Review: Seize the Day

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I can like the writing but not get much out of the story. That happened here. Perhaps this hit too close to home. Perhaps I needed to read something more positive and less urban. Funny in its way, but sad through and through. On to the next.

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Review: My Family and Other Animals

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A family’s moves to Corfu. The story revolves around the differences in the children, including one who believes himself a great writer and another who collects animals. The ending was a party that becomes farce as all the animals collected throughout the book make unplanned appearances. I listened to the BBC audio adaptation, and the addition of animal sounds and other sound effects helped the story. I found it a nice, short entertaining story, similar to a comedic television show episode.

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Review: Selfie Made: Your Ultimate Guide to Social Media Stardom

Selfie Made: Your Ultimate Guide to Social Media Stardom by Meridith Valiando Rojas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m an old hand at the internet and an early user of Facebook and some other social tools. And this was a take on social that is a step beyond what I was familiar with. Rojas approaches her topic from her expertise gained from running her company, DigiTour, which provides a live tour of viral social media “stars”. From her perspective, having a post go viral is key, and she provides advice on how to engineer your social media for optimum virality, if that’s a word. Interspersed with the advice are stories of her business. I found these stories were very interesting, with parts of her experience being a kind of concert promoter mixed in with her learnings in social media. As a how-to book, this was interesting given the currency of the topic, but I couldn’t decide whether the topics have limited audience or not. The audience Rojas describes tends to be young, younger than 25, and you can’t tell if these tactics work with older audiences. The book is very worthwhile if you want to appeal to this demographic. I also enjoyed the “business biography” of DigiTour and Rojas’ growth operating her business. Great tour stories, and great stories about how to blaze trails in creating a new kind of venue, a “talent” show where the “talent” is in acquiring views online.

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Review: Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself by Mark Epstein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author provides his take on the Buddhist eight-fold path to enlightenment, informed by his traditional psychological training. I found his friendly discussion an interesting way to learn about the path to enlightenment, with stories that sound more like they are out of the pop psychology books I am familiar with. I will look for more on this topic, and would positively consider books by Epstein.

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Review: Excursion to Tindari

Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let’s see – intuitive detective (check), three or four different and simultaneous crimes merge (check), additional plot stories involving the detective’s personal life and co-workers (check), humor (and cussing, check), loving food references (check), issues with clueless bosses (check). Yes, this meets the criteria for a Montalbano book. I found this one a bit too coincidental for my liking, but I also found the non-mystery stories, the stories on the side, to be more interesting – I am starting to get a feel for the other police officers. And this one seemed to be funnier. That’s enough to make me want to read the next one.

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Review: The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us

The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tough talks about the varying value of attending different colleges, how tuition and scholarships work, and compares college and trade schools for career outcomes. I found a few topics of great interest. First, Tough debunks the excessive valuation of trade degrees, using a detailed story of a welder who does not earn anywhere near the salaries bandied about by politicians. While there may be examples of plumbers, electricians, or welders getting lawyer-like rates, Tough implies that is quite a rare outcome. The second topic I appreciated was the effort colleges go through to price their tuition and fees, as well as discounts/scholarships offered to students, while optimizing enrollment, expense coverage, graduation rates, and other criteria while also attempting to build a student body culture and meet other goals. This sounded much more complex than airline seat price optimization. I live near a small college and have noticed many different tactics they have attempted to modify their mix of students and optimize their revenues. Tough’s description shows that I don’t know the half of it. The third thing that I found interesting was Tough’s description of lacrosse as a key sport to ensure students are accepted at schools like the Ivy’s. According to Tough, lacrosse is an expensive sport to compete in, which provides some indication to schools that the student will succeed, and pay. Being a former high school band parent, we always heard similar stories about playing the expensive French Horn. The French Horn is the lacrosse of the musical class.

I enjoy the way Tough approached the topics he writes about in this volume. He describes the topic and why it is of interest. He provides the pertinent statistics and expert interviews. For most topics, he also provides the story of an individual, one who has been impacted by the topic. These stories were the most memorable parts of the book. Glad I read this one, and will look for more by Tough.


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Review: Winter Street

Winter Street by Elin Hilderbrand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I saw this book recommended in an online article for those who liked the Christmas movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”. From that review, I expected some raucous and outlandish humor. This was not even close to what this book was. This was a surprisingly well written Christmas story with a little mild humor, mostly in the setup of the plot. This was a family drama, not a comedy. It was well written, and if I want to read more family drama at Christmas stories, I will consider the next one in the series.

