book is made to be easily accessible and includes plenty of brief cartoons illustrating the points. Each of the sections contains a description of the current state as well as where we will be going and concerns we may have. Each technology appears to be thoroughly researched via literature review as well as personal interviews with key contributors. In addition, the final chapter includes shorter summaries of technologies didn't quite make the cut for the book.
The humble shipping container helped to usher in giant changes in the world economy. Box does an excellent job of presetning the history of the container. However, the writing at times seems to jump around, perhaps attempting to provide too many facts at once. Prior to the adoption of a standard container, the cost of loading and unloading a ship could exceed (in time and expense) the cost of transporting the good across the sea. There was little incentive to use larger or more efficient ships because they would just be bogged down in port. Containerization attempts were started with railroads. However, these ended up getting held back due to regulation. (The railroads were not allowed to charge cheaper rates even though the containers added to economies of scale.) 
Reading Lolita in Tehran is memoir by Azar Nafisis describing the author's experience reading Lolita and other books of English literature in Iran during the time of the Islamic revolution. She was born in Iran, then educated in the United States and returned to teach in Iran right as the revolution was taking place. At first, the revolution looked like it would be a positive experience. However, it later became more totalitarian, eventually shutting down the university and leading to her leaving the country. She does note that even the participants in the revolution were complex people. (At one time, the more radical Islamists would defend her while the liberals were silent.) She brought with her some western sensibilities that she wanted to live in Iran. Alas, the revolution would spin from crackdown to liberalization leaving the life of a westernized intellectual precarious. (It was interesting that they would use "Switzerland" as the example of a lax moral state.) The youth were often the ones to provide the muscle behind the revolutionary effort. (Hmm... Are the professor shoutdowns the first step of that in the US?) 
Negotiations over dollars and contracts can be fairly straightforward. Each side wants to get ahead and is willing to give and take a little to get what they desire. However, when emotions and deeply held values are at at stake, things become much more thorny. How do you negotiate when each side has "unchangeable" values that must be respected. Daniel Shapiro provides clues to help us recognize different "non-negotiables" and to successfully work with them. He describes many situations that he has dealt with. In one example, he divides a group up into 6 small groups. Each group much come to consensus on a number of difficult questions (such as should the death penalty be allowed). After each group has come to agreement, all the groups must come together and agree to a consensus within a few negotiating rounds or the earth will be destroyed. Despite only recently adopting their group values, each individual tribe held to them. In almost all cases, the earth ended up being destroyed before the team could reach a conclusion. In another role-play, a group was divided into groups, with one group gradually accumulating more wealth in the came. The "haves" were pulled out to a fancy area to plan the rules going forward. The "have nots" mutinied and refused to even listen to the plan of the "haves" - even though there plan was to ensure that the have-nots benefited more. They saw the group as "them" and could not trust them. They were out of tribe.
Why should we read Moby Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick gives us a number of reasons in this short book. It serves as a nice intro, giving us background in Mellville's life and times as well as the book itself. When it was published, Moby Dick was not very successful. However, after the civil war, and especially after the great world wars, the novel increased in popularity due to its timeless themes. Melville was also a stickler for details giving the novel additional value as a history of a bygone era and profession. Moby book is a long book, and Philbrick acknowledges you can get plenty out of abridgments and other versions. Now, I want to read it.