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I used to blog about just the interesting books I read, but as of 2019 I blog about every book I read. I try to keep these blogs deliberately short (max. 250 words), as an exercise to get to the point.
Partly because of this limit, I also TRY not to go into detail about the book plot or subject — whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. Instead I try to focus on if this is a book worth reading*. And I focus more on style, approach and form.
I take this approach for the same reason that dissecting a movie plot is only a small part of a movie discussion. Movies work (or don’t) because of the techniques used in the storytelling, so those are usually more interesting to look at than the plot.
And lastly, I try to love every book I read. Writing books takes time and dedication. I may not agree or like everything I read, but still someone poured part of themselves in there. So I try to respect that.
* The definition of “worth reading” is of course something you could write a book about. Worth reading for me heavily depends on “what you can take away” or “how it alters your views”. The best books have the ability to change your perception.
If you cannot connect to a remote server from your Chromebook with SSH keys and you get this error:
Load key "/.ssh/identity/id_rsa": invalid formatHere is the tip: add an enter to your private key file!
Yes really!
I spent way too much time figuring this and only found the solution when I stumbled on the solution here.
I’ve been on a bit of a Jonathan Franzen bender lately. I frequently write about him on my other site. The kickstart for all this was a book club meeting about Crossroads for which I not only read the book, but also watched and read a dozen or so Franzen interviews. Older and newer interviews.
What really struck a chord with me was not so much the specific Crossroads discussions in these interviews, but the things Franzen says about reading and literature in general.
And I noticed similarities in interviews that are sometimes decades apart.
I created a supercut video of two specific Franzen interviews that are 20 years apart. In this video a younger and older Franzen talks about reading, literature and love. See if you can spot the commonalities.
David Foster Wallace kicks off the video (who else?). If you didn’t already know that Franzen and Wallace were friends you can tell by just watching them converse. It’s a delight.
In the YouTube description I also link to the two original videos, which are much broader and interesting in their own right (do watch them!) but this supercut specifically highlights ideas Franzen has about reading and literature.
Here is a list of questions (one of these is rhetorical*). The questions serve partly as a videoguide as they are answered in the video. But you can also try and discuss them beforehand, or even after watching the video (e.g. for your own book club).
The video ends with 2016 Franzen making remarks about technology. Remarks that perfectly tie in to what Wallace — in 1996 — says at the beginning of the video about the influence of technology on reading.
Here is the video:
Do you struggle to organise your work, because it seems everybody wants something from you? Of do you often wonder whether you’re doing the right things? This post helps you to answer those questions.
Here are the six basic responsibilities you have as a professional in the modern workplace. Follow these and you are on the right path.
I wrote these down as a reminder to myself and to pass on to people. Because it is easy to lose sight of your basic responsibilities. I also noticed a lot of young professionals struggle with what is asked of them.
Regardless of your specific job — whether you are a manager or engineer — just starting out or a seasoned professional, the following basics will always apply:
I distilled these from my experiences as an engineer, Engineering Manager and CTO for a tech company. And all of them were shaped or sharpened by reading and applying what I read.
The basics are presented as instructions. The key action per item is bold and at the bottom of each item are the book references in cursive.
Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever and will never come back.
Peter F. Drucker
This is the most important thing you can learn about the most valuable asset you have: your time. Every second is unique and you can only spend it once.
Know where your time goes and demand that your time is used wisely.
Measure your time. There are many ways. Here is the most basic one: write down, during the day what you did and then every morning — and this key: take a moment and reflect on the previous day.
Do this every day and you will see patterns emerge, and you will learn more about yourself and your talents and your future (more on these two things later).
If you have never tracked your time: this is the most basic thing you can do. As you become more skilled in this, weekly, monthly or yearly reflections provide even more insight. As will discussing and reflecting on your accomplishments with an accountability partner or coach.
You value your time, and will even more when you start writing down your daily accomplishments.
And you should also demand people to take your time seriously. Examples:
Companies and teams have the characteristic to follow Parkinson’s law. Study this. This is a real thing organisations and teams struggle with. Be on the lookout for it.
If you cannot manage your time you can’t manage anything else.
Read on and you will see that this specific instruction permeates all other instructions.
Read Drucker and Aurelius to know more about this responsibility.
You are paid to add value. You are not paid for your time; for simply clocking in 8 hours every day. If you are, your company is doing it wrong and you are on the wrong path.
If you are an engineer there are only two things that add value, and only two:
Creating things and solving problems.
That’s it.
You help your company by creating things and solving problems that their customers pay for. This is your contribution. Everything else is a byproduct of the above. And if it isn’t, immediately stop doing it.
You are by no means paid to have meetings, they can be a necessity, a means to an end, but never the end itself.
Meetings are also arrangements for people to socialize. This is fine and has its purpose (teambonding or building trust or just fun). But again, the real purpose and goal is to always add value.
Yes, but I am a manager?
Make no mistake, as a manager you are paid for the exact same two things. However as a product-, customer- or teammanager, your work is often less tangible or more indirectly related to the above. But if you drill down, your responsibilities as a manager are:
These four duties as a manager (or senior engineer) are to ensure the team is still doing either one of these two things: creating the right things or solving the right problems. There is no difference in responsibilities, just different tasks.
Read Grove, Drucker and Evans to know more about this responsibility.
If you combine the above two instructions (Know thy time and Add Value) it leads to this: you are always trying to spend your time to add as much value as possible.
Whether you are an engineer or manager: you have unique talents. This is your leverage, this is what enables you to add value, this is why you were hired. Use your talents as a leverage to always try to add the most value.
You know your talents. And if you don’t, start writing down what you did the day before, reflect on it and I assure you your talents will soon emerge (Know thy time). And with this knowledge:
Always ask: where can I at this moment add the most value?
Is sitting in a meeting with junior engineers to train them the best use of my time? Or should I try to finish building this database cluster? Or should I call this supplier and discuss their proposal? Different tasks that ask for different talents. And the answer is never straightforward and depends on many things. You have to decide.
But the rule of thumb is: always pick the activity where your unique talents can have the most impact to the added value of the team or company at that moment.
Read Grove to know more about this responsibility.
In trying to reach the goals of either creating things or solving problems there are only two outcomes.
It is your responsibility to manage expectations and try to eliminate surprises.
For companies: surprises are bad, avoid them. A job is not a birthday surprise party. Your coworker does not like surprises, nor does your manager and I can assure you his / her manager even less (unless it is their actual birthday of course).
The way to avoid surprises is to communicate often and early. And sometimes this is the only tool you have to manage things that are beyond your control (suppliers, illness etc.).
Of course always focus first on the first outcome (reach the result), but don’t wait to communicate when commitments or expectations are on the verge of being broken.
Read Allen, Drucker and Crucial Conversations to know more about this responsibility.
You cannot slay the dragon until you can see it.
Cal Newport
If you have a job where you don’t have to write down what your team, manager, customers, third parties need from you, you are either a genius or your job cannot be very satisfying. Let’s assume you are not a genius and that you have a challenging job. You need to start writing things down. You need a system to keep track of everything that is in your head, to get it out of your head and actively work on it.
Clear your head by writing everything down. Please don’t use precious brain cycles to keep track of what needs to be done. I repeat: you are not paid to keep track of things. You are paid to add value. You do not add value by keeping track of things, you add value by creating things or solving problems.
At the simplest form this is the opposite of Know thy time where you write down and reflect on what you did the previous day (backwards). Track your tasks is, at the most basic level, a list of what you will do today (forward). You can combine these two activities in one sitting, every morning. It will only take a couple of minutes.
Write down what you want to achieve today.
This not only gives you a reflection point for the next morning (Know Thy Time) but it will also structure your day and give you a good guideline of when you need to demand your time to be taken seriously (“Sorry I can’t work on that right now because..” etc.).
It will also ensure that you add value and it will be an invaluable resource in deciding whether you need to manage expectations.
Of course there are all sorts of ways to structure this to prioritize or specify your tasks. Here are the three main ones:
You can discuss at length about these, but see it as starting point. The key thing here is: you need a system: pen & paper, a computerfile or specialized tools. It does not matter what system you use. But please: clear your head.
Read Allen, Grove, Drucker and Covey to know more about this responsibility.
This is not your last job. You will need to find another job. Prepare for this. This is your responsibility. Now. Not when you find yourself looking for a new job.
Know where your time goes and you will know your talents. You will also need to know or find out if your talents apply to other areas.
Actively prepare for a different job by always testing your talents against other jobs.
Know the difference between skill and talent. A good employer will look for talent more than skill. Say you are masterfully skilled in the custom, specialized CRM of your current employer. Your next employer will not have this CRM. This skill is useless. Your talent however could be you are very quick in picking up working with CRMs in general.
See training as a continuous process and not an event. You should always be trying to learn new things. Look to train for things that are generally applicable.
Don’t know what to do next? Write your own eulogy, be candid. What would you want people to say or remember about you? This is not some morbid experiment but one that will reveal your true desires. See if they line up with your talents. Where is the gap? Actively try to close this gap.
Read Drucker, Kotter, Covey and Johnson to know more about this responsibility.
This post is a summary of every responsibility you have as a professional. It presents a coherent model of six principles that can sharpen your views on your professional responsibilities.
This post also offers a variety of literary references as a starting point for you to dig deeper into the mentioned subjects. Because every subject here is, of course, much broader and deeper than will fit into a blogpost.
This question was left unanswered. And for all intended purposes it could as well have been at the top of the post. Why indeed a summary of principles and instructions?
Simple: you spend about half your waking life at your job. This is time you can only spend once. So this is extremely valuable time.
Your time is valuable and important and you want to spend it on something that is both satisfying and fulfilling. You don’t want to spend your days propped up behind a screen doing things until you can clock out, right? This a a dead-end. And you know it. I believe that a job that is satisfying and fulfilling provides meaning and leads to a richer life. And I am sure these instructions can you help you achieve that.
This post is also available in Dutch 🇳🇱.
I suspect Moby-Dick — the quintessential Great American Novel — has the curious accolade of being one of the most famous books ever, while also being one of the least read books. Its reputation greatly exceeds its appeal. Nonetheless, I had always wanted to read this extraordinary 170 year old book. And now that I did, I think I understand its reputation as well as I understand the incongruent appeal.
Moby-Dick clocks in around 650+ pages and 212,000 words. It’s not a small book but it’s also not the biggest book I ever read. But it was definitely one of the hardest, and one that demanded a dedicated and focused effort to finish.
Long story short: reading Moby-Dick is hard work and it’s not exactly the most riveting thing I ever read.
It doesn’t keep you on the edge of your seat. Surprisingly very little happens for such a big book. You can summarize the entire thing in one sentence (yes, I’ll get to the allegories later).
That is not to say that this is not a smart book. Herman Melville’s IQ probably bordered on genius and he pulled out all the stops with Moby-Dick. However, those two things don’t necessarily make for a good book. Why is it then than Moby-Dick is so revered? I can think of a few things.
Melville’s dictionary must be the most abused book ever. Because if there was an Olympics for using the most different words, Herman Melville would win first, second and third place. This is actually a scientific fact: “About 44% of the distinct set of words in this novel occur only once”
Read that again: 44% of all words in Moby-Dick are used only once.
If you don’t believe me just open this book on any page and you can tell this right away. Moby-Dick is not like any other book.
It is divided in 135 small chapters — and one very important epilogue — each chapter deals with a dedicated subject. And it seems Melville took it as an exercise to fill each chapter with as many different words as he could. Not only that, he likes to use long, half page long rambling sentences. There is also an enormous variation in style per chapter; from dialogue to scientific descriptions to inner thoughts to poetic or philosophical or almost theatrical treaties. And to top it all off, this is all done in English from 170 years ago. Just to give you an idea of what a chore it is to read.
And all of these things are reasons Moby-Dick stands out among other books. Another is because it’s about whaling.
Whaling in the 19th century was astoundingly difficult and fantastical venture. If I hadn’t known about it and you would explain it to me I wouldn’t believe you. People actually set out on wooden ships for three or four years and just randomly sail around the world until they found some whales?! Whales that are actual leviathans and that can kill any man in an instant? And when they do spot these whales, they set out on even smaller wooden boats to try to harpoon these 100 foot creatures, BY HAND?! Surely this is all made up! This cannot be real! But it is.
Whaling is an absolutely insane endeavour. And this makes it a terrific backdrop for a story.
I would like to argue no man before or after has know more about whaling than Melville. He not only writes from his own experiences as a whaler, he also had probably read everything ever written (at that point) about whaling and whales. And he uses all this knowledge to bombard the reader with more facts than your brain can handle, about whaling, whales and whalers.
He also shares detailed glimpses of 19th century Nantucket life. Which makes this book a time-capsule of the American spirit. These are reasons this book is so revered in the English speaking world. So much so, that it is regarded as the definitive Great American Novel.
Even though the book suffered greatly from negative reviews and criticism about alleged blasphemy. And it wasn’t until a good 70 years later that Moby-Dick started to be regarded as the classic we now all know. (But this is a story by itself).
On to the good parts. Moby-Dick is not really about the demonstration of Melville’s mastery of language or even about whaling. These two things make it unique, but what makes it good is what is under the surface (see what I did there?).
This book is absolutely brimmed with allegories, allusions and metaphors. Some small, some encapsulate the entire plot, some are even displayed by the book’s structure.
The most clear-cut one is of course that the whale Moby-Dick represents fate itself. But there are many more. Philosophical or contemplative of nature. You can talk and discuss and debate on this endlessly.
There is one meta-allegory I particularly like. In Moby-Dick we read about a whaler, Ahab, that sets out to kill this mythical monster Moby-Dick, a sperm whale he lost his leg to previously. We as a reader slowly get to experience how this whaler goes maniacally insane and takes his crew with him. Until they all go under.
In a sense this is about Melville himself and his experience and difficulty writing this book! And we, the readers, are the crew.
This is just one take. But there are many more direct allegories, about names, stories and references. Specifically the boats and captains Ahab and Ishmael meet along the way, are loaded with biblical references and meaning. I am sure I probably missed a whole bunch too. Melville uses these narrative devices to deal with many different themes. And it is exactly this what sets Moby-Dick apart from other books. There is a score of things that aren’t said, but implied.
My copy of the book ends with a couple of letters from Melville about his book and his struggles in getting it published. Right after the letters the book, oddly enough, shares a couple of very negative reviews from the time of publishing. I am not sure why they are in there. Maybe to demonstrate that people did not recognize the genius at once? Or how remarkable it is that this book still became a classic? I am not sure.
All in all Moby-Dick is a distinctive and unique reading experience detailing a story about a very specific time and endeavour. And I can now boast “I read Moby-Dick”, and I am glad I did but I will also say I didn’t really enjoy reading it all that much.
