I’m cheating a bit to list a trilogy as a “favorite book”, but The Broken Earth trilogy is best read as a trilogy – my favorite entry was the last in the sequence, but this was in large part because the first two books set it up to close with a strong ending. Unlike almost every book I’ve read in the past several years, after reading Four Thousand Weeks, I immediately wanted to flip back to the beginning and read through it again. This book covers much of the same ground as Designing Data Intensive Applications, which was one of my favorite books I read in 2019.