Category: books

This topic has been getting a lot of banter lately. I like the Guardian’s perspective on the topic.

Picking up a book is gratifying: look at me, not reading dumb listicles on the internet! Finishing a book, however, is a challenge. Which of this summer’s top-selling books have the highest reader attrition? Dr. Jordan Ellenberg has a semi-scientific way to find out, using buyer-generated info from Amazon to identify this year’s most unread book.

It’s a charmingly simple (if not entirely rigorous) method: Dr. Ellenberg cruises the “Popular Highlights” listings for each title, which shows the five passages most frequently highlighted by Kindle readers. If most folks make it to the very last page, those passages should come from the front, the back, and everywhere in between. If everyone drops off in Chapter 3, the most popular passages will be focused in the first few pages.

Should you finish every book you start?

…But this funny business of the Hawking Index, a lighthearted attempt to work out how far people persist in reading books, as indicated by the passages they highlight on their Kindles, has got me thinking. And it’s made me realise that my view has changed. I used to believe that if you really weren’t enjoying a book, you should toss it to one side and move on to something you might find more rewarding; essentially, it was born of an insurmountable fear of the sheer number of books I wouldn’t get round to reading before I died.

But things have changed. Clearly, I’ve got older and realised that I was a fool to see world literature as a mountain I had to scale, but more to the point, I’ve seen the threat that endless distractions and a wussy, don’t-like-it, bring-me-another attitude poses to our reading culture. I know I risk sounding po-faced, but the best books are a medium of thick description, painstakingly built word by word to produce strange and unexpected effects in the brain and heart; they deserve more than being treated like a passing bit of entertainment that hasn’t quite lived up to the reader’s exacting standards.

The guardian have provided some cycle-themed summer reading suggestions crowd-sourced from twitter.

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bicycle, books, cycling, reading, summer

On a recent flight, I was reading the Heath brothers excellent Made To Stick. Though the scenario in the book has to do with journalism, the lesson struck a chord with me in my own line of work (Enterprise Architecture).

The journalism professor tells the students that they must write the lead for a newspaper story. He goes on to layout all of the facts:

Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium on new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.

The students then go on to arrange and rearrange the given facts into a single sentence that would serve as the lead for the story. Then the professor opened their eyes by pointing out the real lead of the story — one that the students had missed by merely dealing with the facts. The real lead was “There will be no school next Thursday”.

Wham! By merely reporting the ‘facts’ the students missed the real point of what was going to happen. This made me think about how this can happen in my own field. Many a design review meeting is spent documenting and sorting through all of the technical minutiae but it is the architect’s job to understand the implications and possible risks/impacts of each of the details and decisions made. While certainly a big component, all of the technical details must be placed into the context of the Enterprise to tell the whole story and to truly understand the ‘point’.

I am finding that there is quite a lot in this book that can be applied to Enterprise Architecture (and really any field where you need to get the attention of an audience and keep them engaged in your message — particularly when it is something they consider to be dry and uninteresting).

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architecture, books, enterprisearchitecture, ideas

DailyLit lets you spam yourself with an email containing five minutes worth of reading from a classic book of your choice.

Im not sure that this would work well for me as I am really not fond of reading large amounts of text off of a screen and, in any case, I prefer to do my reading away from my desk. Your milage may vary.

technorati tags: reading, books, dailylit, email

I just finished The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and have to say its a bit of a mixed bag. First, I found the book to be over-long, especially since the entire premise of the book in presented in the rather verbose introduction and then slowly tortured for the next four hundred pages or so.

Granted, some of what follows serves to expound on some of his introductory points but frequently it ranges into breathless, almost infomercial prose about certain big corporations that the author loves to name drop again and again and again.

In later chapters he starts ranging more into politics and this is were he starts to get both annoying and contradictory.

First he posits that no two countries participating in a global supply chain would dare go to war with each other. Really. I guess he missed the part where the US attacked Iraq, nominally over oil supplies (that the US wants to control). It seems the current (US) thinking is to go to war in order to control a global supply chain and not to protect it.