I think I understand what Melville set out to do and I admire his genius. I also think I understand the appeal of this book 170 years later. This book makes you work and that is not a problem, but there were times that I really had to force myself, and that does not happen to books that are favorites of mine.
Melville was a genius wordsmith and put many ideas in this book for people to contemplate over for generations to come. But as is the case with music, I don’t care how many different notes a guitar player can hit on his guitar in 1 minute, that is not music, that is a demonstration of mastery. In the end it is about what songs this mastery produces. And in this case, I think I wanted to have liked the song more.
My book tracking app alerted me that I read 52 books over the last twelve months. So, *franticly crunching numbers* yes, indeed, that averages to one book per week!
I follow a couple of blogs of people that read way more than I do. Like these guys, respectively read 116, 105, 74 and 58 books in 2019. I don’t know how they managed to do so, but 52 is definitely a personal best for me and this blogpost is about how I did this.
When I say that I have read a book, I mean: I read it cover to cover. No skimming or skipping, or glossing through. That’s not reading. And no audio books. Nothing against that, but my point is to read a book as the author intended it (of course, this is different when you study a subject and need to pick and choose parts).
Full disclosure, I am currently experimenting reading Moby Dick with the book in hand and the audio book playing along. It’s fun, and a good way to get your teeth into such a classic. But I still need my eyes to follow the words and I don’t think listening to an audiobook while doing other things is the same experience. A book is not a podcast.
I’ve always liked reading but if I had to state a regret it would still be that I wish I had read more. There is always a certain anxiety when I enter a library or bookstore. The average human, or even a frantic reader, will never read more than a few thousand books in their lifetime. So I can never read just what my local library has in stock: even if it takes a lifetime. There are just too.many.books. With this in mind, a minute watching TV is a minute wasted reading.
I realised I find few activities more rewarding than reading. With this realisation in mind I consciously decided that I would take reading more seriously. And of course I still watch a little bit of TV and movies, but just a bit more consciously.
Here are some principles I developed around reading to keep me on track.
For me, this is key. So much so, that last year I wrote my own book tracking app, to exactly fit my needs. In my app I cannot only track what I have read, or am currently reading, but also what I want to read.
I used to use a spreadsheet, whatever works for you, but I was often getting lost in what I was reading (see Principle 2). So having this app definitely helps.
This may be the most important principle on multiple levels. It not only means that I want to read many different books or genres but also that I like to read them simultaneously.
Of course I have favorite genres or subjects, but I try to be open-minded about every book (I wouldn’t snuff Danielle Steele). You never know what you might learn about yourself.
And before I meticulously kept track, this is usually where I got lost. Not every book demands the same energy or attention level and you should be able to switch it up without regret.
Which I do. So at a certain point last year I was reading 11 different books at once: diaries, biographies, novels, management books, historical books. You name it. Because my app allows me to directly see what I started it’s easy to keep track of this and — most importantly — switch it up when I am not feeling a certain book. Instead of dreading picking up a certain book for months or a half read book getting lost on my bookshelf I just move on to a different book, and know I will eventually get to that book. My app tracks it. And I always do! Some books I haven’t touched in months but I pick em up again after some time when I feel like it, and more often than not it’s usually a better experience. I have now had this experience more than once. And it was quite the revelation. The lesson is: different moods ask for different books.
So far I only actively stopped reading two books, with no intention of reading any further ever (this is fine!). So this is rare. Most books I start, I have already done a little bit of research, to know enough that I want to read them.
Another benefit when you switch a lot between books is that I noticed it helps to retain what the books are about. It’s a different experience when you read a book over two months as opposed to two days. Because you have to actively remind yourself of what the book was about again.
The app allows me to add books to my wish list, and as you can see in the screenshot I bought 90 books last year. Mostly from thrift stores, they are absolute goldmines. And yes, I don’t read e-books. I need to feel paper.
The ‘Books I want‘ list from my app is a guideline for thrift store visits, but mostly I just look all over the place. And I used to be a bit hesitant to buy a book, as it would indicate a future commitment to myself to read it. But since reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan and his thoughts on famous writer Umberto Eco’s personal library (here and here), I have been able to shake this habit a bit. So if a book looks interesting: buy it!
So those are the three main principles. Here are some other tips that help to keep your reading on track.
So there you have it! Now, let’s see what’s on TV.
I have a soft spot for Bono. The megalomaniac lead singer of probably the world’s most commercial band (“the only band with their own iPod”). The Irish humanitarian multi-millionaire. Yes, I get all the criticism. Still, few singers can belt it out like Bono can. And I will forever stand by that.
On May 10th this year, Bono turned 60. So I thought it would be a good time to (re)read his 2005 biography.
I got this book, with a bunch of others, in 2006 at an HMV in Manchester. Good times.
It sort of took me back a bit when I realised that most of this book was written in 2003 and 2004, when Bono was only a couple years older than I am now😲. By then he was of course already a very well established and very famous person. The book is written somewhere between two U2 albums: All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. So it finds Bono in a sort of musical lull, but with VERY high energy on issues like humanitarian aid en debt-relief causes.
The book is written as a dialogue, which is a very interesting concept! But I don’t think the chemistry between this Irishman and Frenchman works all the time. Or, I just don’t get their banter, because it’s cringy at times and the questions often go in directions I don’t want them to go (I would have asked different things!). It is also strange that there seems to be an effort to put everything down verbatim (with inserts like “Bono laughs” or “pauses reflectively”) while clearly this book and the interviews have been edited. Which is fine! But why the emphasis on this fake realness?
I am also not sure of the reason for this biography, other than to emphasize Bono’s humanitarian efforts. This biography therefore also suffers what so many biographies suffer from: high on current events, low on what actually made the subject into the person they are now (Neil Young’s biography is the worst example of this).
Granted, Bono is very vulnerable in discussing his youth and parents. This was probably the most revealing and most interesting part. Also because these are few of the actual biographical parts of this biography. I also enjoyed how Bono talked about his religious beliefs. You don’t always get this from the music. But the tête-à-têtes Bono had with Bush and Clinton were probably very on topic in 2005, but they seem like something from another lifetime in 2020 and less relevant.
So I get this is not a book about U2 but about Bono, but I would have expected a little bit more stories about music. And this is not like Keith Richards or Bruce Springsteen‘s tremendous biographies, which were written when they were much older and are much more about the music.
So now that I am done complaining, I could just say that this book is less of a book than more of a collection of what could be magazine interviews, but HOWEVER: I still liked it!
I mean, it’s about Bono. And he definitively is one of a kind. How could you not like it!
People like stories, people remember stories. So, tell stories! This is what I learned from Seth Godin. But Spencer Johnson clearly understands this concept too.
This little book embodies the concepts of how to deal with change in one memorable parable.
Johnson probably wasn’t the first to do so, but this concept — packing management theories as stories — is everywhere now. And this little book, probably has a lot to do with this trend. It was after all the bestselling book EVER at Amazon.com’s tenth anniversary. Go figure.
This was the third book in a twelve part series of introductions to famous thinkers/philosophers (previously I read Plato and Kierkegaard). You might expect these books to be small (check) and comprehensible (not so much). So like the other two books, this book suffers from the same problems.
Sure, you’ll get an introduction on Marx, and you get a better understanding of what influenced his thinking and what his special relation to Hegel was. Interesting, enlightening, great!
However for an introduction I find the language, specifically in the critical parts, way too scientific. So I am always struggling with the question for who are these books written? Clearly an experienced philosopher would not pick up an introduction like this? And for someone just dipping their toes — it is after all an introduction — I think the language can be a bit overwhelming. So writer, who are you trying to impress? The material is there, but it could do with a bit of editing.
I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates and tend to follow what he does. So this book, just like the one on Steve Jobs, is a nice reminder of the man’s personality and his thinking process.
As it spans some 30+ years, there are mild variations noticeable, but overall: what you see is what you get and with Bill Gates and that is head-on, rational straightforwardness and a passion for software.
This is a book just with quotes from late Apple founder Steve Jobs. I already knew most of them, having read more than one book about Steve Jobs. Nonetheless, seeing his most salient quotes in one place is a good indication and reminder of the man’s personality and vision.
Since the quotes are all dated I particularly noticed 3 types of Steve.
You can probably date the quotes based on their spirit to either three of these periods.
The timeline after the quotes was a great plus for this book as well as the references! However this book was not without mistakes, there never was an iPhone 4GS (a 4S sure) and the iPod was introduced on October 23 2001 (not in november).
If one writer is responsible for how we think about robots it is, of course, Isaac Asimov. The terrifically prolific writer and groundbreaking author of the science-fiction genre, produced numerous works with terrific futuristic insight — and, some were about robots. And I, Robot is a seminal work in this oeuvre. But this book is of course not really about robots, or the famous law of robotics.
No, this law is a vehicle, for these 9 loosely connected stories to present — very clever — logical puzzles often with a philosophical or ethical undertone. And this is what makes this work hold up, even after 70 years (this was written in 1950 🤯).
Our views on robots might have changed but the questions remain valid. And it not so much the robots Asimov makes us think about, but even more so about what it means to be human.
One of my favorite podcasts is “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”. I’ve written about it before, it’s an absolutely terrific podcast.
But this post is not about the podcast but about the book!
After the first 50 episodes creator Andrew Hickey bundled the adapted episode transcripts into the first volume of a book series. And, of course, I had to get it, as an unmissable reference and to support the podcast.
Here are some thoughts on the book’s look and feel as it arrived in the mail this morning. So this is not a book review!
My wish for this podcast is that it will become so famous that Andrew Hickey will get a regular book deal, and the nuisances that come with print-on-demand will become a thing of the past. Nonetheless, this book is already a spectacular body of work by someone truly passionate and gifted, and a book that will look good on any bookshelf.
I love that this fantastic podcast, is now available in a format that can be picked up a 100 years from now and still be instantly accessible. Go buy it!
If you read this blog, you know DFW is one of my favorite writers. I even named my book app, in part, after him. So I could be short about String Theory — it’s a absolute pure delight to read — but, of course, I won’t.
String Theory is a collection of 5 DFW essays about tennis. It mostly covers 90s era tennis — Sampras and Agassi — but it closes with 2006 Federer. With DFW’s untimely death in 2008 I find it rather pleasing that by attending the 2006 Wimbledon final, Wallace got to witness, and write about the phenomenon that Federer is. And writing this in 2020, it is even more remarkable that Federer is still playing and competing with the best. Think about that for a second will you.
That said, his piece on Federer is not the best in this collection. But with Wallace that doesn’t mean it’s bad, because for any other writer such an essay would still be the summit of their writing career.
Though it seems with Federer that Wallace was, understandably, genuinely awestruck and smitten in such a way that he finds it hard to describe what makes Federer so special. And that probably says more about Federer’s remarkable talent than it does about Wallace’s.
But it is not just that what sets this essay apart from the others for me, but it is that there is less of Wallace himself in this specific piece. His surprised, bemused and bewildered observations of sometimes unrelated random events or encounters, sprinkled trough his essays, either in footnotes or the main body, are what make his writing so enjoyable. You can find this in most essays, but just a little bit less in the Federer one.
Take his complete letdown by the bland biography of famous tennis player Tracy Austin. I find it hilarious because it bothers him so much. Even though that (hilarity) was not the goal.
Because, mind you: in the end, even from such a dull an uninspiring sport biography, Wallace manages to ask valid questions about genius and talent and let’s you know the premise was not to be agitated and write amusingly about that, but to ask questions.
The essay about Michael Joyce might as well be the greatest thing ever written about tennis (or dare I say, sports in general?). It’s a complex and nuanced, highly technical, hyper personal but still general analysis of what constitutes greatness. He makes you see things with different eyes, while he is learning to see it for himself. Just amazing.
The lack of this personal observations with the Federer essay are a breeding ground for questions. Was this deliberate? Does this mean he was bored with this style? Was it a style? Questions you can endlessly debate.
Fact is never has their been a greater collection of stories about the game of tennis than what you’ll find in String Theory.
Max Brod is probably the worlds’ greatest publicist. He famously refused his writer friends’ dying wish to destroy all his work after his passing.
This friend was of course, Franz Kafka. And against Kafka’s wishes Max Brod did publish his works and subsequently Kafka became known to the world as an absolute literary genius.
The only other Kafka I read before this was one was The Metamorphosis and liked it a lot. So I hate to admit it: but I was a bit bored reading The Trial.
The Metamorphosis is more concise, and much more over the top. Which absolutely works. The Trial however, is much tamer.
Sure, I can see what’s happening and what Kafka is trying to accomplish. And the ideas and underlying themes he’s playing with. And I really like the dreamlike/nightmarish parallel world Kafka created for the main character. This is of course his well-known watermark: creating these typical Kafkaesque surreal settings. And I thought the doorkeeper story within the story maybe was the most interesting.
Maybe it was my stiff Dutch translation, but overall I had a hard time getting into it.
So mr. blogger, you dare to call Kafka overrated? Not exactly, but I cannot let go of the idea that part of the appeal is Kafka’s elusiveness.
A prolific perfectionist writer who does not want to be published? Who had a very troubled relationship with his abusive father? A writer who died young of malnutrition? A writer who only finds succes after his death? A writer whose books are posthumously (sometimes) scraped together from bits and pieces of scrap paper, so you can forever fawn over the true meaning and interpretation of it?
This is all too much right up the literary world alley.
No doubt The Trial has had great cultural and literary impact. But if you pass this book to someone unbeknownst to all this, I think they might not enjoy it as much as critics tend to think.
Nonetheless these are two pretty good videos explaining what makes Kafka an interesting writer. And I am still interested in his other stories.
This book is a play from 1965, based on several accounts of the infamous travels Welsh poet Dylan Thomas made in the early 1950s to the US. If you know anything about Dylan Thomas you probably know he died young (39), and that he was an alcoholic.
This play captures the last two or three years of his life rather vividly. It’s an alcoholic mess and it details an explosive marriage. His tumultuous life and and classic ‘poets-die-young’ death only deepened the already legend. So much so, that a young fellow named Robert Zimmerman, based his stage name on the famous poet a few years later. And that’s why I picked up this book, and learned a little bit more.
I saw this tweet yesterday, and If you know me, you know I will not pass on an opportunity for a free book!
But more seriously, I have known Jason Fried and DHH for some time now. From their blog, their Twitter and multiple different podcasts. They have built their company around very clear and levelheaded thinking. So I wanted to read this anyway, and not just because it was free.
Because of the Corona virus outbreak our 100 person company is on the verge of moving from a dedicated office to fully remote.
This Monday.
Yes.
So I am in dire need of some pointers. As a CTO and as rookie remote worker myself. And this book offers advice for both roles.
To my surprise most of the ideas in the book were already familiar to me. I had heard them in one form or another in a podcast, blog or tweet. Nonetheless I love that it is all in one place!