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Review: The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are three different themes to this book that I noticed, each part interesting in its own right. The first was Gates’ review of the state of the developing world regarding women, in terms of rights, work, and future. The story here is that the developed world tends to be helping the developing world, sometimes by supporting it, and sometimes by leaving aspects to work themselves out. The last part of the book tended more to a theme of the state of affairs for women in the developed world, with topics such as glass ceilings, equality, and the like. The third theme, which was repeated throughout the book, was Gates’ personal story, her background, her efforts with her foundation to investigate and solve some of the problems discussed throughout the book. I felt that this aspect of the book – Gates’ story of her childhood, her career at Microsoft, and her life as the richest woman in the world, was quite interesting. Gates tells of her parent’s lives and her upbringing, as well as her career at Microsoft as an early MBA hire, and her dates with billg. And she describes how she lives now, including how the Gates’ children attended school using Melinda’s maiden name French to make them a little less conspicuous. All quite interesting. My personal interest – my last name is the same as Melinda’s maiden name, French. Hi, distant cousin! I also sent my kids to school with the last name French, so we have that in common. Overall, I found Gates’ take on the state of women in the world to be interesting, and mostly positive. I enjoyed her personal story more, though.

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Review: Machines Like Me

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

McEwan writes an off-kilter portrayal of a historically-changed early 1980s, with humanoid robots just being released to the public. It provokes thoughts on what it means to be human, but it rolls right on past assuming the robots in the story have earned sentience. I found it interesting that McEwan modified history in order to use Alan Turing as a character here. Turing is the author of the Turing Test, a well known measure of whether an artificial human exhibits intelligence and behavior making them indistinguishable from humans. I liked the idea that you get Turing’s take on machine intelligence as machines advance far beyond the state of affairs during his actual lifetime. McEwan could have gone quite a ways farther here, though, as Turing thoughts aren’t exposed in depth – McEwan plays him as a tinkerer. I also hoped to see Turing’s take on the early chatbots that effectively passed a limited Turing Test, in particular ELIZA (portraying an analyst) and PARRY (portraying a schizophrenic) (view spoiler)[, and this actually ends up being duplicated in a manner by the robots in the story committing suicide. I don’t recall any deep analysis of this in the book, but I do remember lectures on this from a college artificial intelligence course I took a few decades back. It ends up that you can think of many computer programs that could respond to questions in a manner similar to a human that is not a “normal” human adult. PARRY responded until he “got mad”, then didn’t respond, exactly like a schizophrenic might respond. Other programs might respond as a baby would respond, with baby sounds. And you can imagine other examples where someone reading a transcript between a person and the program might think the program’s dialog is by an actual human. It seems McEwan knew about this limited way to pass the Turing Test and wrote this book to investigate aspects of this. I’m not sure he went much beyond my college analysis, but it was entertaining, in an Issac Asimov kind of story. (hide spoiler)] Interesting story and alternative history, but could have gone deeper.

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Review: Business Model You: A One-Page Method for Reinventing Your Career

Business Model You: A One-Page Method for Reinventing Your Career by Tim Clark
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I was expecting something that would leave me with one simple page of personal insight. I didn’t get anything like that. The author provides a number of very familiar exercises to document personal preferences, strengths and weaknesses. There were a few not as familiar exercises tying personal weaknesses to ways to overcome, including using a partner’s or employee’s strengths. Much of the rest of this book was a mélange of simplified and over-simplified business modelling, sometimes tied back to a personal model and sometimes not. Strangely, at times the book used a personal anecdote to illustrate a business model, then turned around and used a business anecdote to illustrate a personal model. I finished the book, but I can’t tell what the purpose was. Was it to build personal models using business models as templates, or vice versa? You get both from the writing. I was very disappointed near the end when the authors described the word profit by saying that the reader may have a bad reaction to the word because it might remind them of used car salesmen or bad business practices. Huh? Just who are these authors writing this book for? People that think business is evil? Incredibly bizarre. I listened to the audio version of this book. I would absolutely not recommend an audio version of this book, as there are many lists read, and one of the large tables is “read” using colors. This is one of those books that really doesn’t lend itself to an audio production. Overall, I believe there are plenty of other books on the market that provide similar advice using similar exercises, including “What Color is Your Parachute?”, which the authors here borrow an exercise from. As I look to Amazon’s “Look Inside” for the hardcover version of this book, the message does appear to depend on the magazine-like graphics that appear on most pages, so readers of the paper version may have a different take. But fair warning on the audiobook, which comes across as a disjointed mess.

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Review: Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life

Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life by Donald J. Trump
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trump as you’d expect, when not limited to Twitter’s character limitation. Typically irreverent, he provides his take on business and life. I found it quite interesting after having been exposed to the sound-bite version of Trump since his election. Trump is big on positive thinking. His thoughts on revenge are cringeworthy, as are his avowed love of women. The business advice is interesting, and I can see some budding developers would really appreciate these thoughts.

