Your strategy is what you ship. I didn’t learn this so much as I relearned it. The story of the Edsel in Business Adventures is instructive. The Ford team dreamed…
Author: john
I aspire to be a lifelong learner. I do read a lot — books and online — and I find increasingly that if I don’t take a few moments to…
The End of Everything by Katie Mack. In the midst of all our current political and social turmoil, you can read this book and either a) have even more to…
This year I read or attempted to read 75 books. There were some dogs but also some great ones. I tried to come up with the “best book of the…
The Adventure Zone by the McElroy family, Carey Pietsch illustrator. Gets great reviews but pretty thin gruel for me. I probably would have thought it hilarious when I was young.…
Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Great tale of intrigue inside MI5. Started a little choppy but then the story took off and the characters rose to the fore. Intuition Pumps…
The Dragon Factory by Jonathan Maberry. Would have been a good graphic novel — evil albino twins, gene-engineered monsters (scorpion-dogs!), Nazis, a plot to end the world. Just a so-so…
Collapse of an Empire by Yegor Gaidar. Good look at the unraveling of the USSR, it’s inherent fragility, and the human costs of the unraveling. Recommended by my Russian friends.…
The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin. A book about a terrible storm written by a Russian author? I expected some serious gloom, but this story was trippy and strange. Memorable but…
Kent State by Derf Backderf. The Kent State shootings stand tall in my memory, but I don’t think I ever knew all the details of the events. This is an…
An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal. An anecdote-driven walk through the dysfunctional health care industry. Some enraging anecdotes, and some useful how-to’s at the end. Would have liked even more…
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. This didn’t really float my boat, I suspect the difficulty of translating from Chinese is significant, it is not just the straight translation but…
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Pretty damning. If you still somehow believe that America is the perfect embodiment of the “shining city upon a hill”, this book will but that notion…
Expanding beyond books! Euphoria is an explosive series. High school like I never experienced, kids struggling with big issues, and I was rooting for them all and blown away by…
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. I have read 0 books set in Kamchatka, an interesting look into the lives of isolated and distressed women on the peninsula. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour…
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry. Another great novel by Barry, two men’s lives explored over the course of an evening, great characters and dialog. Story by Robert McKee.…
The Price of Time by TIm Tigner. What a crappy suspense story. Poor characters, poor plot, just bad. I don’t know why I stuck with it, I am embarrassed. Transitions…
Upheaval by Jared Diamond. Not as breakthrough as his earlier work, but an engaging look at crises and how nations react to them. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Finland…
The Clockwork Dynasty by Daniel H. Wilson. Fun story about automatons who have been hiding within human society for eons, and their struggle to understand their own morality and purpose.…