The book is one of the quickest reads ever, and the structure and clear writing have everything to do with that. It is set up as a collection of themes around the topic of remote work. Every theme is 2 or 3 pages long and to the point! The chapters could be blog posts. And each one hammers one concept down.
Most of the value for me was near the end, the chapters about forward motion culture (good times), leveling the playing field and removing roadblocks (those are the chapter names) specifically stood out.
Key takeaways — or reminders for myself — in order as they appear in the book. Some need extra context, but most speak for themselves I assume.
Maybe you’re thinking that a lot of the items on the above list have little to do with remote work per se. Congratulations! You get it! This is sort of the point. There are of course differences, but the principles stay the same, it’s just that the needles moves a bit — as what to focus on or be mindful of — when it involves remote work. And this book provides clear and practical pointers for that.
This book is already from 2013, but Jason and DHH were clearly right when they saw remote work as the future of work. It makes a lot of sense. And not just because of a virus outbreak.
I picked up this book on our honeymoon to Disney World. But I never read it, because; how do you read a book full of quotes? The answer is slowly!
Just grab it every now and then. And read a few pages.
Of course this is probably a heavily edited and well scrutinized book. Assembled under brand protection of the Disney Company, one of the biggest media companies in the world.
Nonetheless I learned quite a few things, and I have a much clearer understanding of the man who started it all. His choices, beliefs and character are still visible to this day in the fabric of the Disney company.
His ideas about what a park should be, what makes a good story and specifically what the role of entertainment should be. You get a pretty good idea about his thoughts on these matters by reading quotes.
The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing.
Richard Feynman
Well, I definitely wasn’t expecting such sentences in this collection of anecdotes from famous popular physicist Feynman. But I can safely say, it certainly is in line with the rest of the book!
Richard Feyman, the eccentric Nobel laureate physicist lived a remarkable life. And he liked to tell stories. This combination makes this collection of stories in this book widely appealing and entertaining. There is surprisingly very little mention of hardcore science, and absolutely no mention of his most famous and arguably important finding. It is though, about everything else.
So you can expect stories about stories about: picking locks, building the A-bomb, cracking codes, painting, playing the bongos, teaching in South America, learning languages and — to my surprise — unabashedly chasing girls, and visiting topless bars and Las Vegas. Feynman was not your typical scientist.
However what shines through in all these stories are two things: Feyman’s almost unmatched curiosity in almost anything (except the social studies) and his relentless pursuit for applying critical — scientific — thinking in everything (go to the source, can you explain it in an example?). The combination of these factors make Feyman an extraordinary and relentless teacher. He wants to understand and greatly feels the need to explain things.
The book is a lot of fun and surprising on some level (I won’t spoil the fun). Even though some parts make your eyebrows raise.
Though he passed away in 1988, Youtube is filled with videos of Feyman explaining things and they are a pure delight. Here he is explaining fire:
Today is February 21st, David Foster Wallace‘s birthday. So it’s rather fitting that today I finished reading his magnum opus: Infinite Jest. The notoriously long and difficult book from 1996 with visionary insights on modern life. Infinite Jest is one of the biggest books ever written, and it certainly is the biggest book I have ever read.
It took me somewhere between 50 and 60 hours over the course of four months and I — had to — read several other books in between to cool off. So, it was quite the experience. I will try to write some of those personal experiences and observations down here. This post will not discuss or try to dissect the work and themes itself. Many, many, many books and articles have already tried to do that.
No footnotes, I promise.
I knew about Wallace and his challenging writing style, and he always looked intimidating. But last year I picked up ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and it was one of the greatest and funniest things I have ever read (specifically the title essay). And while I was reading that book I tracked down a copy of Infinite Jest. I clearly remember my hesitation. It looked terrifyingly dense. Over 1100 pages in the smallest possible font and hardly any line breaks. And this was just the typesetting, let alone the content! But I bought it anyway, with no real plan to actually read it, yet… But in October I watched ‘The End of the Tour’ — which I greatly enjoyed — so I just had to know what this was all about.
Infinite Jest is not your typical enjoyable reader-friendly book. It is also definitely not a funny book. And it certainly wasn’t intended to be. There are multiple horrific scenes of rape, incest, mutilation and drug abuse (and their consequences i.e. faceless babies). Overall it has a very serious tone and message and I don’t think I expected that.
So whether I enjoyed it in the traditional sense is the wrong question, but I am still glad I read it.
Infinite Jest is unlike anything else I have ever read.
Not only has Wallace an utterly uniquely distinctive style which is impossible to copy, but above all — this book makes you work! Some books you can read in one sitting, with Infinite Jest I could do 20 pages per hour at most, before I was spent. I could not read this book for hours on end. Because it demands your complete and undivided attention. And this can be exhausting. And at times it felt my life was on hold reading it (would I be able to finish it, where is this going?).
Nothing in the story is left unexplored and Wallace’s vocabulary is unmatched (there are over 20.000 unique words in Infinite Jest, this is only rivaled by the dictionary I would think…). And on top of that, he makes up his own words to fit a specific mood or sentence. This makes the reading experience draining.
However, no word seems wasted. Every word seems vital. It is verbose but still perfectly tight prose.
All these things make it a different, but rewarding, reading experience.
I was also left with the idea that this experience can only exist on paper (or at most maybe an audiobook). There is no other way to convey the meaning — which just happen to be expressed by words — of this book. You cannot retell the story, you cannot film the scenes, you would lose everything. I know there are also translations, but I worry that a translation wouldn’t provide the same experience.
Wallace demonstrates and justifies with Infinite Jest that writing is an art form of its own and that reading is a different experience from anything else.
On top of all this, it is also mostly a non-lineair story, jumping from the ‘Tennis Academy’ to the ‘Recovery House’ and all over the place. The story seems like loosely connected collection of shards. And you could almost crack it open anywhere and have the same experience as when you start on page one. I think this is deliberate: it makes your brain work. You have to make the connections yourself. Just like there are no explainers or introductions anywhere.
But I suspect this also aided Wallace’s writing? I sense these fragments, sometimes only separated by a double space, are different writing days (?) because they sometimes differ heavily in tone, ideas and intensity.
There are many, many different themes and many different ideas in this book. Just as there are a couple of general commonalities. One commonality that stood out specifically for me is that every character in this book is flawed. And trust me, there are many characters. Drug addicts, wheelchair assassins, rapists, dealers, handicapped, deformed, talented athletes who threw their life away, you name it: but every character is flawed.
This brings me to what I personally derived as one of the main recurring subjects of the book: suffering. Everyone and everything is suffering from something. The human condition, and in particular its flaws, are at the center of what drives the story.
Wallace himself states that one of the main messages of Infinite Jest is that “pleasure is dangerous“. Specifically: too much pleasure. We are flawed human beings with little to no self-control and a need for pleasure. And this causes problems.
Maybe that’s why he makes the reader work so hard in what could have been a self-referential book title. Pleasure should always be balanced out by hard work.
Yes, you are nothing short of a genius when you can write like this. And from his collection of essays I had already concluded, he was a chameleon, able to effortlessly jump between different styles. But I have often wondered how deep he had to go as a writer to write Infinite Jest. Because whoever wrote this must have balanced on the brink of madness and peered over (I had the same experience with Virginia Woolf).
But this is also what kept me from enjoying the book to its fullest I think. I don’t mind working hard for a book. But when I read Infinite Jest I was 50% of the time immersed in the story and 50% of the time thinking: how did he do this?! How does his brain work? How can someone write this? It really threw me off.
But either way, in the end, just that may be one of the most rewarding experiences from this book. It’s like you get to spend some time in the mind of a genius, and you may not fully understand the machinery and mechanism but you are certainly in on the outcomes.
I heard a great quote: “you might just finish the book and see hints of Infinite Jest in everything that is around you“. I think that is true, this book cannot but leave a mark, and make you see the world through a different lens. And I am glad I am in on it now. And yes, Wallace in 1996 was able to foresee and extrapolate developments with regards to humans and their relation to pleasure (whether this is technology or drugs) that raise questions that are alarmingly relevant today.
At times I thought: when I am finished I am never reading this again! But at other times I thought: this is exceptional I should reread this every so often. (Somewhere in the first few hundreds pages is a story of an addict waiting for a hit. It is quite something). I also made hundreds of yellow marks I want to revisit for various reasons and I want to read more by Wallace. Also there are many Infinite Jest resources I want to read to see what I might have missed (I suspect quite a bit). However, there are also many more books I also want to read of course.
Yes. However, I can’t promise you will enjoy it. And it is an expensive investment of your time (then again, finishing a great video game costs the same amount of time). But the experience of Infinite Jest will be rewarding because it will be unlike anything you have ever read.
Lock the door, turn off your phone and enter the mind of David Foster Wallace.
Gung Ho! is a management book written by well-know author Ken Blanchard. It was somehow never on my radar, so because of the strange title and my unfamiliarity I wasn’t expecting too much, and I only picked it up because I know Blanchard’s other famous theory.
But it turned out to be a delightful, short read. This book can help any starting, aspiring or even seasoned manager to get their priorities straight about working with people.
The theory is built around three core ideas (squirrel, beaver, goose). Decide on meaningful work, decide on how you want to accomplish your task and encourage one another.
What makes the story enticing is that it is based in reality (or is it??). It is built around the story of a factory on the brink of a shutdown, and an old wise Indian who sets out to transform the factory with his new boss. It is sort of misty whether this actually happened (the protagonist herself has some pages in the acknowledgements but seems worried about her privacy). But as the book states in the end notes: it does not matter whether this actually happened: this is a universally applicable theory for every successful company. And I agree.
It’s clever. It’s smart. It’s eloquent. It’s articulate. It’s masterfully written. It’s the archetype of the whodunit. It’s the absolute queen of adverbs.
It’s quintessential Agatha Christie. I enjoyed it thoroughly and can’t imagine someone who wouldn’t.
When this book came out it was seemingly everywhere. Especially in airport bookshops (I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not though). Or maybe I am imagining things and the book just sticks out, more than others, because of the swear word in the title, which is …. quaint?
I happened to find* a Dutch copy and thought: well, why not? Seemed short enough.
And sure enough you can get through it in a few short hours. And I admit it sure did help that the book opens with an anecdote about the writer Bukowski. So mr. Manson definitely had my attention.
It’s clear Mark Manson has a background as a blogger. His writing is proof of that. In an uncomplicated way he explains complicated things. He knows when to stop or when to speed things up and he knows how to entice the reader by mixing personal anecdotes with more or less interesting analogies.
Overall though I have mixed feelings about this book. The F-word is used way too much for my taste. But OK, that’s the gimmick, I get it. I found it more problematic that (I felt) I was treated as an idiot. Especially, since I think I am very well aware of what was going on:
Mark Manson has written a book — based on well established stoic principles — for the masses that do not otherwise read books.
However, there is very little mention of stoicism and the stoic ideas (just one throwaway sentence). Which is strange. Because there are plenty of other ideas and philosophies he cites (and even cites Tim Ferris, so I definitely know he is familiar with Seneca). So this makes it almost seem like he is trying to hide it? Maybe ‘the airport reader’ doesn’t care where these ideas come from, but I do. And he surely must know his ideas are well established stoic principles (from Aurelius, Seneca and others).
Regardless of all this, this book has a lot of truths in it. Truths I was mostly already familiar with, but nonetheless truths. And I don’t mind admitting that I did enjoy reading this book. Mark Manson has carved out a niche for himself by packaging stoic principles in a modern, in-your-face type of language. If that’s your thing, this might be for you. If not, I can point out that there are also many other books with the same message.
*Side-note: one reason I picked up this book is because I found a bookmark in Bregman’s (highly recommended) book that I just finished. The bookmark had an add for Mark Manson’s books. Which is a bit ironic since Bregman dissects and invalidates the findings of the famous Stephen Milgram experiment, while Manson cites the experiment results as a source. Curious, right?
In 1996 — when he was just starting out — Ammaniti published a collection of short stories titled Fango. This particular story (which was also made into a movie) is one of the stories from Fango published as a separate book in 2010 and it’s absolutely vintage Ammaniti.
Being one of his earliest stories, it’s coarse and crude and a actually a bit too much for my taste. His later work is more delicate and smart. I think he tries just a little bit too hard to go for the shock effect. But nonetheless the unmistakable Amminiti touch is all over the place. And it’s still a treat.
Recognizable and unforgettable characters that come to live with only a few sentences: this is something Ammaniti has patented and what most writers strife for. It’s not a superficial skill. Amminiti embodies the notion that the better a writer you are, the more you are able to suffer.
The story itself is a clever, seemingly unrelated, chronological timeline of many different characters on the last evening of the millennium. And eventually they all intertwine in a big way. Because, of course they do.
I don’t know what the English title translation for Rutger Bregman’s latest book will be. But I do know two things. One: there will be one. And two: it will be a bestseller. I do know now, and yes it will be a bestseller:
The title will be something along the lines of: Most People Are Decent. Which is a terrible translation by me and I hope they come up with something better, but it is the general premise of the book.
Bregman hails from the school of Malcolm Gladwell (who he mentions many times). He is a great storyteller, very easy to read and he is able to create a riveting narrative — from different anecdotes and studies — around a compelling sociological thesis. Overall this book sends a message of hope, which is greatly needed. So I can definitely see this book becoming an international bestseller.
To my surprise I was already familiar with most of the ideas, because I am a loyal listener of Bregman’s podcast. His writing style is very similar to his speaking style (which is not always a good thing, but in this case it is). And having listened to him for more than 30 hours, I think I read this book in his voice.
However, even though I can agree on many things (like ‘following the news is bad for you’), there are still a few gripes I have with the book. (Not included the paradoxical reality that I probably disagree with the general premise but completely wholeheartedly agree with the conclusion of the book.)
Bregman is not a scientist, he is an investigative historical journalist, and a really good one. He has a keen nose for pointing out flaws in scientific studies and plotting them against historical backgrounds. And the conclusions he draws from those are seemingly valid. And he makes a good case for most of them, but here is the thing:
Pointing out something is wrong doesn’t directly make the opposite true.
And even though the opposite might very well be true, that is not how science works.
Sometimes such a conclusion makes perfect sense (i.e. I will not argue the correctness of the Stanford Prison Experiment), but in other places I think Bregman lets the narrative prevail the validity of the argument. Which — again — might still be true, but is not necessarily backed up by evidence (this mostly being the case with the Steven Pinker study, I think).
And sometimes the proof or argument is more anecdotal and the sample sizes too small to take for granted. But I also think Bregman is well aware of this. Because this is exactly what he does himself — pointing out flaws. Also he is well aware that history is in the eye of one who tells it and that today’s earth-shattering scientific study can be tomorrows scrap paper. Just something to keep in mind.
