Reading List 2019

My daughter bought this book for my wife at her school's book fair because it has a cute dog on the cover. Some how I got nominated to be the one to read it. The point of view as the dog was interesting for about a second, but quite annoying after a couple chapters. A dog's brain is not complex and interesting enough to want to be inside it for that long.

Fantastic. A futuristic world from the Eighties that never existed. Buy the book, not on a Kindle.

Mesmerizing and beautiful imagery of a world so similar but so different. Save yourself the money and just get the physical book. I bought the Kindle version and it includes tiny black & white versions of the photos, it is nowhere close to the same. The visuals are as important if not more so than the story.

A good story, but drags and is tedious in some parts; it dives far to deep in details of minor points but then skips over major chunks of the plot, to be back filled with a summary. The story and life of Theo is interesting and enjoyed reading about it, it just could've used editing down to 400 pages instead of almost 800.

The story is fairly dark and bleak. It is also quite repetitive, I almost put the book down because it kept repeating the same scenario, but varied just enough to get to the end. I wanted more details on what happened, though them not knowing, I suppose, is part of the story.

The book is written with a distinct style, filled with dialog but not the customary dialog tags, confusing at times but not overly so. I realized it didn't always matter who said what.

A good Hitchcockian thriller, a fun quick summer read.

An epic Western story told with an amazing detail and harsh reality about how it was to live in the West at that time. It is a long one but well worth the time.

Read this story with my 8-yr old daughter, her first major chapter book. We started reading it together but she really got into it and read the second half without me. So I finished it on my own to hear the end of the story.

It's a fun story that literally dives deep into the world of fairy tales.

Oh yeah, Stephen King is a really good author

A good read, I would recommend it. Culture Code offers a different view on what is truly important for forming successful teams. The key qualities of trust, safety, belonging, and communication are more important than most other factors usually attributed to successful teams.

A great book about rituals and traditions at work. The book explains why rituals are important to shaping a team's effectiveness, a company's culture, and how they can be used to contribute to individual creativity and productivity.

The majority of the book is divided into 5 main areas (Creativity, Performance, Conflict, Community, and Transition) and provides 10 example rituals to try to tackle specific issues or improvements.

I recommend getting the physical book because there are a lot of drawings and graphics which may not translate well in a digital version.

A good practical guide for managers, defining what it means to be a manager and what you should do as a manager. The writing was enjoyable, easy to read with little to no jargon. I recommend it for all new managers, and even experienced managers will learn and gain perspective from the various topics covered.

The ideas in the book are solid, with plenty of great quotes and aphorisms to extract. However, as a book I found it hard to engage with the material. It was just a little too preachy self-help and repetitive. The book is like a string of Medium posts each around a principal, good in small doses but not necessarily a cohesive story or book.

An excellent guide to improve your writing. The book is full of practical suggestions, tons of examples, and is solid writing itself. I've read both Strunk & White and Pinker's Sense of Style and recommend Zinsser's book as the first to read, and then re-read.

There is enough value in the book that it is worth reading, and having as a reference The later chapters I found to be the most practical. A few early chapters dive deep into the technical nature of sentence structure which I found confusing.