2024 Year book review

This is also for the lost years during the covid/baby raising time where I barely read anything.

Order is chronological, all the ratings can be found here

The Fountains of Paradise

Arthur C. Clarke

Read from 2020 to 2021

Because of happenings it took me a year to read this book, but I still fully enjoyed it. Great story, great writing, I really like books from Clarke a lot I think.

The 2017 list of books I have read

As every year here is the list of books I have read. I would call this year the “Iain M. Banks Year” because most of the books I read were from this author. I really like the Culture Universe. Some classics in between and some heavy non fiction books make this year a very enjoyable reading experience.

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

What better to start off the year with some really good classic. And The Sun Also Rises is pretty much on top of it. Being my third novel from Hemingway, I enjoyed this a lot. The prose, the story, everything in it makes it really wonderful. Not much to complain about. I just recommend it.

The 2016 list of books I have read

This years books have a strange mixture in it. Some really short ones like “Neverwhere” and one really long one like Infinite Jest.

There was no really bad book this year where I totally regretted reading it, but the “Kingkiller Chronicle” is very close to disappointment. Only worse was “The Magicians”.

On the other hand the last book of the “Three Body” problem was exceptional good.

The 2015 list of books I have read

Another year closes and another year with a lot of interesting books. Overall it felt better than last year where I read some real big duds.

This time I also read some really interesting books from authors that I would normally never read. My first non western sci-fi novel with the “Three Body” Series from Liu Cixin. Amazing read. I also stumbled on one of my top books this year “The City & The City” by China Miléville. A really surprising book. Not to forget “Proxima” and “American Gods” as some top highlights this year.

The 2014 list of books I have read

2014 is coming to an end pretty soon, so it is time again for the year “Books I have read” list. This year was a bit of a bummer and is currently averaging out to 3.6pt out of 5pt compared to the 4.1pts last year. Some duds I read, some really big duds.

On the positives side I read some really great books, like “Wind, Sand and Stars” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert A. Heinlein, “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, “Dispatches” by Michael Herr and my Top Book this year “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse. I also read my second Kafka since I read one in High school. So not all was bad.

Python: Output Formatting Double Byte Characters'

This is a copy from Medium: https://medium.com/@gullevek/python-output-formatting-double-byte-characters-6d6d18d04be3

Everything below still stands as of Python 3.9/10/11

But I updated the code below to be compatible with current Python rules

Gist with updated version is here:

https://gist.github.com/gullevek/4d2a5175c23a37d4b0e7fa2db26437a4

If you want to print out some data to the terminal and have it perfectly align and formatted with double byte characters (aka Chinese, Japanese or Korean) it will pretty much be impossible with the standard format in Python as this goes on the length of the string but not on the actual width of the string.