There is one in particular I can’t not point out, because it is one of those persistent false claims that are constantly being regurgitated. And because in this case it is about my hometown, I feel I need to address this one.
In a throwaway sentence on page 432 Bregman argues that my hometown — Urk — consistently has the most PVV (a far-right party) voters. Sure, it helps the narrative, but I would argue this is false. Have a look at the last 10 (!) elections. There is only one election where Urk voted definitely higher — and one time marginally higher — but in all other elections Urk voted structurally lower for the PVV in comparison with the national vote.
This is not meant to point out that the book or the premise is wrong. This is just one small example of keeping your eyes and ears open and to always keep thinking for yourself.
I think I have read everything by Gladwell, except his latest. And I think Bregman is also a fan. And he will probably be called the Dutch Gladwell when this book becomes that international bestseller. An unimaginative title (though arguably better than ‘that Davos guy’), but more importantly maybe also a wrong one.
Because Gladwell is under a lot of fire lately, mostly because he tends to oversimplify in an effort to push his conclusions. And I think Bregman does steer clear of this. He is much more careful in drawing conclusions, and doesn’t shy away from casting doubts on his conclusions. Which makes the reader part of the process. But he does call for a grandiose idea (A New Realism) which is another thing where Gladwell usually misses the target. But in Bregman’s case this grandiose idea follows naturally and is commendable.
Having stated some gripes, know that I am not a miser (just a stickler for facts), and I can safely say this is a wonderful book!
Bregman is not an optimist, nor a pessimist but a possibilist (yes, I borrowed that from the book). And I like that a lot! And I don’t know if Bregman knows this, but his ten rules from the last chapter share a great resemblance to Covey’s seven principles. Which I also greatly endorse.
And while this is not a scientific book, it is a book about hope, ideas and presenting a different perspective. And like I have stated many times before on my blog: getting a different perspective is always a good thing. So I would definitely recommend reading this book.
Side note 1: the effect of a cover sticker (to me) has probably the opposite of the intended effect. Because the TV program (where the sticker is from) needs the writer as much as the writer needs the TV program. And when I read on page 28 that Bregman himself calls a different book ‘magistraal’: it makes it even more lazy or at least ironic. So to me such a sticker is a warning: always make up your own mind.
Side note 2: from all the books I read this year, this was probably my favorite physical copy. Though not a hardcover, it was just the right size, the cover design is gorgeous and the font and typesetting are absolutely perfect! Of course, it also helps that Bregman is a great writer, but the overall design also make this book a pure delight to hold and read. I wish all my books were like this.
It’s probably fair to say Niccolò Ammaniti is one of my favorite writers at the moment. This being his third book I read since last year.
He has a gut stomping way of describing the human condition in a funny, recognisable and smart way. His dialogue, characters and plot ooze effortlessly from the pages. And especially his metaphors are one of a kind.
This book specifically touches on a more serious subject, but is still a treat to read.
If you have a couple of hours to spare. Read some Ammaniti.
When The Black Swan came out in 2007 it caused quite a stir. And understandably so. Taleb has a distinctive and fresh view of looking at the world through the lens of an emperic skeptic.
He also likes to write, think out loud, and argue why he is right (and others are wrong). He greatly admires Kahneman, Poincaré and Mandelbrot. But he also dislikes a lot of things: the traditional — and wrong — application of the Bell Curve, the Nobel prize, suits, non-erudite people and a lot of people who work in the field of economics and statistical analysis.
This book came out just before the financial crisis. And people thought the crisis was proof of the Black Swan theory. But alas, that is exactly the wrong conclusion to make, and this is usually made by people who have not fully grasped the Black Swan concept (Taleb argues this crisis was anything but a Black Swan, because he actually DID see it coming). Either way, it did help popularize the book and therefore Taleb (who is less interested in making friends than being right).
Taleb is obviously a very bright and gifted man. He his able to distill his original scientific ideas into more or less popular prose. In my 2010 edition of the book there is a post-essay ‘On Robustness and Fragility’. Which is written after the initial success of The Black Swan. But Taleb uses this essay mainly to double down on why he was right. Which is a bit tiresome.
But nonetheless I enjoyed reading this book: it is written by someone who clearly enjoys writing and explaining things. But mainly because The Black Swan offers you a different view of the world which is always a good thing!
Writing a Churchill biography is not an easy assignment, even though it would be difficult to butcher the job. Churchill lead an unprecedented rich and varied life and just writing down the bare facts would already be enough for a great story. But it would also be a massive undertaking.
Haffner took a different route. He chose the high-level helicopter approach. And he managed to produce an impressive sketch and sagacious analysis of Englands’ most famous political figure, by focusing key on phases of his life. Haffner has the correct required biographers’ distance and writes with ultimate authority. His sentences are carved in stone and are a delight to read. And in some places he is as tough in his verdict as the man himself was.
In his highly distinctive ‘tone of voice’, Maarten van Rossem provides the most succinct available lecture on the root causes which lead to the 2008 financial crisis.
From the change in Keynes thinking (after the 1920s) to the Hayek and Friedman ideology — embodied by the neoliberal policies of Reagan and Thatcher. Van Rossem explains how culture and ideology shifted and, combined with technology and humanity’s never-ending greed, provided the perfect ingredients for what happened in 2008. And what will probably happen again; because humans never tend to learn.
Van Rossem doesn’t wait for the reader, he uses very direct, compelling argumentation, but provides few footnotes or sources. So it’s a matter of believing what the messenger says, as opposed to the messenger providing evidence for his claims. But when you do, this book is the most tight high-level historical overview of the 2008 financial crisis you can find.
Side note: I found it remarkable that van Rossem (as a historian) shares similar ideas with Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who tends to dislike what historians do). E.g. they both subscribe to the idea of people’s general misinterpretation of the Gaussian distribution (the Bell curve). And they both share their admiration for Kahneman and they both seem to dislike the Nobel prize.
Dare Dream Do (Dromen Durven Doen) is one of the all-time bestselling Dutch self-management books. Tiggelaar is a popular figure and he has a charming, personal and pragmatic writing style.
There are few new concepts in the book (at least for me). Practices like visualisation, goalsetting, checking goals, taking responsibility and being grateful. These are all familiar concepts, shared by many other similar well-known management theories.
And with that, Tiggelaar shows a direct linage with the likes of Covey, Kahneman and even Aurelius. But you wouldn’t know this if you’re not familiar with these theories. And that is precisely what makes this a good book. Tiggelaar has condensed this knowledge into an approachable, coherent, concise, practical and actionable book that can be read in a few short hours (or one sitting in my case). And if that’s what you’re looking for, go give it a read.
When I read The Phoenix Project last year, I was smitten. I loved the combination of using fiction to describe how to apply — management and DevOps — theory to true to life situations. So when the publisher asked if I wanted to review the follow-up, I didn’t hesitate. And I can safely say The Unicorn Project is just as much fun as its predecessor.
This fiction book takes place in the same universe as The Phoenix Project. Actually: the same company and even the same timeline. However the protagonist this time is female — Maxime Chambers — which is a welcome change.
The Unicorn Project builds a fictionalised business war story around DevOps theory.
A large incumbent auto parts manufacturer struggles to keep up with changing markets. And the hero of the story is given a thankless project and is told to keep her head down. But she doesn’t! She assembles a team and guided by the mysterious Erik Reid and his Five Ideals (and later the Three Horizons) she sets out to change the course of her project — and subsequently the company!
The reason why I love it so much, is because even though it is fiction the described situations are just too real. I know them all too well. And The Unicorn Project provides insight for how to deal with these situations. It does so by applying the Five Ideals.
The main plot is built around seeing the application of these ideals unfold and their beneficial consequences.
Gene Kim has defined the following Five Ideals:
I will not go into detail about the definition and application of the Five Ideals — you should read the book! — but you can take an educated guess from their description what they mean.
And here is the author himself, giving some background information:
I’ve identified values and principles I call the Five Ideals to frame today’s most important IT challenges impacting engineering and business. … My main objective is to confirm the importance of the DevOps movement as a better way of working, and delivering better value, sooner, safer, and happier. I do this by addressing what I call the invisible structures, the architecture, needed to enable developers’ productivity and to scale DevOps across large organizations.
Gene Kim
Saying there is a happy ending, is probably not a spoiler. The plot is the vehicle for carrying and embodying the DevOps concepts. My only critique is that the book is so chuck full of management and pop cultural references that their application to the story sometimes feel contrived. But not to a fault.
(And apart from that, I kept expecting the CISO to show up and complicating things. But he didn’t?)
I really love the References in the back of the book. I’m a sucker for references and further reading. And I now have a large YouTube playlist with talks about concepts in the book.
Of all the references and concepts mentioned, one in particular popped out: the author’s clear love for functional programming, and Clojure in particular. So I did some digging and sure enough, Gene Kim loves Clojure!
Here he is explaining his love for Clojure:
Bonus: the references from chapter 7 point to a talk by Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure), which is just a phenomenal talk.
Reading The Unicorn Project, will leave you smarter and energized to take on challenges you or your company might face. Go read it!
foster
/ˈfɒstə/
verb
1. Encourage the development of (something, especially something desirable). “the teacher’s task is to foster learning”
TLDR: I made a personal bookshelf management web application and named it Foster and you can find it here. Here’s what I did — with gifs–, so you might build your own.
I named it Foster. Because of *this* blog post — it accompanies the application, so it’s self-referential. And also, because I am currently reading David Foster Wallace‘s magnum opus Infinite Jest. And lastly, the word ‘foster’ makes a lot of sense otherwise, just read on 😉
I like to read and I like to buy physical books — and keep them. Over the years I tracked both of these things in a spreadsheet. But this became unmanageable so I needed something else.
Something like Goodreads but self-hosted. So, preferably a web application where I could:
But I couldn’t find anything that fit, so I knew I probably had to roll my own. In simpler times MS Access could do this sort of thing in a heartbeat. But it’s 2019 and I wanted a web application. However I am not a web developer and certainly not a frontend developer.
But when I came across https://books.hansdezwart.nl/ I knew this was what I was looking for! So I emailed Hans. He was very kind in explaining his application was self-coded and not open-source, but he did provide some pointers. Thanks Hans! So with those tips I built my own application (front and back) from scratch. And I decided to pass the knowledge on, with this blog.
This is what the Foster frontend looks like. It’s pretty self-explanatory: I can search *my* books, track and see reading progress, track collections, click through to book details and see the activity feed (more on that later). Oh, and it’s fast! ♥
The five different parts in the frontend are: ‘Search’, ‘Statistics’, ‘Currently reading’, ‘Collections’ and ‘Activity feed’. They are presented as Bootstrap cards. The frontend is just one index.php file with a layout of the cards. All cards (except ‘Search’) are dynamically filled with content expressed as a div class. The class content is generated by one JavaScript function per card, which in turn call a PHP file. And the PHP files just echo raw HTML.
Other than the index.php file there is one search.php file to make up the frontend. This file takes care of presenting the book details, search output, log and lists views (more on that later). So, most of what can be done and seen in the frontend is handled by the search.php file.
The frontend itself is of course nothing unique. It’s just a representation of the data. The backend is a bit more interesting!
The frontend was the easy part. At least it was after I figured out the backend! I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the database design and what the backend would have to do. I thought the design for such a small application wouldn’t be too difficult. But I surprised myself with the number of changes I made to the design, to get it just right. And I wanted to get it right because:
General rule of thumb: when you start with a good design, everything else that comes after will be a lot easier.
The multiple foreign-key relations between tables (on ids etc.) are not defined in the database. I choose to do this in the code and the JOIN queries.
It’s not hard to understand the database design. And yes, the design could be a little tighter — two or three tables — but let me explain!
One of the main things I spent time thinking about are the actions and their respective states.
I figured you can do one of five things with a book (actions):
Makes sense right? You could even call it the ‘book life cycle proces‘. With one input and one output.
HOWEVER! Some books you already own without wanting them first. Or, you can read the same book more than once. Or, you can give a book to a friend, and buy it again for yourself. Or, you can finish reading a book, that you lent — from a friend or library — so it is not on your shelf anymore. All of these things happen. So actually the ‘life cycle’ actions are not a chronological fixed start-to-end tollgate process, it’s continuous and messy.
Every new action is added to the book log. In the frontend the last 25 entries to the book log are presented as the Activity feed. Every action has a timestamp when an action got logged and a date for that action. Which are two different things. So when I now add a book to my shelf that I acquired 4 years ago, the book log timestamp is now, but the date for the action is 4 years ago.
With this log I can keep track of books even after I got rid of them (because selling/purging is just one of the action for a book). This is important because this way I don’t lose the log history of a book.
Also I can add books to my wanted list even if I have owned them before (maybe I gave them away etc.). And I can start/finish reading the same book more than once. It doesn’t matter, because it is just a log entry.
Now here’s the interesting thing. With all this log information I can generate four states:
These states are generated by specific hardcoded queries per state. They are generated on the fly by what is in the log file, and where the most recent log records prevail to decide the current status.
And with all this:
Foster will track the complete history per book and at all times represent all books I want, own, have read or have owned, at that specific moment in time.
I could have defined these actions as a list: but lists are simpler. Let me explain.
I tend to collect and read specific genres of books, e.g. music, management and computer history books. So I tend to organize books like that. These descriptions/genres are all, of course, just lists.
Some books can be three of these things at the same time: part biography, part computer history part management. So one book can be a member of more than one list.
In the Foster backend I can add or delete books to and from as many lists as I like.
I can also easily create new lists. Say: a list of books that I want for my birthday, or books that are on loan, or books that are signed by the author etc. I just add one new list to my table, and the list will be instantly available in the backend and presented in the frontend.
In the frontend the action log states and the different lists are grouped together under the Collections card. As stated the first 4 collections are populated from the log, and a book always has a last state. The others are just lists.
I can create or delete as many lists as I’d like, and it won’t affect the book log. This way I can organize my book collection far better than I could physically (a book can only have one spot on your physical shelf).
This is where the magic happens! Bol.com — a large Dutch book retailer — has a very easy API you can use to query their book database. I use it to search and add books to my collection. With one click I can get most book details: title, ISBN (=EAN), image, description etc. And I can pull them all into my own database. Including the image, which I then copy and store locally. Like this:
Of course I can also edit book details when necessary, or just enter a book by hand without the API. Sometimes Bol.com does not carry a book.
The bol.com search API is the start page of my backend. The other important backend page is an overview of all my books. Clicking on the titles brings up an edit view of a book. But most importantly I can quickly add or delete books from lists here AND add actions (started reading, finished).
I have defined jQuery actions on the <select option> dropdown menus, which provide a popup — where I can fill in a date if necessary — and which trigger database inserts (there definitely might be some security concerns here: but the backend is not public).
