I honestly found the writing in the Phoenix Project painful, but I'm surprised you're the only one to mention it since I've heard it come up a fair bit elsewhere. I think it's probably more popular in the more traditional IT world than HN's typical audience.
I'm not very particular about reading so I'll just steam ahead on even the crappiest books.
For nonfiction books I mostly put myself in the mindset of learning or conceptualizing the content in a more abstract way, like building a mind map.
For fiction, I picture the story like a movie, which distracts me from bad writing, so this book hit that sweet spot for me, personally, where I could imagine the world and the events but also conceptualize the abstract content.
I actually wish I could read more technical books that have fiction and technical concepts mixed like that!
Edit: Also, for as much as people complain about DevOps here, I'm amazed so few people have read this book. It's literally the book that invented DevOps as a term, right?
It didn't invent the term. John Allspaw and Paul Hammond maybe did, in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4 (from the comments, I guess this talk is actually referenced in the book?)
