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The long awaited end of the Alcatraz series! After reading The Road, settling in for a children's book was the goal - but this one ended up being much more dark than I'd expected. Maybe dark is the wrong work – but certainly a downer.
The final book in the Crazy Rich Asians series. Although not my favorite in the series, it does a great job of buttoning up the various stories while still hinting at a future.
I've always enjoyed alternate history expeditions. Indiana Jones, National Treasure and now also this series. Its hard not to enjoy a combination mystery and treasure hunt driven by clues sprinkled throughout history. I enjoyed this one more than I expected.
Beans character is an oddity. I enjoyed the character in this one, but less so in the political intrigue that came up later in the Bean series. For the Enders Game story though, this one was impressively fun. The thought of reading the same story from another character was not at all exciting to me, yet this was a fun read.
Good story, although predicitable at times. Sets things up for part 3 of the series in a solid second book in a trilogy, in the same ways you'd expect from a part 2.
Part 3 of the Foundation trilogy. I wasn't as emotionally attached to some of the characters in this one as the others, but at least the ending payed off.
When looking into Sci-Fi books that I should have already read, this trilogy kept coming up. It won the Hugo award for “Best Trilogy” - an award created just to give it to this series. It was short, but lived up to the hype. The premise relies on “psychohistory”, a way of mathematically predicting the future. The first book was actually based on a number of short stories and parallels the fall of Rome. I enjoyed the series, but not enough to read the other 11 books in the series.
When reading about modern stoicism, this one kept coming up as a book recommendation. The focus is on resiliency and growth mindset when it comes to opposition. This may seem like common advice, but it's sometimes most difficult to remember when in the worst positions.
Hatching Twitter follows the rise of Twitter through the lives of its founders and initial employees. As someone how has followed twitter since the beginning, I thought I knew the story but wow was I wrong. It turns out that there was far more power jockeying and boardroom backstabbing than I ever thought.
The way this story is told is also rather impressive. Rather than just being a telling of facts, you feel like you're there with the characters in the rooms as ideas are brainstormed or things go right (or more often wrong).
Twitter has played an outsized role in my life. The first startup I worked at where I felt true ownership of my work was a platform to connect Twitter users with advertisers to make money (before promoted Tweets were a thing). I remember going to Twitters first (and only) conference, Chirp, right around when Twitter hit 140 employees. I remember sending out a sponsored tweet manually from a Rails console that someone paid $20k to send. I remember having lunch with coworkers and friends on the floor at a Twitter event while Will.i.am had discussions over us.
Twitter holds a number of great memories for me. While this book shed light on some of the darker sides of the company, it also left me feeling how important a part it was (is) for the founders - a feeling I could easily identify with.
The 2nd Dresden Files book features a new mystery – people are being killed by mysterious slashes that don't correspond with any weapon or animal. I preferred the first one in the series, more than this one, due to it's focus on mystery. While this one had that, I didn't feel the same A-HA! moment as before.
I love Amy Schumer's standup, and her show. We recently saw her live here in Orlando, and it was hilarious. Her book, however, is less comedic and more of a memoir of hard work coupled with sad life events.
100 years before the events in A Song of Ice and Fire, Egon Targarian was only a small kid. If you're curious about how he became the most well adjusted of his family, this one is worth checking out. Although an engaging number of stories that add a bit of backstory, they only shed a small amount of new light on overall setting and family dynamics of the era.
Despite it's awful reviews, I enjoyed the movie for WWZ. It's hard to read a review of it without people mentioning how much it butchered the book. For what it was it was great – but the book is able to explore on a level that would never work for a movie. The book itself takes place after World War Z, the zombie war. The narrator interviews a series of people from around the world as they elaborate on how they participated in the war. These range from the origins of the disease and how it spread, to how countries adapted with it, to submarines, to how humans faced off and eventually cleaned up after the war.
If you've ever wondered “I like zombies, but what would it be like if we did ?”, then you'll truly enjoy this book. It's much less about action and more about strategy and motivations to keep on living.
Building on the first one, I felt that I enjoyed the heist side of this one much more. It reminds me of the movie “Lucky Number Slevin” (which wasn't as good as this book), where our heroes are thrust into situation after situation where they are being exploited for their unique set of skills. The main arc with the Sinspire was the the one I was most interested in, but felt the resolution wasn't as strong. Leaving off much more in the middle of the story than the first book, I'll need to read #3 to know where this one goes.
Speaker for the dead asks more questions than it answers. Xenocide and Children of the Mind are all about answering those questions. Although Children answers more questions, Xenocide has more heart.
First book in Asimov's Empire series. Interesting to learn how everything was setup for Foundation, the characters and the story were slow and painful to finish.
This is the book I wish I had read in grade school. Growing up, I always thought of the largest difference between introverts and extroverts to be quiet vs outgoing. The difference though is much more complex. The premise of this book is the idea that extroverts get energy from crowds, while it costs introverts energy to interact. The idea that some introverts even enjoy speaking because they value getting their message across more than their distake for public speaking hit close to home for me.
It's fun listening to stories told in unique ways. The Illuninae files (this being the 2nd in the series) fits that sweet spot for me. This one is told through a series of audio recordings surrounding a trial of something that happened in the first book. The narrator changes as the audio files change - sometimes reading instant messages, AI thought processes, overhearing conversations written letters and even video analysis reports. I enjoyed the direction of this one and am looking forward to the 3rd in the series next.
After hearing about this one for well over a decade, I decided to give it a shot. If I had read this one when it came out, it might have hit much closer to the target. As it stands now, I's mostly a refresher of things already heard. Now – I wouldn't be surprised if wherever I heard them from were originally from this book, as it is a design classic.
How do you validate your product and business ideas? If it's by making them, then you'll probably not going to be able to get much feedback. This book focuses on that question, tackling it with a variety of suggestions. From MVPs to user interviews, this was a great reminder of how to inspire innovation and track it in companies that have learned how to reproduce an entrepreneurial spirit.
How do you deal with coworkers who bring you down? Do you try to “fix” them? Try to work better with them? What if their actions prevent you from being the productive team member you want to be?
This is the idea Liz poses between “Deminisher” and “Multipliers”. Multipliers have the ability to make everyone around them better. Deminishers, on the other hand, hinder other peoples abilities to work.
While many of the examples are presented over and over again (which got somewhat monotonous), a few stuck with me. Working with others when you already have a plan in mind can make for an unhappy relationship. The constant reminder in this book to seek context with others and solve their problems first was a leadership takeaway that I could stand to do a better job at.
Pizza delivery by the mob, a character named Hiro Protagonist, Motorcycle riding, samurai sword wielding characters - I'm not sure this story ages that well. Reading it as a teenager would've been better, but for now it was tough to make it through without rolling my eyes repeatedly.
Another Neal Stephenson story following 2 story lines: one following code breakers in World War II, another a group of dot com entrepreneurs. Featuring fictionalized versions of names from the time including Alan Turing made it easier to identify with the characters. The first half of this very long book was tough to get through, with most of the payoff towards the end. The detailed descriptions of cryptography and theories about a digital currency were the most interesting part.
Just as good if not better than Enders Game. A very different story, but I can see why this won a Hugo award for best novel. I was impressed that OSC was able to draw us into a completely different world for Ender and still empathize with the characters.