The frontend is open for everyone to see. I don’t mind sharing (my podcast list is also public), also because I always enjoy reading other peoples lists or recommendations. The backend is just one .htaccess password protected directory. In my first database design I had a user table with accounts/passwords etc. But the .htaccess file seemed like the easiest/quicker solution for now.
I built Foster from scratch, no Symphony/Laravel or what have you. And I am a bit annoyed surprised there is still no MS Access RAD equivalent for the web in 2019 (i.e. a all in one tool: from DB design to logic to GUI design to runtime).
I know Django does most of the backend for you , so I briefly looked at it. But for Foster I still ended up using PHP / MariaDB / Bootstrap 4 / JavaScript / jQuery. It’s a familiar and very portable stack that you can mostly just drop and run anywhere (and most answers are on StackOverflow 🤓).
I’ve thought about using SQLite, but I am very familiar with MySQL/MariaDB so that made more sense. Also I learned more about Bootstrap than I actually cared about, but that’s alright. And I wrote my first serious piece of JavaScript code ever (for the dropdown select actions). So that was fun.
All in all: I spent a few days pondering the database design in the back of my mind. And 4 evenings programming front and backend. And now I am just polishing little things: which is a lot of fun!
Right now, I still have around 200 more books from my library to catalogue correctly — that’s why some dates are set to 0000-00-00. But here are a few possible new features I am thinking about:
“Foster looks nice. Please share the code!” No, sorry, for several reasons.
I remember exactly where I was when, in 2004, I heard that Dutch ad site marktplaats.nl was sold for a staggering 224,5 million euros to eBay. A polder Cinderella story.
This success was, however, no accident. Of course, luck was involved, but this is true of all successful businesses. A few years after this deal Bob Crébas (don’t forget the acute accent), wrote down his experiences that lead to this deal. And this has resulted in a very fun auto-biography.
A former, staunch anti-nuclear energy, jobless and musically inclined hippie, from a farmer family, who was not particularly concerned with appearance and image, first grew a thrift-store chain into a multi-million euro business before deciding to jump on the internet bandwagon. And then he defied several odds (there were *many* competitors) before striking gold with this internet thing.
I read this book in one sitting: it is an absolutely fun, well-written and energizing story. And the internet deal (my primary interest) is only a small part of this story. Which is proof that this is a balanced story and that there is more to the writer than just this one deal.
I particularly liked how he weaved the entrepreneurial and pioneering spirit of the new land and the zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s into this story. And of course, the bands he played in are absolutely fantastic fun to read about.
Bob comes off as an interesting character and this auto-biography seems to be the accumulation of someone who is able to define and articulate his life philosophy succinctly: it’s about being not having, and it’s about creating and giving and not taking.
Hemingway, the writers’ writer, is famously known for having spent his early years in Paris. Freshly married, this struggling and then unknown writer was honing his craft and subsequently defining what it means to be a writer in a vibrant post World War I Paris. Where he wrote his first big novel.
In later life Hemingway wrote up his 5 year experience in a couple of loosely related stories. Which involve interactions with other writers (mainly Scott Fitzgerald) and poets. And which offer very specific details (drinks, prices, addresses etc.). Which is almost odd, since the stories were written some forty years later? These stories were posthumously bundled and released as this memoir.
This memoir offers a perfect insight in understanding Hemingway better and his writing. Blunt, scarce, dead-serious (to a point of being humourless even), and without pretense, A Moveable Feast is quintessential Hemingway and a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand him.
When I started college in 1998 this was literally one of the first books I had to buy. It was part of a — cheaply thrown together — five-pack of paperback management book ‘classics’. And my particular copy is printed on recycled paper, with boring frugal typesetting, and even has a Dutch translation error on the back. Not normally a book you would hold on to for 21 years.
We had a couple of classes on the book and I read parts of it. And I clearly remember thinking: well, this is all just common sense! Whoever wrote this was just stating obvious things like: ‘being proactive’ and think ‘win-win’. Anyone could have written this!
However it turned out that the lessons from this book returned to me in one way or the other over the course of my career. And I started seeing the true value and meaning (application is everything). And when I started a higher management education course a couple of years ago, everything came together. I was assigned a personal coach who (so he later on declared) was a Covey trained professional. So he coached me on the Covey teachings and things really fell into place. And I have internalised the key lessons since.
This year I decided to read the book cover to cover again. And with a bit more experience I can now state that this book is almost just perfect.
The seven habits are not a quirky catchy marketing thing — although that undoubtedly had an effect in the successful marketing and branding of the book. Also the word effective has a different connotation than get rich quick. This is not that kind of book. The ‘seven habits’ is a complete and — what’s a better word for holistic — approach to leading an effective and fulfilling life.
Over the years I have read many other management books. And there is a clear line to be drawn between Drucker, Grove and also Allen about what exactly makes good management (and yes, I read all of them). Covey holds a very large and distinct place in that lineage.
But even more modern management ideas like Simon Sinek seem to share a direct link to Covey (start from the inside). Or the famous Ray Dalio biography (principles are key to everything) don’t really bring new principles to the table, just application. Because, Covey already covered the principles.
Apart from going for a complete approach, the book also perfectly balances between being abstract (here’s a thought to ponder) and practical (literally start doing this now!) at the same time. Which is a very fine line to balance and something very few books manage. Management books usually tend to be one or the other.
Many management books have been (poorly) written about just one or a couple of the seven habits. And although some might have some merit, they usually lack the complete approach and relative context in which Covey presents the habits. Because everything is connected with everything — take one out thing and everything breaks.
The seven habits is usually marketed as a business book. My Dutch copy translates the title to ‘habits of leadership’ while the actual English title deals with ‘habits of people‘. That is quite a difference! So I don’t think Covey necessarily indented it to be a business book. A lot of examples are also about his direct close family and other non-business relations. Which is something I do find quirky and not a big enough sample size to be empirical evidence: this is one of my few criticisms. But the examples tend to hold up, not because Covey says so but because they are generic and realistic enough for anyone to relate to.
TLDR: I love Covey and I think everyone should read this book. Because it is about being a better human being.
I have written about Tommy Wieringa before. And this little book is once again a clear example of the mans’ writing ability. Effortlessly and thoughtfully he creates a small story — a tragic love story between two people. And this story, of course, unfolds dramatically almost to the point of derailing and then just staying in the tracks. And Wieringa brings it down to a human level. While never overdoing it.
One of the things Wieringa masterfully does is hiding novel worthy ideas in throw away sentences. It almost seems like he collects these ideas and spreads them carelessly throughout his books just to stick it to other writers.
Roger Thorpe is just as good a writer as Douglas Coupland is. As a matter of fact, he is also as real as a Douglas Coupland character. Glove Pond is his first novel.
I got this book bundled with The Gum Thief, and I was thrown off guard by the high praises on the backcover by Coupland himself. How come I had never heard of this writer? But as soon as I started reading there was the unmistakable Coupland prose and cadence!
This book is the result of the work of the main character from the Gum Thief. Interestingly the main character in Glove Pond also deals with another author who also writes a book. Because, of course he is.
The book has a couple of interesting — and classic Coupland — ideas. E.g. what would happen to the world if everyone’s IQ dropped 50 points, or the other way around, if everyone all of a sudden would become a genius. Entertaining, hilarious and sometimes frightening thought experiments. And exactly what I like about Coupland.
When Gomorrah came out in 2007, apart from spawning a popular TV series, it shook the world. The workings of Italy’s lesser known ‘other mafia’ — the Camorra — are laid bare and Saviano subsequently signed his own death certificate. He has been in hiding ever since.
It’s a gut-wrenching mosaic of stories, of how this organisation operates from Naples — mind you, a modern West-European city — and their direct impact on anything and everything in the area and indirectly all throughout Europe. No details are spared, murders and tortures included. The title is of course a word play on the the Camorra name and the biblical story of the city that was so foul it got destroyed. It makes complete sense.
Gomarrah is a necessary book, it was just a question of who dared to write it. Roberto Saviano did.
There are however some caveats. In trying to be complete the book features a devastating onslaught of names en characters. Too many to wrap your head around. But maybe that was precisely the point. The other caveat is that there is little explanation for how and why this specific area is the birthplace for the Camorra. But that was not the point, so you would need another book for that.
The rather sensationalist title would normally be a reason to not want to read this book. But since this book came out in 2010, the author E.J. Pfauth has become known for more than just this book. He is the co-founder of the Correspondent (a journalism platform), has written other books and he hosts a rather entertaining podcast. So I thought it would be fun to see where his head was some 10 years ago.
The book is part boyish bold blogging adventures i.e. travelling the world and meeting blog celebrities. All while trying to push the medium of blogging to new meaning. And the other part is a between-the-lines advice of how to exactly do this yourself. It’s not a specific how-to, but more ‘this is how I went about it’ (his second book explores this topic in more detail).
A couple of things stood out. First: the upbeat and ambitious belief that blogging could change the world. And second, while reading this in 2019 the notion that yes, the world has indeed changed. But, not necessarily by blogging. Case and point: the main two blogs from the author himself have vanished from the internet. And some of the mentioned blog celebrities have retreated into obscurity. And of course there’s Facebook and other monoliths that have eaten into the blogosphere and the independent self-publishing spirit it stands for.
But what stood out most throughout the entire book was the relentless tenacity of the author. His eagerness got him all around the world. Fortune favors the bold indeed! He was young and ambitious and would try everything and anything to get readers.
I have been blogging since 2005 myself, but I do it mainly because I enjoy it. So I have a different view of what blogging is about than the author. But of course, blogging can be many things. None of which is wrong. So in the spirit of this book I deliberately set out to blog something that would attract more readers. And it worked.
A couple of years ago I stranded about half-way into Ulysses. It did not click. One of the greatest novels ever written, but I had little use for it. So I put it aside for another time. Recently I came across a rather insightful video (highly recommended) about Joyce and his work, and all of a sudden a lot of things clicked!
But not to rush into it too fast, I picked up Giacomo Joyce first. A small and a rather easy read, but classic Joyce.
It’s a collection of poem-like loose and short to very short phrases and sentences about Joyce’s encounters with a young female student. My copy has the English text on the left and the Dutch translation on the right, which is very useful when you are reading someone who helped shape the English language. Also the notes by the translator are remarkably enlightening. Joyce could write three sentences, and you would think you understand what he says, that is until you read the explanation about the six references and metaphors Joyce crammed in there.
Since it is a very loose collection of thoughts (that Joyce almost threw out) and that were only collected by someone else, I couldn’t help but wonder: why did you write it down in the first place then (or why do people blog)? Funny, is that he answer that question more or less himself:
Tommy Wieringa is of course famous for his novel Joe Speedboot. A tremendous novel, where Wieringa demonstrates heaps of writers’ finesse. This book — the Death of Murat Idrissi — is no different. Even though this is a short and easy read, it touches on a lot of subjects and themes and has the Tommy Wieringa flair all over it. He is a master is describing brooding situations, internal struggles and setting a scene.
I am a Douglas Coupland fan. And I think his debut Generation X still holds up as one of his best novels. I probably read it for the first time over ten years ago. And I have since then read several other Coupland novels. (I also reviewed jPod extensively in 2007 on my Dutch blog). So I am quite familiar with his unique style, which is a large part of the attraction. However rereading this book was quite the revelation.
First, to my own shock, I barely seemed to remember the main story (sure, three friends in a desert town, but that was about it). This might be fuel for an entire blogpost on this subject (“What good is reading when you forget? Does this depend on the story or author? etc.”).
But second, when I was reading I had to double check when this book was written — yes, really 1991! The story also takes place around that time. Sure, there a few outdated references, but mainly it struck me how relevant, fresh and on-point Coupland already was in describing and predicting modern society (our society) and our relationships — with each other or technology — which is a main Coupland theme throughout all of his work. Remember this book was written pre-www (pre-grunge!). So it was definitely a different time. But the characters and their stories hold up well, because it is mainly about human interaction. And the struggle these Generation X characters face in their search for meaning, might be even more relevant today.
So rereading this book left me with even more respect for Coupland as an astute and perceptive writer.
Martin Luther King Jr. was only 39 years (and 2 months and 19 days) old when he was murdered. Thirty-nine. I never realised this — until I am 39 myself now.
When he died he had already received a Nobel prize and over 100 honorary degrees from all over the world, but more importantly, he had changed America forever.
Much has been written about MLK and by MLK. And it is especially the latter I am interested in.
This small book is a collection of (Christmas) lectures he wrote and presented on Canadian radio in 1967 — the so-called famous Massey Lectures. This collection itself was published less than a month after he was murdered (which makes reading the foreword by his wife and widow quite chilling to read).
The Dutch translation is a bit rough and outdated. But if you ever heard MLK speak there is very little imagination necessary to hear the man’s voice. It is so powerful that it cuts through time and languages.
The themes he discusses are familiar, but what is most prominent is the very, very long journey that he still saw ahead and that he was not so sure we would ever get there. These lectures help in understanding what MLK saw as the ultimate goal and also pinpoint the root of the problem. A goal which is sadly enough still utterly relevant. And a root cause that is still around.
You don’t have to read the book, here is a YouTube playlist I created with all five speeches where you hear the man himself.
David Foster Wallace could write. And not just write, he could really write extraordinarily well. In related news: water is wet.
Wallace’s writing struck me as an epiphany, a beacon of light, a clear and unmistakable differentiator between merely good writing and exceptional writing.
I have known about DFW for some time now, and I have seen his famous commencement speech several times. It strongly resonates with me. As some other interviews do. But his writing? It seemed intimidating.
Infinite Jest, his magnum opus, is this famous thousand page multi-layered beast of a book. So I thought I start with something lighter. ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing…’ is a collection of essays and so it seemed like a good starting place.
It is a collection of 7 stories and essays on tennis, state fairs, TV, irony, David Lynch and a very entertaining cruise among other things. (Each story could validate a blogpost by itself — there is just so much there). Wallace demonstrates with academic skill his philosophical insights on modern life with the essays about other writers, TV and irony. But he is, just as easily, able to make you scream with laughter when he describes a highly anticipated and ultimately disappointing experience with the dessert tasting booth at the state fair. This man could seemingly do anything with a pen.
The words, and sentences (and footnotes!) all just seem to ooze effortlessly out of him. His voice is radically clear and distinct and his vocabulary and attention to detail are unmatched. It is very obvious Wallace operated on a different level, intellectually and talent wise. And I often stopped reading and wondered about how his depression got the best of him in the end, and whether this much talent and severe depression are somehow two sides of the same coin. Because judging by his writing, I don’t think he experienced the world the same way most people do (whatever that is).
The first thing I did after finishing this book, was head to a bookshop where I bought Infinite Jest. It still looks intimidating, but I can now only assume it must be a definitely fun thing to read.
