I read the entirety of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen. I've been meaning to since I heard about it in college over a decade ago. With a new baby here and some extended parental leave, I ploughed through all 8000 pages or so and it was so, so worth it.
Being open to throwaway code before a design doc+review is an idea I promoted and tried to demonstrate in my projects at my most recent employer, but I found that it just didn't work within our engineering culture an expectations. Funnily enough, it had the most success when working on larger projects that spanned multiple teams and services, where often my team was consuming or providing an interface, and the code sample provided a clear usage pattern that other teams could critique or grok. I got the most dysfunctional comments within my own team on smaller projects and PRs (e.g. "not sure why you want to do it this way" on small code blocks, critiquing data structures used), so I'm still not sure if it was a company culture issue or team issue.