Next he spends an inordinate amount of time slagging off Islamic countries and enumerating their perceived shortcomings with various economic figures and assertions. Thomas, I’d be interested to hear those same numbers for Israel, as well. How many new patents are created there per year? What is their GDP growth? How does it compare to other countries in the region? With Europe? If the constant loans from the US are any indication, probably not well. My point is that he needs to be careful about where he shines his spotlight and to do it evenly and without bias.

It is also curious in this discussion that there is no mention of Turkey and the reforms that Attaturk put into place after the second world war. Granted, Turkey is not exactly a world economic powerhouse, but they have gone a long way toward separating religion from the government and economy. Also, I note that toward the end of the book he’s back to swooning over the high tech situation in Malaysia (an Islamic country), where is laptop coincidently was built.

And speaking of the laptop, did we really need the tedious two page recounting of where every part in his laptop might have come from? I could have done without it.

Finally, the assertion that anyone who is concerned about the side effects of globalization (pollution, natural resource over-consumption, etc) is a ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ or ‘Trotskyist’ is gratuitous and something that I would expect more from Fox News than an even handed discussion regarding globalization.

Overall, I found this book overly long and ponderously presented. It would have made a very nice short essay (preferably without the race-baiting and political posturing).

technorati tags: books, globalization, technology, economics

A new book by John Battelle titled The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture should provide an interesting read and some insight into this ever growing company. The review on Wired.com sounds promising so I’ll probably add it to my wishlist.

The last book like this I read was supposed to have been on the startup of Netscape, called Competing on Internet Time. However, I found this book to be a real dissapointment as the dubious premise the author took was that everything that Netscape did was in reaction to Microsoft. I can’t count the number of times the author kept using the tired phrase ‘…locked in a life and death struggle with Microsoft’. The fact is, at the time Microsoft had no clue about the Internet and where happily flogging away on the virtues of video on demand over cable (remember the blinding success that turned out to be).

Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure was a fascinating look at how real innovation (in this case in the early days of pen based computing) can be choked to death by ‘partnering’ with Microsoft.

I still think that my favorite book on technology companies was Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. This is a book that I picked up an read many years ago and continue to re-read it now and again.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

This book was a suggested read by the ‘book club’ at work. Frankly, I don’t get what was supposed to be so great about this book (or maybe I do). First off, I found the writing style chatty and sophomoric (and in some cases annoyingly so). The way that much of the material is dealt with many times focuses more on the controversy around a given topic or some gee-whiz statistics than on actual substance and understanding.

While I was tempted to give up on the book about 100 pages into, I told my wife that I was going to force myself to finish it, in an ultimately vain effort to find out why it was so highly recommended. The only conclusion that I could come to is that the readers were really only interested in the sound-byte qualities of the book — something that they could chirp in on during a lunch conversation or over drinks.

In comparison, I found any number of books by Simon Winchester, such as Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, and The Professor and the Madman to be much more compelling and ultimately satisfying.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Ok, everybody has already heard of/read this book (what can I say, Im slow and don’t have many opportunities to read). I thought that there were a great many interesting ideas about how things become adopted/popular. I particularly enjoyed the writing style which I found to be engaging without being chatty.

I also enjoyed the book because it is the sort of thing that helps me in my job, which is largely about trying to make complex things understandable and influencing people to take action on them based on the benefits.

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather by Gao Xing Jian

I bought this book after it was rather deliriously reviewed on NPR.

While there are a few interesting moments in the book on the whole, I was left wondering what all of the breathless praise in the review was about. The last two short stories in the book where particularly unsatisfying. The short that shares the same name as the book moves along nicely then absolutely disintegrates into a stream of consciousness load of blather. It’s almost as if the author couldn’t figure out an ending so he pulled the literary equivalent of the last 10 minutes of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey movie.

The final short in the book reads like a collection of snippets for ideas for scenes in a book (or even a film for that matter). They don’t come close to hanging together and have the jarring effect of poorly done free jazz (to my eyes anyway).

I’d give this book about 2 out of 5. Not a total clanger, but definitely not one that I would read again.