I finished this book in one sitting. Partly because Zonneveld has a pleasant writing style. But also because the rather recent story of a hugely talented and (very) young cyclist who early on in his career got involved with dope and raced towards destruction is fascinating.
It’s the (auto)biography of Thomas Dekker but it is just as much the biography of the cycling world in the early 2000s. And this world, as we now know, was rotten to the core. This book helped uncover parts of it when it came out in 2016. And many more books about this subject have come out since and around that time.
The book is telling and doesn’t hold back, for anything of anyone. Even Dekker himself doesn’t come across as a particular likeable character. Arrogant, cocky, egotistical and self-destructive to a fault. A very bright star who burned out VERY quickly.
He only did one Tour de France and his actual relevant career was only a few short years. The book came out three years ago, and even this year’s Tour de France will have riders older than Dekker is at the moment. So there is a sense of what could have been.
One important takeaway is the notion that using dope is a gradual (non-conscious) thing. Driven by ego and desire to win. But even more important is the notion that there is no such thing as a casual doper. You either dope or you don’t.
As a cycling enthusiast it’s not necessarily what you want to read. But it is what it is.
Slaughterhouse Five is a well-known classic. And I had been wanting to read it for quite some time now, and now that I finally did, I must say it was absolutely not what I expected.
In a good way.
The book is a sort of autobiographical non-chronological story about the bombing of Dresden, but it is also about time travel, space travel and aliens and different thoughts on philosophy. So yes, there is quite a lot to unpack in this wondrously written meta-fiction novel.
As a reader you have to work hard to keep up with all the time and place switches. But the fantastical and funny storytelling make that easy. (Vonnegut has a certain dry comedic style that I suspect people like Douglas Adams must have been inspired by.)
But even the — sometimes — nihilistic black humour can’t hide that Vonnegut is actually trying to tell or show the reader something. What that is, is largely up to the reader — and also what makes this a postmodern book. One of the things the book itself claims to be, is an anti-war book. And that is certainly also true. So it goes.
Matthias M.R. Declercq pulled of two remarkable things. Not only did he manage to find this extraordinary story about friendship, ambition and sacrifice, he was also able to write it down in exceptional fashion.
The events described in ‘The Fall’ (‘De Val’) are real, but the book is not necessarily a biography. The story revolves around a group of five Belgian riders (flandriens) who are pretty well known in the cycling circuit. Some are even minor celebrities. Their lives and events — and especially the fall — are pretty well known and in some cases were front page news. As a writer you could easily overlook these stories because they were already so heavily documented.
But Declercq shows to have a keen eye for the story behind a story, and he was able to look past known facts and look for a deeper, collective connection between these five riders. And from their humble shared beginnings, Declercq takes the reader on a journey for each individual rider.
He does so with finesse. There is a dignified distance in his writing style (like a reporter) and this strikes the right tone of being an interested witness rather than a thrill seeker (the latter being the fate of many sport books of recent years). By doing so we get to hear the human perspective behind the stories. All these riders have lives, parents, wives, children and they sacrifice a lot. Which might be easy to forget when watching the Giro.
The fact that the often dramatic and heroic sport of cycling is a central subject, of course helps the book, but it is mostly Declercqs’ writing that make this book stand out. I love cycling and I love good books by good writers. This book has both.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is one of the most profound books I have ever read. It has directly impacted my attitude towards sleep and subsequently altered my behaviour. Books that change your behaviour are rare and this is one of them. You should read it.
We all know that sleep is important. But Walker dissects study, after study, after study to describe how important sleep exactly is, and what the devastating effects of too little sleep are. Walker presents what we know about sleep — which is still a large research area — and he comes to quite sobering, startling and stunning conclusions about the importance of sleep.
The shock and awe approach could leave you with a sense of defeat of how we approach sleep related problems. Because, individually and as a society, we handle it very poorly. But Walkers’ optimism towards the end regarding solutions, does provide a little bit of comfort.
Modern man has dug quite a hole for himself, with blue LED lights, caffeine, alcohol, iPads and online distractions, which all disrupt our (sleep) lives more than we can even begin to imagine. But Walkers’ solution is not to shy away from technology, but rather to embrace and expand it explicitly towards better sleep. So fortunately there is at least also some direction in this book. We badly need it.
Please read this book.
Jaap Bakker, a local storyteller from a small rural town in the Netherlands (Urk), has written down anecdotes and jokes from the last hundred years or so. Either things he experienced first hand or that were told to him. So expect hundreds of fun little stories. Stories anyone can identify with, about human interaction and small town life, that make you smile, laugh or even burst out.
Needless to say, I am biased about this book. Since all stories are rooted in my hometown, and therefore very relatable. But I do fear some stories would probably need added context for outsiders to make sense. So it could have used some outside editing to make it more coherent. But nonetheless, I thought it was a delightful read.
Pick up any good management book and chances are that Peter Drucker will be mentioned. He is the godfather of management theory. I encountered Drucker many times before in other books and quotes, but I had never read anything directly by him. I have now, and I can only wish I had done so sooner.
The sublime classic The Effective Executive from 1967 was a good place to start. After only finishing the first chapter at the kitchen table, I already told my wife: this is one of the best management books I have ever read.
Drucker is an absolute authority who unambiguously will tell you exactly what’s important and what’s not. His voice and style cuts like a knife and his directness will hit you like a ton of bricks. He explains and summarizes like no one else, without becoming repetitive. Every other sentence could be a quote. And after reading, every other management book makes a bit more sense, because now I can tell where they stem from.
Drucker demonstrates visionary insight, by correctly predicting the rise of knowledge workers and their specific needs (and the role of computers). In a rapidly changing society all knowledge workers are executives. And he/she needs to be effective. But, mind you, executive effectiveness “can be learned, but can’t be taught.”
Even though executive effectiveness is an individual aspiration, Drucker is crystal clear on the bigger picture:
Only executive effectiveness can enable this society to harmonize its two needs: the needs of organization to obtain from the individual the contribution it needs, and the need of the individual to have organization serve as his tool for the accomplishment of his purposes. Effectiveness must be learned…..Executive effectiveness is our one best hope to make modern society productive economically and viable socially.
So this book makes sense on different levels and is timeless. Even if some references, in hindsight, are dated (especially the McNamara references, knowing what we now know about the Vietnam war). I think Drucker himself did not anticipate the influence of his writing, as the next quotes demonstrates. But this is also precisely what I admire about it.
There is little danger that anyone will compare this essay on training oneself to be an effective executive with, say, Kierkegaard’s great self-development tract, Training in Christianity. There are surely higher goals for a man’s life than to become an effective executive. But only because the goal is so modest can we hope at all to achieve it; that is, to have the large number of effective executives modern society and its organizations need.
For some reason I had never read the David Allen classic Getting Things Done. But I found out that 18 years after its release it’s still a good introduction to time and action management.
David Allen tries to make the natural, systematic. He does so by introducing a 5 step workflow: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. Allen does a great job of explaining these steps with real world examples and sprinkles his text with inspiring and relevant quotes. His system is very much based in the physical world — notes, folders, file cabinets etc. — which can feel a bit outdated, but does make sense (as he explains).
GTD is a way of thinking about organizing. And it has elements you can also find in other organisation methods. But GTD really focuses around three main concepts.
1. Put everything on a list
Yes, everything. The idea is to clear your head, and use your brain to think about things, not to think of things.
2. Define the next ACTION
This is really the hardcore key concept of GTD. Define the next step. Think about results and decide the next action. And it is very important that the next step is an action. If your car needs a check-up, your list entry is not “Car check-up”, your next action and list entry is “Call the garage to make an appointment”. But you may discover that you need the phone number first. So your next action becomes, look up garage phone number. Get it?
3. Update actions
When you’ve written down everything you need or want to do in your system (1), and decided on the next action (2), your system will only work if you regularly revise your system. You do so by updating or working on your actions.
I can see how the GTD method can work, when you stick to it. And even if I don’t think I will apply GTD fully, I certainly take away some key concepts. And I like how the system tries to empower our natural abilities, and to let your brain do what your brain is good at. That is: not keeping track of things, but creating new things.
My only question is that people who could really benefit from such a system, are usually already in over their head. So they would need a coach (or outside help) to successfully implement GTD.
I enjoyed reading GTD and would argue to read it at least once. By just reading it, it already seems to activate a mental process to want to organise and declutter. How else can you explain that I just ordered a labelprinter and 60 feet of bookshelves?
My favorite biographer, Walter Isaacson, did it again. He created a gorgeously illustrated book about the quintessential renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci. The book is based on the mind blowing — in number and content — 7200 pages of notes Leonardo left behind (which probably only accounts for one quarter, the rest is lost). As far as I am concerned this biography is the definitive introduction to this left-handed, mirror writing, ever procrastinating, sculpting, painting, stargazing, riddle creating, bird watching, theatre producing, water engineering, corpse dissecting, observing and ever curious dandy polymath.
“Leonardo’s notebooks are nothing less than an astonishing windfall that provides the documentary record of applied creativity.”
Walter Isaacson
I don’t want to go into too much detail about Leonardo da Vinci; just read the book! But needless to say he was one of a kind, his mind worked differently from other people and he made wide varying discoveries. I always thought he must have been a reclusive person. Because he was so far ahead of his time — sometimes centuries — that he must not have enjoyed present company. But, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Leonardo was very much a people person. And this is one of the key arguments made by Isaacson about Leonardo’s art and skill. Not only was he a keen curious (the most curious) observer and tinkerer but he also sought cooperation to bounce ideas off. Isaacson makes a strong case of Leonardo specifically becoming and being a genius because of the combination of these things.
As I’ve come to expect of biographies by Isaacson, his own personal passion and admiration for the subject shine trough. Which is why I always enjoy his writing. Of course, some things that happened 500 years ago are up for debate, but Isaacson demonstrates enough knowledge and backstory to his findings to come to mostly natural conclusions. This book does an especially good job of going through da Vinci’s life chronologically but still managing to show the cross-sections and connections between art and science (and everything else) throughout Leonardo’s life. And with Leonardo everything was interconnected and related, so this is quite an accomplishment!
All of Leonardo’s skills and knowledge, of course, came together in the painting he worked on for 16 years. The Mona Lisa. The book beautifully works towards that conclusion. And by reading this book you come away with a deeper understanding and appreciation of what exactly it is you’re looking at.
Blauwe Bananen (Blue Bananas) is a management book that was number one for 38 days on managementboek.nl. It is aimed at people who generally don’t read management books. So it sometimes tries to be unnecessarily funny, seemingly afraid to alienate the reader with otherwise dry concepts. Nonetheless the message itself is pretty solid. The theme being: how to become a blue banana. A blue banana is a business with a unique skill set or proposition.
That the message carries merit is not a surprise. This book unabashedly builds on the famous organisational and business strategy theories laid out by Treacy & Wiersema and Hamel & Prahalad. The book introduces readers to a succinct and on-point summary of their concepts. It does so by guiding the reader through four steps: Pursuits, Promises, Perception, Proof (freely translated by me from the Dutch B letter words).
With these steps the book makes the theory practical and consequently is very direct. Which is a good thing. To further cement the theory it offers 29 exercises and practical thought experiments (Things like “write down what you think are unique talents of your organisation”). Overall it does a good job of landing one of the main messages: it does not matter what value you add, if your customer does not perceive it as such. Everything you do as an organisation should add value to your customers’ experience.
If you rarely read management books, Blue Bananas can be a good starting point and offers valid questions of how to add value to your organisation.
Writing short introductions to classic philosophers are hard. This book tries, but falls a bit short as a true introduction.
Plato, the first documented, Western philosopher set the pace for 25 centuries of philosophy. This book explains the culture and setting where Plato developed his philosophy, and their interrelation. It also touches on the main aspects of his philosophy as well as you could possibly expect in a short book of around 100 pages. But I do have two issues with this book.
Firstly, as a reader you need to bring your a-game. There are quite a few names and concepts thrown at you. I assume that people who pick up this book know very little about philosophy so this seems like a mismatch. Secondly; it does not help that most of the language is highly academic (note, I did read a Dutch translation). Two or three chapters were decisively easier to read than the rest of the book, because the language was completely different.
So even if I picked up a few things I would not suggest this book as an introduction to Plato. (Reasons are similar to the Kierkegaard book.) In 2019, if you need an introduction I would suggest you read the Wikipedia page. It’s clearer in language and structure than this book from 1983. I expect somewhere there must be easier introductions to philosophy, geared towards true novices. If not, consider it an untapped market (or maybe we have it already and it’s called Wikipedia).
This classic management book started off with two confusing and underwhelming chapters, but ended up being one of the best three management books I have ever read. And I would highly recommend it to any manager.
If you run into a book recommendation thread on Hacker News or someplace else where tech savvy people congregate, chances are, High Output Management will be mentioned. Published in 1983, updated in 1995 and revived in 2015 with high prise from Ben Horowitz, this book seems to have an enduring allure and impact on tech managers and the tech industry in general.
The 47 year old, down to earth, polymath Andy Grove was already an experienced and successful leader at Intel when he wrote this book. But nobody, probably not even Andy himself, could have predicted what was yet to come for Intel. Namely the explosion of personal computing and the internet, catapulting Intel into becoming one of the most valuable technology companies in the world. And consequently confirming Andy’s theories and practices. I think this explains part of the lasting appeal to tech people.
But most of the appeal is in the words itself. Andy has a very direct and practical approach to dissecting hard managerial themes and is crystal clear on what is important and where (and what) the leverage is. Many, many management books have been written since, and even when I think there is room for editing in this book, I still haven’t read a more comprehensive collection of valuable management lessons put together in such a clear and concise manner.
Everything you read and hear about Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is true. It is an incredible — TRUE — story, told exceptionally well, about the lethal cocktail of greed, ambition and narcissism.
If this wasn’t non-fiction I would have dismissed parts of this book as contrived. We are used to Silicon Valley success stories, but reading about such a supposed success, which raised 900 million dollars at a 10 billion dollar valuation, and which manages to completely fool people such as George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and which, eventually, turned out to be one big decade long lie, is insane.
But not only is the story in itself extraordinary, two other things make this book stand out.
First, the investigation about how this book came to be is part of the story itself. Which makes for a riveting read.
And secondly this book is a celebration of the freedom of the press. With the dazzling number of lawyers, lawsuits and NDA’s described in the book, I was sometimes worried it would be snatched from my hands as I was reading it. The pressure put on people NOT to reveal the truth was enormous. If people like Elizabeth Holmes and David Boies would have had their way, the world would look a lot different. So you get a real sense how these things can go the other way, and where we will never know the truth. But the truth has prevailed (this time) through the freedom of the press. Bad Blood gives hope!
The Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson (my favorite biographer) is mentioned a few times as a (misplaced) inspiration to some of the main character’s actions. Let’s hope Bad Blood can be such an inspiration of how not to do things.
Go read it.
