Category: Uncategorized

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Whew what a tough read. We have been so fortunate to always have access to housing and family in our lives. Life for people at the bottom of the […]

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally. An odd woman in Dublin tries to connect with the world, or escape the world. Tiring. Misterioso by Arne Dahl.  Another Swedish mystery.  Characters seem very cold.  Either A) Swedes are really different, or B) the […]

We get to spend two days with strategy consultants this week. I spent the first four years of my career as a strategy consultant and I have some perspective. Strategy is not some task you do every once in a […]

The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden. Started out great with some novel characters and South African setting, kind of sputtered out. The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson.  OK how did I miss this for so long??  What a […]

Tesla is just kicking ass in car apps — https://electrek.co/2019/09/15/tesla-v10-first-look-release-notes-features/.   They made an investment in a UX and data architecture and it is paying off.  Most carmakers are targeting where Tesla was 18-24 months ago, and by the time […]

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker. In the late 1800s in NYC, a golem and a jinni struggle to fit into human society and become human themselves. Very entertaining and a nicely introspective about what defines humanity. I’d […]

So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Very helpful coverage of a very tough topic.  Horrific recent news stories about personal attacks on the author. Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe.  A deep slice of history during […]

Writing software for cars is hard. Processors are generations behind mobile phones. Compute/network platforms are byzantine and fractured within/across OEMs. OS environments/toolchains are clunky/archaic. Internet connectivity is unavailable, intermittent, and costly. Long OEM production cycles are fundamentally inconsistent with modern […]

Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart. Great story based of a budding female detective in the early 1900s. Based on a real person, this is a great retelling. How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. The history of […]

The Old Man by Thomas Perry. A lazy suspense novel, unimpressed. The action moves along ok but the characters are tissue thin. And when I see a character arrive in Vancouver on a train and “catch a cab to Victoria”, […]

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.  My first Doctorow, and I am not sure I will do any more.  A hash of steampunk, cyberpunk, biohacking, post-gender, libertarian themes all jammed into a stew, and there just isn’t much story or character in […]

The Genius Plague by David Walton. Award Winner, and has some great concepts, but wasn’t an amazing story. Fun but forgettable. Empty Planet by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.  Very interesting book about declining birth rates and the implications for […]

Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. I hate pop business books but this book does not belong in that category. A timeless approach to the basics of strategy, whether in business or any other setting. The Helicopter Heist by […]

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Really great book about decision making, and how to think probabilistically about decisions. Very good. Change Agent by Daniel Suarez.  Suarez is always super fun, this is a great tale of genetic editing and […]

In a recent article about the latest VW Golf, the product manager was quoted “Already now there are ten times more lines of code in the latest Golf than in a smartphone”. This statement is interesting in some many directions. […]

Our Towns by James and Deborah Fallows. An uplifting walk thru towns and cities across America, each of which is finding its way and wrestling successfully with renewal, growth, education, immigration. There is a lot of great stuff happening everywhere […]

The Library Book by Susan Orlean. A peek inside the history, operations, and stories behind the LA Public Library, written by someone who loves books and libraries. Really enjoyable. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. Surprisingly fantastic tale of a […]

Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit by Christof Spieler. Oh I love maps, and this book is chock full of them, and a great overview of transit in the US. It is easy to focus just on […]

These seem interesting — from five books

Age of Fracture by Daniel Rodgers. I really really wanted to like this book, it is well-regarded and seems to have an interesting thesis about what has happened in the last 50 years in our country. But overly wordy and […]