George's Top 10 Reads of 2020

We were all stuck inside most of 2020, so if you’re like me, you probably read a lot last year. You might have heard already that I wrote a book that came out in October. It won an award and is already a best seller. So if you haven’t gotten your copy yet, go check it out.

Top 5 Nonfiction

1. Deadliest Enemy - This is the most important book of 2020. Why? Written in 2017, Osterholm predicts almost exactly what would happen during the pandemic we faced this year. There’s a whole chapter where he does a tabletop exercise on what would happen, predicting shortages, and potential lockdowns. The question is, if we could have predicted it, why didn’t we do something about it? Could we do something about it? Osterholm asks why we aren’t at war with disease instead of just accepting it as a reality…a good question as we go into 2021.
2. Path to the Stars - I had the honor of interviewing Sylvia Acevedo for my book. Acevdeo is the CEO of the Girl Scouts and was a rocket scientist who worked for NASA on the Voyager 2 mission. But the book is about her growing up as a young girl, learning english, and forging the path that would lead to her success. We take a lot of things for granted today, but this book reminded me how much we’ve overcome and how to be strong enough to overcome the challenges we face today.
3. Word by Word - Kory Stamper works for Mirraim Webster and in this delightful   book she gives you an inside look at how dictionaries are written. The best part is seeing how much thought and insight goes into the defitionion of a single word. So if you’re a fan of the word “irregardless” you will find out that it really is a word…take that grammar police. There’s also a whole section very thoughtfully dedicated to the “B” word which was totally amazing.
4. The Order of Time - Admittedly, I may have gotten this audiobook just because it’s narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch. However, Rovelli’s exploration of what time means with everything we’ve come to know about physics made me want to give up my career in cybersecurity and go back to school to study physics. It was also satisfying enough so that I didn’t have to do any of those things.
5. Sandworm - If there’s only one cybersecurity book you read this year, you should read my book, Well Aware. If there were two cybersecurity books you read this year, make Sandworm the second. With the Solarwinds Sunburst breach in December, it’s critical that we understand the motivations behind this group of attackers.

Top 5 Fiction

1. Hench - this is my favorite fiction read of 2020. In a world where henchmen work part time in the gig economy, one temp who is injured by a superhero and considered to be collateral damage becomes the worlds greatest super villain, the Auditor. This feels like a next level of superhero story, adding thoughful consideration of what is always missing from superhero stories - reality.
2. The Book of Koli - This one was an unexpected delight…from the author that brought us the unbelieveably good, The Girl With All the Gifts… Koli is set 10,000 years in the future after the collapse of civilization. He finds an iPod running an AI that shows him music and art and teaches him a lot more about life.
3. The Legend of Bagger Vance - I had only ever seen the movie, but of course the book was better. There’s a very supernatural, spiritual element that they could never do justice to in a movie. And the book tells the story from the perspective of a young boy, which also wasn’t captured as well in the movie. I really love all of Pressfields work, fwiw.
4. Children of Ruin - This one is the second in what I assume will be a trilogy about the space faring survivors of a war that saw viruses destroy nearly all of humanity’s technology. And it turns out that our early attempts to terraform several planets created life in ways we never imagined. I love how well Tchaikovsky captures truly alien versions of life and I really hope there’s a next novel in this series.
5. Will Save The Galaxy For Food - I love a good space comedy, and Yhatzee Croshaw delivers. Yhatzee is known by video gamers for his game review series Zero Punctuation…so he’s really got solid nerd cred. The premise - if we ever do invent wormholes, then a lot of space pilot adventurer types will be out of work. And those are the only people really capable of saving the Universe from certain doom.

George Finney is a Chief Information Security Officer that believes that people are the key to solving our cybersecurity challenges. George is the author of several cybersecurity books including his latest work, Well Aware, recognized as Book of the Year by Business Class News. George has worked in Cybersecurity for nearly 20 years and has helped startups, global telecommunications firms, and nonprofits improve their security posture. George has been recognized by Security Magazine as one of their top cybersecurity leaders in 2018 and is a part of the Texas CISO Council, is a member of the Board of Directors for the Palo Alto Networks FUEL User Group, a Master Mentor for the Cyber Future Foundation, and is an Advisory Board member for SecureWorld.