In general, philosophy has a reputation of being hard to understand, and Kierkegaard certainly does nothing to lessen this reputation. He was largely misunderstood in his lifetime, but also very aware that he was ahead of his time. Maybe that’s why he was an enormously prolific writer. His works are often complex and paradoxical in tone and plentiful enough to ponder on its meaning for many lifetimes.
This book has the almost ungrateful job of trying to give an introduction to this rebel amongst philosophers. No easy task. And the writer does not help himself by choosing overly complex phrasings for already complex matters. So this is not an easy read. And, being an introduction, I expected a different writing style.
But I did enjoy the biographical background information about Kierkegaards’ life in the first chapters. After that, Gardiner picks out 4 seminal works to explore main Kierkegaard themes. He does so by offsetting these to other philosophers, especially Kant en Hegel. But without necessary background this can quickly get complicated. (I had to keep notes.) Nevertheless, I especially enjoyed the Abraham paradox as a thinking exercise, and this book also provides nice starting points on Kierkegaards’ thoughts on subjectivity, immorality, individualism and the leap of faith concept.
On my honeymoon in 2009 I asked the store clerk at the Hemingway house on Key West: “what’s a good book to start with?”. She recommended The Sun also Rises.
And I understand why. Because this novel is probably the most accessible summary of the typical Hemingway writing style. Very much set in the 1920s — yet timeless — it is a story about classic themes such as friendship, love, morality and searching for meaning, told through sparse dialogue and with minimal background. And where the main characters drink, a lot. A whole lot.
At the surface this book is, at most, an enjoyable adventure about a group of restless friends, who do a bit of travelling and go to see the bullfights. But when you dig a bit deeper: a lot more is going on. Which underscores the iceberg theory for which Hemingway is famous. There are many sources where you can read about what Hemingway supposedly meant. And while these can be a welcome addition to reading, I am sceptical about too much analysis. Sometimes maybe it just is what it is. Either way, one of the features of great art is that there is no definitive meaning and it is what it is to you.
I read a book about flawed and memorable characters fleeing and navigating through the complexities of life and love. And they drank. A lot.
I picked up this book in the bargain bin of a HMV in Manchester in 2006, when I was on a — sort of — pilgrimage. But I left it on my bookshelf for 12 years, thinking I probably knew most of it already. But books are meant to be read, so I had to get to it eventually.
I think I understand why this book was already in the bargain bin the same year it was released. Not that it is a terrible book, but it is just a really hard sell. In depth reviews of every Warsaw/Joy Division song, demo or recording session are something only hard hardcore fans have a thirst for. But if you do, you will find a chronological and remarkable tale of four guys who went from sloppy generic punk music to producing a timeless, unique and legendary album within two short years. With each page turn, they improve and get closer to reaching that point. Which was a natural conclusion of everything prior, and didn’t drop out of the sky. But even so, the progression and quality of a debut album is still unmatched (maybe only by that other band).
The book falls somewhere between a biography and an encyclopedia. In other words, just my cup of tea! I certainly picked up a few new things. Mick Middles gets quoted often, he is another authority on Joy Division because of his book. I also own this book, and I definitely need to read it now!
I literally received this book from the hands of Jimmy Carter himself at a book signing in New York. I never met a president before — even if only for a few seconds — so I was keen to read his book!
Carter always struck me as an interesting person. A multifaceted outlier: deeply religious but pro science and evolution, anti-NRA but pro guns, peanut farmer by trade and a nuclear submarine operator by education. But apart from all that, any 93 year old who has been married for over 70 years, probably has some interesting experiences to share.
But this is not a biography. This is a personal creed about his definition of faith in Jesus Christ, interwoven with experiences about engaging with world leaders or dealing with personal or global crises of the past. In the last chapter, Carter, without naming names, demonstrates awareness by exactly pinpointing current problems. And you learn that his general approach to past and current problems are often the same, which I think come down to one powerful word: inclusion.
At first I was confused who this book was for. I expected it to be for either Christians or deliberately for non-religious people. But none of that. Carter just writes from his own personal experiences and deeply held beliefs, for anyone who wants to listen and learn something. And he does so with authenticity, honesty and integrity.
Bonus!
I was also lucky enough to be at the taping of this interview on the same day as the book signing. He was a surprise extra guest. The interview offers a great recap of what to expect of the book.
This was an exhausting book to read. Because it reads like a prolonged poem with a stream of thoughts about everything and anything and with very little dialogue. Two things are very clear though: Woolf went very deep and therefore this book can not be anything else than autobiographical. Feeling already exhausted as a reader, I couldn’t even imagine what the process must have been for a writer to put this on paper.
It’s not my favorite kind of fiction but I am still glad I read it. It’s remarkable how Woolf is able to capture moments of human thought and emotion in an identifiable way: tempestuous and full of unfulfilled intent. And where love and hate are often not as indistinguishable as we think.
In 2018 I read 24 books (25th in progress). Here is a list of 10 books that stood out in one way or another. Some are recommendations.
Besides music biographies, computer history and management/business books, I tend to read bestseller novels from a few years ago. By then the crowd has decided what’s good and thrift stores will carry a lot of these books — which can be an indication of something worth reading.
Yes, I read on paper. Screen reading is a different experience for me.
The first couple of books on the list are fiction, the rest are non-fiction. Otherwise the list is in no particular order. Spoilers ahead.
This Pulitzer price winning book will get under your skin. Everything you read about it is true. It is disturbing and unsettling in every way. It is a book about slavery, and the structural dehumanization and killing of millions of Africans over hundreds of years. And it will shed light on the completely hopeless situation of entire generations of humans. But it is also about redemption and the human spirit (and sadly not just the good parts).
The after-the-fact writing style Whitehead uses is very effective. For instance he will write a build up to a rape scene, so you know it’s coming, and there’s nothing you can do. But when it does, the first sentence is of what happened after (“the women of the camp stitched her up”). So without actually describing the event he will make your heart sink. He uses this technique quite a few times, to great effect. I could write a lot more about this book, but just know that this book will not leave you and it will change how you look at things.
The book blends realism with allegory. So even though it is a fictional story (there was of course no literal underground railroad), large parts are based on extensive research of real events. Therefore this book greatly upset my understanding of the history of the USA and slavery.
The Kite Runner is another book that will get under your skin. It is a universal story of the friendship of two boys. About their relationship and the unselfishness and sacrifice. What makes this story extra remarkable is how the writer interweaves the setting (the nature, the culture, the city) with the story. He makes them work really well together. In doing so he not only underscores the idea that people, and therefore their choices, are a product of their environment. But also, this writing style will make you feel as if you are running your kite with the two boys through the crowded and narrow streets, leaving a dust trail while the hot sun is beating on you. A small part of the book near the end I thought was a bit far-fetched, but that might just be me. All in all it’s one of the best books I read this year.
This book is in a lot of Dutch thrift stores. And for good reason, because the writing talent of Ammaniti is evident. Of all books, this book made me laugh out loud the most (I mean, the donkey on a catapult). Ammaniti tells imaginative and captivating but still recognizable stories, that are great fun to read. Even though he adds some unnecessary coarse details in my opinion. For good measure, I also read ‘I Am Not Afraid’ by Ammaniti to see if it was a one-off. But it is not. You can probably pick up any Ammaniti book and enjoy yourself. Overall I would say his writing style feels like a snack instead of a wholesome meal. But sometimes that’s what you want.
And when you crave a snack, I can also recommend the Dinner. Many thrift stores’ bookshelves bend by the weight of the amount of copies of this book. It was one of the most sold books ever in the Netherlands. And I enjoyed reading it. It is written in such a way that you can tell the writer really carefully crafted sentences and chapters to keep the flow going. But after finishing I do remember some of the characters, but I struggle to remember the main plot reveal. But that is because the plot is secondary, this book is all about dialogue and human interaction which are both masterfully written down.
This bio is from 1975, when Johnny Cash already had quite the life and a biography was well in order. We now know he would also have another life, artistically, in the nineties. So reading this book from a 1975 perspective was great. Cash, of course, seems like a man of few words. But the words are heartfelt and honest, and they shine through the paper. You can sometimes just hear the sentences in his voice. Reading this book left me with a deeper understanding of the man and his thoughts and his faith.
But as with most (music) autobiographies I’ve read, this one also falls into the trap of spending a disproportional amount of pages on more recent, less relevant events. Neil Young’s bio for instance talks way too much about his digital music player. And Cash dedicates a lot of time to the charities he runs. That’s probably fine when you read it in 1975 but 43 years later, that’s not what people remember him for and readers will have little connection to something that was topical then.
I’ve written a blog specifically on this book. I can think of no other book that blends two of my favorite subjects, management and computer history, in such an exciting manner that you would think it is fiction, when in fact it is not.
And that can also be said about this book. In a different way, it is fiction, but it is also not. Read my blog post about it here.
I would say this book was written when Google was at its peak (2014). So I couldn’t help but compare what I read to what we know now. And that is not always a positive story. Therefore this book sometimes struck me as being a bit too much self-congratulatory and trying to be funny when clearly they are not telling the whole story. So it deliberately withholds information, which of course makes sense for a billion dollar company, but you can feel tricked as a reader. They only tell you what they want to tell you. And if you’re fine with that there are still quite a few really good lessons in here so I would certainly recommend it. Also, I am still rooting for Google to not be evil.
I reread this book this year, because I think it holds good reminders of how some things really work. Thiel himself has become kind of a controversial figure, but this book has ideas and asks questions that help you make see things clearer. So rereading it once in a while is recommended.
I reread 4 books in 2018, including Zero to One, the Rider, the Old Man and the Sea. These three I’ve read multiple times already, but this was my second read through of the Innovators. It is the near complete story of the age of computers. It’s my favorite kind of subject by my favorite biographer. I love it.
This year I had a chance to meet, and have my copy of the Innovators signed by, Walter Isaacson himself, which was a lot of fun. I also picked up of his latest book on Leonardo da Vinci, which I plan on reading of course.
When you consider that tens of thousands of new books are published each year, reading around 25 books per year is not a lot. The books combine for a total of 6,123 pages, so averaging around 250 pages per book. But more importantly this comes down to reading around 16 pages per day. Now that does not sound like a lot does it? So maybe there is still room for improvement.
Art Garfunkel has a log of every book he ever read. Over 50 years of reading and still he ‘only’ read around 1300 books. Which is impressive, but of course still very little compared to the millions of books available. So when you can only read so many books, you have to be picky. But I am always looking for tips!
I am looking forward to reading ‘How the Internet Happened’ and see how it compares to or complements the Innovators. And a lot of people seem to recommend Bad Blood because it would reveal a lot about Silicon Valley culture. Both books came out recently.
So, any other books I need to read?
When a co-worker handed me a copy of The Phoenix Project, the 8-bit art on the cover looked fun. But the tagline — ‘A Novel About IT, DevOps and Helping your Business Win’ — sounded a bit like the usual buzzword management lingo. But I was clearly wrong, I loved this book!
It is unlike anything I’ve read before and it really spoke to me because the situations were so incredibly recognizable. The book tells a fictionalized story where the main character, Bill, gets promoted — more or less against his will — to VP IT Operations and subsequently inherits a bit of a mess. Things keeps breaking and escalating, causing SEV-1 outages all while the billion dollar company is having a bad couple of quarters and put all their hope on Project Phoenix. An IT project that is supposed to solve anything and everything; already three years in the making and nowhere close to be finished.
The story revolves around Bill and his struggle of how to turn things around. On his path to discovery he is mentored by an eccentric figure called Eric (who is such a great and funny character).
I feel like Bill and I have a lot in common, mainly because the book is really spot on when describing situations IT departments can find themselves in. Some scenes were a literal copy of things I have experienced. As if the writers were there and took notes. It made me laugh out loud or raise my eyebrows on more than one occasion. The reliance on certain key-figures, the disruption of self-involved Marketing/Sales people, the office politics, the lack of trust in teams, the weight of technical debt, the difference between requirements and customer needs. It was all too familiar. So for me the power of the book is the true-to-life examples, because those provide the basis for arguing the successful application of the theory.
Because the book is in fact the theory of DevOps compiled into an exciting story. Which is a lot more fun than it sounds.
Actually the book could be seen as a modern day version of The Goal by Dr. Goldratt — a book that handles the Theory of Constraints — which I had of course heard of, but never read. The writers of The Phoenix Project make no secret of their admiration for Goldratts’ theory. But DevOps is of course a thing of its own. A relatively new paradigm, borrowing from TOC, Lean and Agile principles among other things. Its goal is ‘to aim at shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases, in close alignment with business objectives’. And where The Three Ways theory is a central aspect, unifying culture with production flow. The book shows how those theoretic mechanics work in practice. And that IT is closer to manufacturing than you might think; by breaking down the four different types of work there are in IT. That was actually an eye-opener for me. But I won’t go into too much detail about DevOps, I just wanted to point you in the right direction. If you work with different people to create anything in IT, you are probably going to like this book, and are bound to learn something.
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder is one of those books that always seems to pop up when ‘computer-people’ share book recommendations. Exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C and so on — you get the picture.
It is supposedly about computers, and I like computers! So I had to read it.
And the “Winner of the Pulitzer Price” notion on the cover also seemed promising!
I had assumed it was fiction, however when I started reading it became pretty clear this is a non-fiction book. The Soul of a New Machine, follows a Digital General Corporation team of two dozen engineers in the late 70s who design a 32 bit computer — aka the Eagle — in an 18 month period under enormous pressure and inspiring leadership with ever moving deadlines and increasing market pressure.
It’s an amazing read.
These quotes from the authors’ website pretty much cover what’s so great about it.
Apart from being an exceptional book, here are specific things that stood out for me:
For me this book is a definitive must-read and I would personally really recommend this book to anyone. However I fully understand that this is not for everybody. It can come across as dry or too technical, but if you have ever engineered anything in or with a team or worked with strict but ever moving deadlines, you will recognize a lot and maybe even pick up a few things to put into perspective.
By the way, this is the machine they actually built (according to Google). The commercial name for the Eagle became the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. (picture is courtesy of the blog: The Soul of a Great Machine.)
This book by Ashlee Vance sat on my wish-list since it came out two years ago. So, long overdue, last week I finally got to it and boy, what a ‘fantastic‘ read it is. There is lot to say about the man, his ideas and the ways he goes about bringing those ideas to life. Whether you like stories about next-level entrepreneurship or bold boyish imagination about where we are moving as a species, this book has it.
The book has made me even more convinced that Elon Musk might be the most interesting person in the world right now. Here are some observations about his personality from the book.
“It’s how much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.” – Rocky
All in all this is a well written book, with well researched facts and also not without criticism towards the main subject. But even though he has accomplished so much already, what is most interesting is that this is actually work in progress. So you can only wonder what the future holds for Elon Musk and therefore the world. And we are all witnesses which is kind of fun and exciting.