The book was written as a combination of Trump and seminar mogul Bill Zanker’s response to business and motivational topics. Each chapter contained Trump’s take on a topic and Zanker’s take on the same topic. Both shared anecdotes from their business lives, most of which I found interesting and valuable. I listened to the audiobook, and while they often divided the sections by saying “Zander’s take”, I found time and again that I was not sure which author was speaking. On audio, this really needed a second narrator to help the listener keep track. I found both authors shared a number of stories about their persistence enabling business deals. These persistence stories are what I will remember from this book.


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Review: Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As always, Gladwell writes an interesting book, with well-told stories and mouth-watering simple and novel comparisons. In this book, though, it felt like Gladwell was aiming at a big and nebulous concept – misunderstanding. The stories that provided examples were hard to string together to build a cohesive “unified field theory” of misunderstanding. Overall, of interest, but not as thought-changing as other of Gladwell’s books.

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Review: The New Iberia Blues

The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read almost all of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books. I really enjoy Burke’s ability to write the atmosphere and mood of the bayou in his novels. I also enjoy the inner monologue of Robicheaux, who often surprises by being well read and complex. Also key to my enjoyment has been the excellent narration of many of the audiobooks by Will Patton. This was another one that was fun to read.

However, these stories are getting too similar. Of the two dozen or so Robicheaux stories I’ve read, a strangely large number involve Hollywood-types filming in Robicheaux’s rural area. If the Louisiana Film Board has this kind of success rate, I’d be very surprised. Add in the musicians and rich guys and you get a small stable of types that are re-used with minimal differentiation. The stories are different, but some of the characters are too similar to those in other books. I have also noticed that I enjoy the writing so much that I suspend any disbelief in the storylines. But this time, I didn’t give Burke as much leeway. So I found his plot, revolving around (view spoiler)[ an obvious mass murderer, taking plenty of time with the small, local police department investigating, but not attracting a single reporter or FBI interest, was just far fetched. (hide spoiler)] Fun to read, but testing my appreciation.


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Review: Baseball Card Vandals

Baseball Card Vandals by Beau Abbott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This art book contains copies of the fronts of vintage baseball (and a few other sports) cards that have been “vandalized” with markers to make them humorous, or, in cases where there’s a swing and a miss on humorous, odd and arty. A typical example: for a Mark Belanger card, the artists added words to the top saying “The best thing to hang clothes on”, and modified his name below to say “BEHANGER S” while drawing a clothes hanger over the bat in his hands. The book contains mostly photos of the modified cards (you can find many of the ones in this book and many more searching the title on Google) with some introductory text describing the germ of the concept. Many funny, most weird (i.e., “The receipts at CVS are out of control”), a few just clever. Good for a half hour or hour of perusing. The examples on Google seem a bit randier, the book is tame in comparison.

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Review: Rich Dad's Before You Quit Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know about Building a Million-Dollar Business

Rich Dad's Before You Quit Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know about Building a Million-Dollar Business by Robert T. Kiyosaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Absolutely not what I was expecting. The book is really about the subtitle in this case, not the title. Kiyosaki aims this book at sussing out what a person needs to understand in order to build a business of their own. He adds to the collection of charts he’s created and introduced in other “Rich Dad” books, or possibly not – I haven’t read all that many of them, but the ideas seem quite familiar. From my experience with this line of books, the author turns typical business and investing advice sideways, providing a different perspective and different guidance than in other, more traditional business and investment books. This one is more business and career guidance. I had been hoping, based on the title, that this would cover, at least in part, pre-retirement concerns, but Kiyosaki doesn’t in this volume. By amount of ink, I’d estimate that over half of this book is Kiyosaki’s “business autobiography”, telling the stories of his exploits in learning to run his surfer wallet business and his educational seminar business. I tend to enjoy these kinds of books, and I found these parts interesting. The rest of the book was dedicated to a few illustrative word triangles and two by two boxes that help classify and list the aspects of business that need attention or the different ways to make money in Kiyosaki’s world. He also returns to comparing his real father and his rich mentor, and it seemed like he trashed his father quite a bit more extensively than he did in his previous books that I had read. I did not find this very interesting, but for a different perspective for those building a business (or more creating the mindset to build a business – like understanding the roles of experts and determining which experts need to be involved), this may provide some value.

