Bookworm Friday: Five Books Recommendations from Guillermo Montoya

In this series, we ask our William Hill colleagues to share their favourite book recommendations and tell us what specifically they learned from them. Today we present five recommendations from Guillermo Montoya. Have a good read!

On a daily basis, Guillermo is Engineering Team Lead in the Unity team. He says: My goal is to look after one of the Unity teams and contribute to the platform that is being built behind it. My team’s contribution specifically is to build and maintain some of the backend services that compose the entire platform, which is detached from any external vendors, all built in-house (PAM, payments, Betting Platform). It’s been a great opportunity to build from scratch such a big and important platform and this is only the beginning. Besides work I’ve been living in Poland for already 3 years, I like sports, mostly football. I’ve been playing in a club in Krakow since the beginning and started to take part in some tournaments. Also, after coming to Poland, I joined the Crossfit community. Apart from sports I also like travelling, dancing and brewing coffee.

Check out his 5 book recommendations!

1.Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favourite writers, not because we are compatriots but because of magical realism style he co-shaped, also in “One hundred years of solitude”, one of his most known books and one the most important books of the Spanish language in the XX century. The book covers a century in the life of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictional town of Macondo in Colombia.

2.George Orwell, 1894

This is a dystopian political fiction novel, written by George Orwell between 1947 and 1948. “I do not believe that the society I have described in 1984 will necessarily become a reality, but I do believe that something like it may come into existence,” Orwell wrote after publishing the novel. Reading the British writer is more necessary than ever today as a reminder of how important it is to defend our freedoms. We live in a society that is increasingly under surveillance, where our privacy has a price, and we don’t mind losing it. A situation that is accentuated in some parts of the world.

3.Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

This Israeli historian has written a very nice trilogy which ends with this title. I am pointing out here his last book, but I think people should read the whole trilogy starting with the title Sapiens, then 21 Lessons for the XXI Century and finishing with Homo Deus. Sapiens is a journey through our past, Homo Deus, a look at our future, 21 lessons for the 21st century is an exploration of our present. The overwhelming success of his trilogy has made Harari the undisputed revelation of essay literature. This series shows the history of humanity from the dawn of man and ventures into our days to come, passing through a lucid analysis of our present day.

4.Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad 

The book shows the trauma of slavery in a complex and demanding, morally charged novel that exudes beauty and power. Whitehead envelops the reader with his story, in which a metaphor such as an underground railway devised to escape for black slaves ceases to be a metaphor and takes shape. This title is included as #1 New Times Bestseller.

5.Julio Cortazar, Hopscoth 

Thanks to this masterpiece, Cortazar is considered the forbearer of the Latin Boom. The author proposes readers to get through the story in two different ways: following a lineal reading or following the direction proposed by the author performing different jumps between chapters like simulating hopscotch.

The element that really caught my attention when I started reading the book is the way he develops the stories in both ways and how it all makes sense.