This book had been sitting on my to-read list for way too long! But I finally found a second hand copy, so here we go!
You could say this is the official autobiography of Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. The Operating System that changed the world! You can wake me up in the middle of the night to talk about operating systems. So this book is right up my alley.
It’s funny to think that more time has passed since this book came out (16 years), than the time there was between the birth of Linux and the release of the book (10 years). So an update would be welcome, however history = history and this book does a good job of documenting the rise of Linux. Even in 2001 it was clear that Linux was a huge force to be reckoned with and that it would only grow bigger from there. But I think few would suspect Linux would be the most used operating system in the world (largely) because of smartphones i.e. Android. Because people were still talking about the desktop in 2001.
The book is structured around alternating chapters written by Linus himself and the writer David Diamond. It follows a chronological timeline. From young Linus to Linux, to underground celebrity status, to bonafide celebrity, to riches and world domination. The story is told in either conversation form between David and Linus or just plain old retelling facts. Because in 2001 things were relatively ‘fresh’ the book has some nice intricate details. Details that would probably be lost when you write a book about this subject 20 years from now. And that is probably what I liked most about it. I was familiar with most of the history, but this book does a great job of filling in the details to get a complete picture from a first degree account. Also there is quit a bit of room towards the end where Linus shares his thoughts on Intellectual Property, copyright and becoming rich (not Bill Gates rich, but still rich). Which was really interesting!
Here are some take-aways from the book:
The title of the book is ‘Just for Fun’. And it is written with room for jokes and lighthearted thoughts. But there is also plenty of serious thought on ideals and pragmatism. But fun is the general theme throughout Linus’ life and the development of Linux. The fun that you get from following your curiosity, working hard on making it happen, and caring about what you do. The pragmatic approach of Linus to everything he does seems to create a sense of flow and he follows that flow and has fun with it. This is also backed by how an enormous project like the Linux kernel, which is the biggest software project in the world, is managed. The loose structure that dictates the development comes from flow.
So all in all it’s a very fun book to read! Even if it’s from 2001 and a lot has happened since. I think there could be an updated version. Or you could ask yourself: “who, in 2017, is the equivalent of 1991 Torvalds?”. So, whose biography will we be reading in 10 years time? My money is on Vitalik Buterin (literally, I own Ethereum). He is a current day one-of-a-kind genius whose technology will probably change the world. Get it?
You are probably aware that there are a *lot* of ways to visualize or model business and management related things. There are few fields of expertise with so many models and theories (sure, math and physics but they are older).
There is even a book that specifically tries to list the most well-know models. There are already over 100 models in this book and the writer told me that the next update will feature even more! Most models have solid reasoning behind it. It might be easy to dismiss them as blah-blah or just common sense. But you should always try to think of a model as a tool, a means, and not a purpose by itself. The tool itself is not the goal, the tool can help you reach your goal. So a model is like a hammer and you are the carpenter. And it should help you gain insight, enable you to communicate key parts of what it is you’re doing or shed some light when decisions need to be made. And most importantly: grow your business.
So it helps to know your tools. Know when or why to apply a model and how it can help you. One particular model I came across recently is the Business Model Canvas. And I like it a lot.
It is a bit different. The idea behind the BMC is explained in a book called Business Model Generation. You can already tell when you hold the book that it is different. The landscape shape will stick out of any bookcase and it has beautiful typography. It is written by Alex Osterwalder but not by him alone. The book is created in a sort of crowd sourced way. Over 400 business and management experts provided Alex their input. I know what your thinking: that this model has become overly complex. But the opposite is true, this process has resulted in a very clear, usable, understandable, adaptable model you can use to visualize and challenge what it is your are doing with your business.
The template for the model canvas has 9 boxes. Each box is a question and you need to answer it. (This is the BMC. Really!)
Here is what I like about it:
Answering this question is of course answering the reason for your company’s’ existence and/or (potential) success. The BMC is released under a Creative Common license, so you are free to use it. Of course there is a lot more to tell about the BMC. Like what the next steps are after this or how to transform business when the BMC implies you should. Or how it ties into the Value Proposition Canvas. But for now this should get you started!
Best-of lists signify another year is coming to a close. People feel a need to sort and order things to make room for what is to come. Or something like that.
So here is an assorted list of best new things I found in 2016. Things can be anything, as long as it was new to me in 2016. Feel free to share your list in the comments.
Google Photos turned out to be a real improvement in photo management. It saves space on your phone and, more importantly, you can search trough photos because Google AI indexes them (and every face on it) for you. Picture of that meeting last month? Coming up! Picture of your kid on a swing? Say no more fam, I got you. You should give it a try, it works pretty great. (Be sure to read the T&C if you have privacy doubts).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEK37MBTUPk
I have listened to 316 podcasts this year. I ain’t lying, it was kind of my thing this year, I even started my own podcast with a friend.
But apart from that, the “How I built this” podcast is hands-down the best new podcast I found this year. Every episode is interesting. No duds so far. It’s always a great story of one or more entrepreneurs on how they got started. And there has been a wonderful selection of guests already. This show is fun and you really learn something every time (but learning is fun ammirite?!).
Usually I compile a list of best new music discoveries. I might still do that. But for now I’d like to point out one genre, that was newish to me: Dark Wave. Taking new wave a bit further. Not for everyone, I know.
Even though I just started this one and so I haven’t finished it yet, I still think Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike will be my favourite book of 2016. Boy, this is something else. And right up my alley, life-lessons, entrepreneurship, sports, passion. It speaks to me. You learn something, you feel you understand things better after reading. At least so far, I might blog about it after finishing (or you know, podcast about it)
Probably Sniper Elite III. I only played a few games this year, but this one was fun. Sneaking and sniping Nazis in the African desert. Not too much backstory or immersion, just what I like for now.
The Big Short. A piece of recent real history portrait by great actors. Yes, in a Hollywood fictional sort of way, but that didn’t bother me.
TV shows are missing from this list, because there just weren’t any that I think I’d like to recommend. But I have seen more episodes of Flip or Flop than you would guess. Probably because we bought a new house ourselves and did some work on it.
Not so much an article, as a guy who writes them. I think I must have stumbled on Derek Sivers and his braindump sivers.org a few times already before 2106, but it didn’t stick or I didn’t see the bigger picture. But this year it did, you can really learn a lot from this guy, who built and sold his company and didn’t keep a penny. He writes interesting articles, some have been compiled to read as a book. Highly recommended.
(That reminds me, I probably also should start tracking favourite quotes.)
I watch and like a lot of YouTube but I have never liked (you know, like-like) a youtube video in my life. So picking one is hard because there is no log. So this is a placeholder for myself to keep track of this. The same goes for gifs, also moving images. I probably have seen more gifs than videos, and that’s saying something 😉
My Chromebook. I did a blogpost on it. But my Tascam DR-40 and Logitech MX Master are close runners up. Oh and I started driving one of these, which is also a nice piece of technology.
For this last one, I’m going to be unapologetically selfish. Yes, with all the political drama this year there were a lot of interesting or funny tweets. But this tweet is mine, non-political and my favourite:
Hello World! Dit is Frans van den Berg. Geboren op 29-7 (2 priemgetallen). 3970 gram. Uptime: 11 uur en 14 minuten. pic.twitter.com/ynCq82UzP9
— Jan van den Berg (@loginn) July 30, 2016
In 2004 I picked up this book about Donald J. Trump. Published in 1987, it is a story about the, then just, 40 year old Trump’s insane real estate successes. And I was genuinely interested. From what I knew then, Trump was the poster child of decadent 80’s Manhattan mega fortune makers. But around the same time his TV show started, and my interest dwindled. I had better things to do than read about this loud-mouthed preposterous figure.
Well, fast forward to 2016. Trump is running for president and surprising friend and foe (but not himself) by being the GOP’s front runner. All while being even more foul-mouthed, obnoxious and racist than anyone would have probably been able to predict. For some time now I wondered how this works. Who is this guy, is it all an act, what is his angle?
So yes, now would be a good time to read this book. All 367 pages of it. Here we go. Here are some things I take away from it, mainly regarding his personality.
The book is small part bio, where the influence and success of his father become apparent. But more so the different chapters are each dedicated to a specific deal. Mostly spanning ‘only’ a period of 10 years. And those deals tell a great deal of how his mind works.
The book makes Donald Trump not come off as a dumb guy. Between his late twenties to around the time the book was written, he had constructed multiple multi-million dollar complex parallel deals. So it was not just luck. He was able to have success partly because had a good upbringing. I would call it a silver spoon (he would disagree). But he comes from a well off and educated family (his uncle was a very well respected MIT educated scientist) and his dad already built a development empire and taught him all the tricks (and got him started with a “small loan”). But he succeed mostly by being clever, hands-on, PATIENT and above all positive.
Yes, you read that right. This guy is incredibly positive towards all and any adversary that he faces. Actually he thrives on what others would call no-win situations. He gets his kicks from it. But he has a way, that no matter what happens he will see the upside for it (for himself). Opportunistic is another word for it. He simply doesn’t accept defeat and in his mind he will give it a spin so that what happened is actually good. Just think about that for a second, this is not a bad character trait.
This character trait also has the effect that he is not shy with compliments towards people he works with. They are: “the very very best”, “genius” or “incredibly smart” or anything in between. It also makes himself look good of course (working with the best), but I can’t help think this also has a positive effect on the people he works with. They want to work for him and prove him right. It is a great management technique. And a great sales technique, you better believe you’re buying that multi-million dollar apartment when a guy like Trump is describing it to you.
The book is filled with complex deals where negotiating sometimes went on for years and things (laws, people etc.) constantly changed but he always saw the upside for himself. He will explain it was actually better that this or that deal fell through or that it was better in the long run etc. He will spin it. But that’s all business. The most striking example of this ‘positive’ attitude was the part about his older brother, who at the time of writing had just died more of less related to a drinking problem…. Trump donates no more than a few sentences to the how and why of all this. But the exact first words after that are: “Fortunately for me, I….”. This took me back. His brother just passed away, and he is directly launching into what’s fortunate for him? But from there on it all made sense. This is the essence of Trump.
The flip side of this same trait is that he is incredibly negative/hostile towards people that stand in his way. The energy he will put them down with is as great as the praises he hands out. Funny thing is that in the book it is mainly politicians that come off bad, and the then mayor of NY Ed Koch specifically. When you’re done reading you really believe that the mayor of the biggest city in the world has the brain capacity of a toddler.
To me these traits are both sides of the same coin.
Beforehand I figured the book was probably mostly written by a ghost-writer. But within the first 5 five pages you are reading this story in the voice of Trump. It has this unmistakable Trump tone of alternating between praising and putting down people and projects (HUGE). It is how he is.
And what we’re seeing now is actually no different, it is just a lot more polarised. The praises and put downs are subsequently more and more contrasting and irrational. But he is older now, US politics are a TV show (he knows how that works), and so he is venting out this part of his character. It’s part of the deal.
Also, I think he is bored.
He was incredibly successful and resourceful in the late 70’s and 80’s. By writing letters, walking around, reading newspapers, pushing and phoning people up (so.much.phoning). However looking at his track record for the 90’s and further, it’s not that he himself has changed, but the world has. Computers came, internet came with it, people found new ways to do business. Trump still ran his casinos and investments, but the glamour was gone. Trump was some dinosaur from the 80’s. So when the TV show came calling he jumped on it. And when that passed he was looking for something new. So, why not be president of the free world?
Because it’s exactly the two things that make him tick, and what he is good at: facing uphill battles and rallying people.
I’m not going to make presidential predictions just yet. But it is safe to say I wouldn’t be voting for him, nor that I think anyone should. Even though still I believe when he would be elected you would see a different Trump. Less polarised. He has that much sense (I hope). (edit: 2019 Boy, was I wrong).
I’ve always loved timelines. Visually seeing where things are in time resonates pretty strongly with me. This love goes back to my earliest memories of the dentists’ office where a huge year-round calendar hung on the wall. It had 12 distinct vertical columns and every day had its own little box. Maybe it’s because of the physical pain that went with those visits, but this calendar is cemented in my mind. It’s what I literally see when I think of ‘a year’.
For things that span multiple years I also tend to make timelines in my head. I plot everything from music history to computer science history and I make cross-references. So for me, the Beatles broke up around the time Unix and C were being developed. And MIT AI’s lab was getting a PDP-1 when Elvis was serving in the military. So yeah….there’s that.
And I like to document everything. What I read, play, watch or listen to. Pretty much for the same reasons I think. So why not plot all that data in a nice timeline? So here you go, my timeline for January with 4 categories of things that I read, watched, played or listened to. I.e. books, movies, games and podcasts. Here’s the full screen version.
This weekend I read On Writing – A memoir of the Craft by Stephen King – something I should have done 10 years ago. This book is not a work of fiction as you might expect from mr. King but rather it is the accumulation of his thoughts on writing (well!).
I don’t plan on writing fiction, I don’t even read that much fiction (tech history and music biographies mostly) but the rules in this book apply to writing in general. Which is something that I do. You’re reading this blog, right?
I noticed this book is often cited in discussions on writing, as a very insightful work. So I had my eye on it for some time now, and when I saw a second hand copy online, the deal was done.
(Mr. King also references The Elements of Style a lot. Which is that other book that is often cited).
Of course I would urge you to read it yourself. It is “part memoir, part masterclass”, and together both aspects make for an entertaining read. As a personal reminder here are my most important findings from the book. There are probably more but these are the ones I remember. So these struck a chord. (Note: mr. King is a straight shooter.)
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up. – Stephen King
On my last vacation I finally got around to reading Masters of Doom by David Kushner. This book from 2003 keeps popping up every now and again and people always rave about it. I put it on my Amazon wish list years ago (which holds 50 books atm). But recently I came across it again, so it was time.
And boy, what an absolute pleasure to read, it was. From start to finish. It’s the story of id Software and mainly the two Johns (Carmack and Romero) the 2 founders who, as the books’ subtitle states, transformed pop culture with their games. This is not a lie. id Software single handedly created the FPS genre with their Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake games and were responsible for introducing the PC in the 90s as a serious (gaming) platform.
This is not a book review. Just read the book, trust me you’ll enjoy it. There are a gazillion (positive) reviews available. This post is just a list of things that struck me while reading this masterpiece.
I could go on about the pizza and diet Coke addictions or the interesting relation/energy between Romero and Carmack, that they were a perfect match that pushed each other but also as they both grew, they grew apart. Or how Doom integrated in everyday life and was subject of critical outrcy following the Columbine shooting. But just read the book for yourself (or read about it here, here or here). It is ultimately a book about a couple of guys that started from the bottom and created a startup which in turn created an industry. A classic Silicon Valley rags to riches story.