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Review: Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book changed my life. When I read it, I was playing around with a neural net, a kind of logical "black box" that can find patterns. Of course I was trying to predict the price movement of stocks. After literally hundreds of minor adjustments to my model, I got a stock predictor that actually worked. I traded it based on the indicators once and made some quick money. But then a lesson from Foucault's Pendulum started nagging me, the talk about the laundry list. (view spoiler)[ In the book, a researcher finds an old piece of paper, full of holes due to age. He can make out writing, but many parts of words seem to be missing. The researcher works on deciphering what the paper was about, assuming it was related to the Knights Templar, and he comes to realize that, if those missing pieces are filled in with certain letters, the document is a key to everlasting life and a timeline to a Templar reunion. This belief becomes pivotal in the story, leading to the researchers eventual demise when others demand the proof. But just before this happens, the researcher's wife points out that if you replaced the missing letters with different ones than the researcher chose, you would see that this was a centuries-old laundry list. In other words, you can make many stories from incomplete information, and an incorrect interpretation could be deadly. Occam's razor, dude, Occam's razor. (hide spoiler)]I decided to stop working with the black box, although I think I could have used it further, and possibly made a lot of money trading or writing about it. I had started to believe the story the black box "proved". At least I quit while I was ahead! Although I kinda wished I hadn't... BTW, I was predicting ERTS using CPQ (the former Compaq) and DELL as proxies for the market over trades between one and ten days. Back in the mid 90s. On a 386 using one bootable diskette.

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Review: Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches by John Hodgman
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Hodgman writes of his life on the Eastern seaboard, living in older houses in somewhat rural areas of Massachusetts and Maine. At times funny, droll, bleak, boyish, self-deprecating, and self-congratulating, you can sense the person behind the PC in those commercials, as well as staring in or guesting on a podcast, has this personality that is well-exposed here. I enjoyed the humor, but the many knowing wink-winks he adds made it more difficult for me to enjoy – like a guest who overstayed his welcome. He also told quite a few stories revolving around garbage and the dump and mouse droppings that, while funny to a point, ended up leaning toward the disgusting and awkward. I can see Hodgman writing a truly classic book at some point, and some bits here are golden, but this was overall a good, not great effort.

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Review: Holidays on Ice

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read quite a few of David Sedaris’ more recent books, and realized that I had missed this one. Feeling in the holiday spirit, I picked up the audio. Sedaris seems changed. His stories are still a mix of outrageous, funny bits with cringeworthy episodes, the kind of humor that leaves me smiling with occasional guffaws. (That sounds a bit more like a weather forecast than I intended.) But his newer stuff is more personal, seems honed on real life situations, and is more wistful than this. Overall, this was quite fun, but if this is your first Sedaris, don’t stop here. I liked most of the stories here, the department store elf story that leads off the collection, “SantaLand Diaries”, was a narrow favorite.

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Review: The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In some of the reviews I read of “The Pioneers” before I began listening to the audiobook, I got a sense that the book told too many stories of too many early settlers, and this concerned me. I don’t do well with books with huge casts that you had to keep track of. My worries were for naught – I enjoyed this story of the early settlers of Ohio and of the Ohio country and statehood. Being from Illinois and interested in early settler history, this felt very similar to reading about my area and the people that settled there. McCullough follows the stories of a few influential people involved in initial settlement, starting with a preacher/scientist who worked with congress to enable the initial “deal” creating the Ohio Company. McCullough then describes the travails of the initial group of settlers, including many Revolutionary War veterans, as well as leaders from subsequent waves of settlers. Mixed into the narrative are plenty of interesting stories, including a mention of Lafayette’s visit and salute to the old soldiers of freedom, and of Aaron Burr’s visit with the rich Blennerhassett family on their private island in the Ohio River to plot the overthrow of Mexico. I found the book held my interest throughout – McCullough found some great stories in this area and time and drew out the historical significance of events here.

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Review: The Convict and Other Stories

The Convict and Other Stories by James Lee Burke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Having listened to most of Burke’s mystery novel audiobooks, I didn’t know whether to expect short versions of his mysteries or something else. You get something else here, a collection of very readable short stories, many touching on the same themes Burke hits in his mysteries, especially his Dave Robicheaux stories set in New Iberia parish in Louisiana. I always said Burke knows how to write an atmospheric scene that drips humidity like bayou bald cypress trees in August, and he shows some of his writing expertise here. But there are also things missing in comparison to his novels. That’s not necessarily bad. Burke tends to write long, angsty, and over-literary inner monologues for his characters, and you don’t get as much of that in these short stories. I missed them. Burke also tends to repeat plot elements in his novels, but in these short stories he’s further afield than I am used to – there’s even a story about baseball here. (I’m currently reading Burke’s “The New Iberia Blues”, and it focuses around Hollywood filmmakers filming in rural Louisiana. I believe that means that more than 10% of his dozens of mystery novels revolve around this same theme – movie making in New Iberia. I suspect the Louisiana Film Board is way more successful in Burke’s novels than in real life! These stories must have preceded that plot theme.) Another interesting difference was the narrators of the audiobooks. Most of Burke’s unabridged audiobooks are narrated by Will Patton, and he has a way of amplifying Burke’s atmospheric descriptions. I would go out of my way to listen to Patton. Here, different narrators read each story. For this kind of collection, that worked fine. The variety helped separate the stories and keep my interest up. Overall, I liked these stories. They provided a taste of the writing of Burke without the deep investment required of his novels – kind of like a tourist version.

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