This week I started reading On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, a book that has been mentioned a few times by people I usually interview for my weekly podcast as something that is both inspiring and has had a major impact on their lives and careers. After the third or forth time someone mentioned I finally broke down and got myself a copy at the local bookstore.

For someone who has run his own podcast for several years (albeit not generating a lot of content lately), it took me quite some time to actually start listening to podcasts myself. Ironic, I know, but I guess the main reason behind this was because I was always reading code at work and eventually, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't pay attention to what was being said! No matter how interesting the topic being discussed was or how engaging the hosts (or hosts) were, my brain would be so focused on reading code that everything else just turned into white noise.

Another year has gone by and I guess it is time to review the things I set out to do and grade myself on how well (or poorly) I fared. Here are some of my goals for 2015: Read 70 Books Grade: PASS Even though I had a very, very busy year at work, with many releases of Red Hat Satellite 5 and Red Hat Satellite 6 shipped to our customers, I managed to surpass my goal of reading 70 books, finishing the year with a whopping 79 books read!

{.align-left} Read Selected Short Stories by Franz Kafka (review) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (review) A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby (review) Buddha, Vol. 1\: Kapilavastu by Osamu Tezuka (review) The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (review) Reading Billy Budd and Other Stories by Herman Melville Gift Auto da Compadecida by Ariano Suassuma O Lustre by Clarice Lispector O Santo Inquerito by Dias Gomes Dona Sinha e o Filho Padre by Gilberto Freire A Moreninha by Joaquim Manuel de Macedo Todos os Nomes by Jose Saramago O Guarani by Jose de Alencar War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Contos Fluminenses by Machado de Assis Helena by Machado de Assis Quincas Borda by Machado de Assis Bufo & Spallanzani by Rubem Fonseca O Buraco na Parece by Rubem Fonseca Seize the Day by Saul Bellow As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

{.align-left} This August 2015 I took a break from work and spent about 6 days enjoying some R&R down the North Carolina shore with my family. I managed to get through some of the books that were waiting for a long time for me to get to them, as well as try some new authors. Read The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke I forgot where I read about how the short story "The Sentinel" was the inspiration for "2001: A Space Odyssey", but being that I have always considered the latter a great book and movie, I managed to grab a copy of the anthology "The Sentinel" just so that I could read the short story by the same name and see what else Arthur C.

{.align-left} This July 2015 I travelled to the Red Hat office in Brno, Czech Republic to spend some time with my teammates there, and I managed to get a lot of reading done between long plane rides and being jet lagged for many nights :) So I finally managed to finish up some of the books that had been lingering on my ToDo list and even managed to finally read a few of the books that together make up the Chronicles of Narnia, since I had never read them as a kid.

{.align-left} Those of you who know me know that I am a huge book reader and spend most of my free time reading several books at the same time. One could say that reading is one of my passions, and having wasted so many years after high school completely ignoring this passion (in exchange for spending most of my time trying to learn about Linux, get an education, a job and, let's be frank, chasing after girls), I decided that something had to be done about it, and starting around 2008 I 'forced' myself to dedicate at least one solid hour of reading for fun every day.

For my last post of 2014 I wanted to show, with pictures, the books I read and spent so much time with this year. Back in January of 2014 I set out to read 30 books as part of my Reading Challenge. I wanted to focus on reading Brazilian authors early on as I felt that I really needed to learn more about Brazilian literature and this time, read books for fun and not because I was told to back when I was much younger.

Making a quick pit stop to mark this milestone in my professional career: today is my 3-year anniversary at Red Hat! Time has certainly flown by and I really cannot believe that it has been three years since I joined this company. I know it is sort of cliche to say "I can not believe that it has been this long..." and so on and so forth, but it is so true.

Woke up this morning and, as usual, sat down to read the Books section of The New York Times while drinking my coffee. This has become sort of a 'tradition' for me and because of it I have been able to learn about many interesting books, some of which I would not have found out on my own. I also 'blame' this activity to turning my nightstand into a mini-library on its own.