Blue Bananas – Wouter de Vries jr. & Thiemo van Rossum

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 […]

Plato – R.M. Hare

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 […]

High Output Management – Andrew S. Grove

This classic management book starts off with two confusing and underwhelming chapters, but ends 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 somewhere else involving tech savvy people, chances […]

My music discoveries of 2018 part 2

This is part 2 of my best music discoveries of 2018. Earlier editions are here: 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 (part 1). Hands down my favorite tracks of 2018 are still One. Sentence Supervisor with Yelena, and City Calm Down with Blood. I have played these tracks more than any other. Both were featured in […]

Bad Blood – John Carreyrou

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, […]

Kierkegaard – Patrick Gardiner

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 […]

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

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 […]

Joy Division and the making of Unknown Pleasures – Jake Kennedy

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 […]

Faith – Jimmy Carter

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 […]

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

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, […]

Ten notable books I read in 2018

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 […]

Can we replace paper?

Paper always beats rock and scissors. Because one of the few inventions greater than writing itself, is writing on paper. Paper writings are absolute, self-contained and transferable units of knowledge, which after publishing become and stay available and accessible for hundreds of years or more. Don’t take my word for it, there is this great […]