Posts tagged book

Actual Book

Should I read it? Yes, if you’re in you’re between the ages of 28 and 42. In fact, you should read all of Jonathan Tropper’s novels if you’re in that age range.  Plan B is a quick read with engaging characters and my only disappointment is that I’ve now read all of Tropper’s books and have to wait until he releases a new one.  

ACTUAL BOOK

Should I read it? If you have any love of history, and specifically WWII, then yes.  Actually, you should read The Rising Tide first since it’s the first in this trilogy and then you should read this one.  I’m a huge fan of Shaara’s historical fiction and highly recommend all of them.

ACTUAL BOOK

Should I read it? Yes.  A look at how American Christians have tailored their faith to make it ok to also push for the American Dream, Platt proposes a “radical” faith that pushes taking Jesus’ message into the world.  While not everything resonated with me, enough did to make this a worthwhile read.

ACTUAL BOOK

Barring an unlikely reading binge before Sunday, it looks like 2011 will end with 43 books read.  And Full Dark, No Stars is a perfect ending book as I received it as a gift for Christmas in 2010 and it took me most of 2011 to finally read the thing.  Not that the book was bad, I just had a hard time engaging with it and found myself frequently picking up other books in its place.  A collection of four stories, this book goes to some dark areas, even for the likes of Stephen King.  There are so many fantastic King books, this just isn’t one of them.  I’d recommend picking up one of his other collections of stories (Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, etc).   

ACTUAL BOOK

Number 9 Dream was the last remaining David Mitchell book left for me to read, and unfortunately, I may have enjoyed this one the least of all of his novels.  I thought that this novel started slow and I had a really difficult time getting into the story.  I  will admit that once it got moving, the story kept me engaged and by the time I finished I was conflicted about how I’d review it.  Mitchell remains one of my favorite authors, but I’d rate this one in the same class with Ghostwritten; enjoyable, but not on the level of Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

AUDIOBOOK read by Carolyn McCormick AND ACTUAL BOOK

Wow.  I will start by saying that I was wrong.  Sometimes books get so much hype that I instinctively assume that they are not as good as people are claiming.  When the books are designated as “Young Adult”, my apprehension is even greater.  This trilogy was recommended to me some time ago and I’ve had the audiobooks on my iPod for what seems like forever.  My wife read The Hunger Games a few months ago and demanded that I read it, so I finally gave in and started the first book.  A week later, I had finished all three via a combination of audiobooks and the hard copies that we have at home.  I started all three on audiobook via my usual listening method (in the car during my commute), but found myself ditching the audiobook for each of them with about 100 pages remaining and just reading the rest in one sitting at home.  This is by no means a critique on the audiobooks, which were expertly read by McCormick, but a function of the quality and intensity of the story which I couldn’t wait on or drag out.  By now, I expect everyone has a pretty good idea of what these books are about, so I’ll skip the synopsis and just tell you to read them now and enjoy.

ACTUAL BOOK

Go read this book.  For his first novel, Riggs gathered a number of old photographs, most of which have some sort of photography trick or other oddness.  He then built a story around the collection of photographs.  I don’t want to give anything away about the story as it is too much fun to discover the whole thing yourself.  It’s a quick read (it took me 3 or 4 hours), but I found myself quickly picking it back up anytime I put it down for something else.  Highly enjoyable and I hope we get more books like this out of Riggs.

ACTUAL BOOK

This book was required reading as part of my Emerging Leaders program at work as we prepare for our “stretch” projects.  The basis of the book is an online strengths assessment called StrenghtsFinder 2.0.  With the purchase of the book, you get a code to take the online assessment, which returns five strength areas based on your answers.  The book has a reference section where it discusses each strength and what they really mean.  The crux of the whole book is that you should play to your strengths and surround yourself with people with contrasting strengths instead of trying to improve your weaknesses.  Overall, I think the assessment and strength descriptions are informative and could be of good use.  The rest of the book seemed to be more filler and rah-rah stories of how various leaders have played to their strengths.  If you’re interested in the assessment, I recommend just picking up the StrengthsFinder 2.0 book as you can do without the additional stories in this expanded edition.

ACTUAL BOOK

Not unlike one of my favorite books of all time, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten is a loosely connected collection of nine stories.  Each of the stories is an independent tale with references and minor connections to at least one of the other stories in the book.  I tend to enjoy this device because it reads like your typical collection of short stories except that you get the occasional “a-ha” moment when you recognize a person or an event from an earlier story.  As with most short story collections, some of the individual narratives are better than others.  As a whole, the book flows well and you at least get the sense of an overarching theme, although I’m not sure that I’m smart enough to really understand what that theme was.  As with all of the other Mitchell books I’ve read, I very much enjoyed this novel, though not not as much as Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.   

ACTUAL BOOK

This is by far the best book that combines a penguin fable and proper change management that I’ve ever read.

I “won” this book in a raffle at my office (no AppleTV for me).  I’ve read Kotter’s work before and his eight steps to leading change are standard reading for most corporations and business schools.  Our Iceberg is Melting is a telling of Kotter’s eight principles using a fable of a group of penguins and the changes they’re forced to face.  The fable presents the concepts in a more illustrative way that helps the reader to put some concrete examples around why each principle is important.  The book is pretty cheesy, but a good intro to Kotter’s work and I’d recommend it as a entry to change leadership to anyone interested (or forced into) the subject.