📚 Books I read in May 2026

A lot of fiction books in this issue, and a recommended reference to help you prepare for behavioural interviews

Reading is callisthenics for your brain.

Reading good books is a great way to broaden your knowledge and perspectives.

Reflecting on the books I read every month helps me cement the key learnings from each one of them.

What’s better than recommending someone else a good book?

Recommending two, three, or five good books!

Here we are with the April edition of the books I read last month!

If you end up reading one of them, please let me know in the comments section.

Before we get into the four books from May, a small announcement and a bit of housekeeping.

I have decided to stop including Amazon affiliate links in books for reasons related to editorial line coherence and use those opportunities to promote alternative actors in the space.

While I’m still trying to get ahold of someone over at AwesomeBooks, my go-to place for buying new and used books, links in this issue will point to the books’ pages over at HardCover. If you’ve never heard of it, let’s just say that it solves the same problem space as Goodreads, just a lot better¹.

Secondly, the housekeeping. If all goes well in the upcoming weeks, I’ll finalise the move over to Ghost. If you want to help and support the work that goes into writing this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

Thank you to David, Julio and Pieter for joining the ranks of active supporters!

With that out of the way, let’s have a look at the four books from last month

💫 Book Highlight: Mastering Behavioural Interviews by Austen McDonald

Mastering Behavioural Interviews, by Austen McDonald

287 pages, First Published: December 9th, 2025

Austen McDonald reached out months ago asking if I’d be interested in getting a free copy of the book², and then writing a review of it in the newsletter³. I obviously accepted, and finally last month I got a chance at reading it in full.

This book is exactly what the title says: it’s a detailed guide on how to approach and hopefully succeed the “Behavioural Interview” that is often part of the interview process, especially in big tech companies.

But what exactly is a behavioural interview? In the words of Austen, it’s the following:

The behavioural interview is a non-technical round where the interviewer, often the hiring manager, discusses your previous experience to assess your fitness for their open role. It’s the culture fit interview, the soft skills interview, the “Tell me more about a time when…” interview.

Austen is clearly very experienced in how to conduct such interviews, having interviewed and hired an insane amount of people himself through his career. The book doesn’t assume any prior expertise or knowledge and goes from basic/foundational topics to more advanced ones.

It is clearly targeted at people applying for tech jobs in product, design, data or engineering. It’s hinted at in the book’s subtitle, The Guide to Storytelling in Tech, but it’s worth calling out. You might be able to generalise some of the concepts and advice, especially around frameworks and preparation, but all the examples presented in the book are very tech-specific.

There is a second assumption, though, a bit more subtle and implicit at the beginning and becoming clearer as you go through the book: the frame of reference is not just tech but big tech specifically. Assumptions around how interview processes are structured, normed and made as objective as possible through standardised processes and written feedback are one key element.

As I like to say to people, while big tech represents the biggest chunk of revenues in the tech space and is over-represented in media and public discourse, big tech companies are actually the exception rather than the norm in technology.

So, while this book includes a lot of very valuable insights and tips that you can internalise and master to become a lot better in the storytelling of your career, be mindful that these might not apply or generalise well to the type of company you’re applying to. Especially if you’re not in the US or applying for startups / scale-ups, where the process is a lot messier and, unfortunately, subjective. Some companies try to copy processes they read about online but lack the depth and discipline to do that effectively. A few times in the book Austen explicitly says that he’s assuming the interviewer is prepared, structured, and well-intentioned. This might not always be the case.

Furthermore, while the behavioural interview was very popular in tech companies in the past decade, post-Covid and especially with the obsession with GenAI of recent years, I’ve heard reports from people going through interviews where the whole soft-skills department had been significantly de-emphasised in favour of basically knowing how to do shit with agents.

So, while I do agree with most of the recommendations and principles Austen is putting forward in his book, I’m personally worried and unsure whether these will still be as valued in the upcoming years. But this industry has been a crazy pendulum for such a long time; chances are that in the post-apocalyptic world, once the enthusiasms around token burning have settled, the industry will rediscover the importance of soft skills and human-to-human communication.

Finally, there’s one detail that has been bugging me when reading this book, and I believe it has to do with cultural differences, semantics and individual values.

Throughout the book, Austen often makes the (good) case for never lying in interviews. The arguments in favour of them tend to be mostly practical and opportunistic, i.e., you’ll be caught and all hell will break loose, and never on the principle that lying is simply dishonest. That’s not a dealbreaker, as it's down to how much each one of us values principles over benefits/drawbacks.

But the problem doesn’t end there, unfortunately.

In certain parts of the book, while openly discouraging the practice of lying, Austen recommends “dressing up” the reality in a way that for many people—myself included—could be considered lying. Such as suggesting to not recognise you’ve been moved to a different project to avoid raising suspicions and telling instead that “I moved to a different project”. Or when it suggests somehow making up the story that you “wanted to work in a different field than company X” rather than acknowledging personal issues.

These are all small and benign examples, but that doesn’t change the fundamental issue: the definition of lying/telling the truth is sometimes fuzzy, and I found myself disagreeing with some of the advice in that specific area.

I know there are cultural and personal elements that influence how people relate to the concept of honesty and the different nuances the word ‘lie’ can take in different contexts. So, take this for what it is: my interpretation differs from the one put forward by the author; hence, I would not personally recommend some of the suggestions when it comes to dealing with complex/delicate truths.

That said, if you’re planning to go through a round of interviews soon, I do believe that you’d find this book very helpful in helping you prepare with a method and structure, rather than winging it.

