Also found on my kindle… downloaded and forgotten 🙂
Short entertaining read with lots of bits and pieces of wisdom. Worth reading.
Category: books
Chris Guillebeau: The Art of Non‑Conformity
This was marked unread on my kindle, but upon reopening I realized I’d read it before (but apparently a ~decade ago), so I decided to re-read it, since it’s short 🙂
Still a good read – while it didn’t necessarily age well on the storytelling side, the overall narrative still feels pretty spot on. Certainly worth reading, inspiring, full of beautiful quotes.
Patrick Lencioni: The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business
One of the books that resonate well with my own experience gained over the years, around the importance of clarity, cohesion, communication and psychological safety making organizations truly great.
Worth the read, but better starting with the “Checklist for Organizational Health“ (all the way at the end of the book) and then diving into the specific chapters to learn more.
Still has too many words compared to the core message 🙂
Stephen Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People on my kindle – had stopped reading it at 41% a couple of years ago and finished it just now. While in essence, a good book, there’s a lot of editorializing and storytelling. Leaving that out, would probably compress it to ~100 pages.
Laurie Fabiano: Elizabeth Street
For some reason I downloaded https://www.amazon.com/Elizabeth-Street-Laurie-Fabiano-ebook/dp/B0030AOBR0 to my kindle a while back (can’t remember why) and since all other unread alternatives seemed less attractive, I’ve read it now 🙂
Wonderful novel taking the reader back to the times of 1900 Italy, to a family story around immigration to the US (l’Amercia!) and their struggle with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hand_(extortion).
Jeremias Gotthelf: Anne Bäbi Jowäger: Wie Anne Bäbi Jowäger haushaltet und wie es ihm mit dem Doktern geht
Recently finished reading, and thought I’d be worth logging it here, to ensure I don’t forget:
Amazing read when it comes to the words and sentence structures used (I assume that’s only true when read in its original form, with reasonable Swiss German language understanding), but Jeremias Gotthelf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremias_Gotthelf) really likes to philosophize (and sermonize), which makes the whole read much less enjoyable.
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
What an epic book. Just finished https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina – and am quite impressed. It’s challenging to capture the impression, but I seem to most like the holistic storytelling. Long, but totally worth the read, also because it takes the reader back into a time long ago in Russia.
Tim Ferriss: The 4-Hour Body
After having attempted to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_4-Hour_Body (https://tim.blog/category/the-4-hour-body/) before, and stopping half way through, I finally found the time to read the second half of the book as well.
Seen as a guide to various health and fitness related aspects to dive deeper into, I think the book does a reasonable job. – There are a couple of things I hadn’t heard about before (and a couple which are so far out of my horizon, I don’t think I’d ever have learned about them, if it weren’t for the book (baseball..)) providing a reasonable increase in knowledge spectrum.
Hans Rosling: Factfulness
Based on a recommendation, I’ve finally read Anna Rosling Rönnlund’s, Hans Rosling’s and Ola Rosling’s book “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think“.
I remember Hans Rosling from some of his famous TED talks (like https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen, https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling) but wasn’t aware of the book until a couple of weeks ago – and to be honest, I only now made the connection between Dollar Street (https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/matrix, https://www.ted.com/talks/anna_rosling_ronnlund_see_how_the_rest_of_the_world_lives_organized_by_income) and Gapminder (silly me, in hindsight it’s too obvious).
The findings shared have been transformational for my worldview, and how I navigate the world today. If you need to kill some time, I recommend to at least watch the TED talks – after which the book is a bit of a repeat and you could skip to Chapter 11 right away.