📚 Other Books I Read in March

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

391 pages, First Published: October 5th, 2024

For some unsurprising reasons, in the past months I happened to see this book mentioned or recommended by various people while commenting on the current geopolitical landscape, particularly in the US. It’s a historical fiction book that tells a what-if story of a major event from the past going in a different way than it actually did.

In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth tells us the fictional story of what could have happened in the US if, in the fall of 1940, Charles Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Roosevelt at the presidential elections, told from a young Philip, the 8-year-old son of a Jewish family from Newark. While Roosevelt was the hero of the Democrats, the president who helped the country out of the Great Depression, Lindbergh was a famous flight pilot with sympathy for Hitler and the Reich, someone who had expressed anti-Semitic thoughts, accusing the American Jews of trying to drag the US into WWII out of personal interests.

This book reminded me of The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, though the similarities are mainly related to the historical context and the choice of an alternative path to the one taken in the events leading up to WWII and after it. In fact, those two books are profoundly different. And I loved both.

The Plot Against America does an excellent job at presenting most of the tragic events from the eyes and the understanding of an 8-year-old boy. In that sense, it reminded me more of The Tin Drum than any dystopian science-fiction book on WWII. Thanks to this book and the appendix including real chronicles of the main characters, I learnt a lot more about the tensions that were breaking apart American society in those years, when most of the drama seemed to unfold in Europe. In particular, I learnt a great deal about how much Henry Ford sympathised with the Reich and antisemitic movements⁴.

But why have so many people referred to this book in recent months? After reading it, it becomes quite clear: what’s happening with the US today, with an anti-democratic leader with a lot of affinities with extreme-right-wing politics, resonates profoundly and almost eerily with the imaginary scenario depicted by Roth in this 2004 book. I’d recommend anyone to pick it up anytime soon. It’s long, it might take a while to read, and it includes a lot of digressions and anecdotes that are the essence of literature, but its core history lesson is as relevant as ever today.

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton

331 pages, First Published: September, 1st, 1969

I’d never read a book from Michael Crichton until last month. I’ve never been too interested in blockbusters’/bestsellers’ names, especially as many of them tend to write the same book multiple times, changing the title and little more.

After hearing a lot about Crichton and his writing discipline from other writers, I decided to overcome my prejudices and picked up a digital copy of The Andromeda Strain. While he had been publishing books prior to it, this is the first one that Crichton published under his real name. Apparently that had to do with his fear of losing credibility as a medical practitioner if people found out he was also a writer. I love how people had different moral standards in the 1960s⁵.

That said, I found the book interesting in many ways, but the resolution felt very underwhelming. I won’t include any spoilers, but the whole thing made me wonder if Crichton was running up against the manuscript deadline and had to wrap things up in a half day. It felt like a missed opportunity to expand on the medical and scientific part of the book.

That said, I enjoyed the rest of it. The characters were well defined and with their own contradictions. Science and technology were mixed in a good balance, especially considering this book was published in 1969.

That doesn’t necessarily make me a fan of Crichton, but I might read some other books in the future. Especially when I’ll feel the need for something light and engaging.

1984 by George Orwell

1984, by George Orwell

336 pages, First Published: June 8th, 1949

I recently found a second-hand copy of 1984⁶, and decided it was a good reason to re-read this classic of political science fiction. I read it many years ago in an Italian translation, and that gave me enough of a reason to read it again, this time in English.

By this point it shouldn’t be a surprise that the current geopolitical environment also served as an inspiration for going back to this old book, first published in 1949, in the early days of the post-WWII world.

It had been so long since I first read it, maybe 20 years or more, that I had forgotten a lot of details from the plot, and this made the whole experience even more enjoyable. I have effectively rediscovered it and realised how much my memory of it was blurred and full of gaps.

I enjoyed every page of it. At many times during the reading I thought about passages that would make for perfect quotes to understand today’s world. The one I decided to pick refers to one of the key activities that contributed to the Party’s ability to ensure its hegemony: the practice of rewriting the past and cancelling all traces of real events. What follows is an excerpt from a dialogue between Winston and Julia, the two main characters of the book.

He tried to make her understand. ‘This was an exceptional case. It wasn’t just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realise that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has beeb re-written, every picture has been re-painted, every statue and street building has been re-named, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’

If that passage reminded you of the endless present of modern-day social networks, some of the most ridiculous moves from Donald Trump, or Elon Musk’s political agenda with his Grokipedia, you’re not alone.

As one of the Party's pillars says, ‘Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.’

So, I guess everyone should read 1984 before it gets rewritten by those who control the past to make it look like the Party was woke and that, instead of doublethink, they were practising DEI⁷.

If there is one thing I’m grateful to current days’ leaders and oligarchs for, it is their relentless ability to make seemingly old literature as modern as ever.

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1. This is not a sponsored post or an official endorsement. I just like what they’re doing, and promoting alternative players to the big names is something I genuinely like to do. The hardcover links are referral links, which might give me some months of “Plus” subscriptions when people sign up.

2. Austen did indeed send me a free copy, but thanks to the insanity going on with tariffs, I ended up paying the customs more than the actual book price. I guess books will become luxury items soon. Anyways, this is a signed copy, so entirely worth it.

3. If you're an author and would like your book to be covered in this monthly column, please reach out. Chances are I'll be thrilled at the opportunity: fet things get me more excited as free good books :)

4. It seems to be a common trait among rich technocrats

5. What I mean by that is today a surgeon would be very proud of being a renowned Instagram influencer; if anything, the surgeon’s practice would make them slightly ashamed as uncool.

6. This one was published in 1987; unfortunately, I could not find one from three years prior, but I’ll keep searching.

7. Let's not forget that in a X livestream Elon Musk didn't budge and agreed with Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right AfD party, when she declared that Hitler was communist.