5/5
Took a while to start because The Secret History is one of my favorite books and I was pretty disappointed by The Little Friend - I can't really even remember it. The Goldfinch on the other hand will stick with me for a long time. It's a book where you inhabit someone else's life so deeply that it's disorienting to finish. Outstanding.
2/5
Very short. Not as grubby as I was expecting. You'd be better off just reading The Lean Startup.
5/5
Outstanding WW1 spy/psychological literary thriller.
3/5
Engaging romp of an alien first contact mission to Earth as experienced by a video game developer.
4/5
Epic book about the origins, frequency and long term outlook of life in the universe.
4/5
A search for a missing person is the backdrop for watching society start to collapse and the plot begin to thicken in the sequel to The Last Policeman. Here's hoping that the third book will be worth the wait.
4/5
Has some new (to me) angles to help you try and understand relativity and quantum mechanics so I enjoyed it. I can feel that clarity starting to slip away again two days later though...
3/5
Not as religious as your typical business self help book, still wildly repetitive though. Important goal -> focus on leading rather than lagging metrics -> simple scoreboard -> peer accountability on a weekly basis -> win. It's pretty much scrum for the non-development crowd (assuming that having a captive customer can be counted as a leading metric which I think it does).
4/5
Well paced and strange book about catching a serial killer via unexpectedly powerful tattoos.
3/5
It's like an episode of the A Team with two important differences - the book is set in India and the A Team don't show up. This means that it doesn't end well.
4/5
Exactly what you'd expect from Reacher. It's a solid thriller and totally on form.
4/5
The fascinating, troubling and ultimately morally ambiguous story of how a ubiquitous and storied cell line (HeLa) came to be, and the impact this had on the family of Henrietta Lacks (whose cells became HeLa).
3/5
The central idea of the book - better to construct small experiments and learn faster - seems right, but for a book about validated learning there is precious little data to support the hypothesis. Do Lean Startups return more money to investors or do they just pivot between slightly different ways to share photos before entering the deadpool at the same rate as Fat Startups? I want to believe Lean is better but a stack of anecdotes about IMVU just isn't enough to convince me.
Also, I hate all business books that start out by explaining how their profound ideas are applicable to all people at all times in all industries before stretching out a paragraph of insight over hundreds of turgid pages.
Lastly always read business books a few years after the peak of their popularity so you get the benefit of hindsight and a chuckle at the companies that are held up as shining examples of the author's methodology at the time but are now dead, festering or mostly incarcerated.
Having said all that I think that the approach is generally right and I appreciate that at several points in the book Ries states that there are no easy answers and no substitute for good judgement.
4/5
Exactly what you'd expect from Reacher. It's a solid thriller and totally on form.
4/5
The fascinating, troubling and ultimately morally ambiguous story of how a ubiquitous and storied cell line (HeLa) came to be, and the impact this had on the family of Henrietta Lacks (whose cells became HeLa).
3/5
The central idea of the book - better to construct small experiments and learn faster - seems right, but for a book about validated learning there is precious little data to support the hypothesis. Do Lean Startups return more money to investors or do they just pivot between slightly different ways to share photos before entering the deadpool at the same rate as Fat Startups? I want to believe Lean is better but a stack of anecdotes about IMVU just isn't enough to convince me.
Also, I hate all business books that start out by explaining how their profound ideas are applicable to all people at all times in all industries before stretching out a paragraph of insight over hundreds of turgid pages.
Lastly always read business books a few years after the peak of their popularity so you get the benefit of hindsight and a chuckle at the companies that are held up as shining examples of the author's methodology at the time but are now dead, festering or mostly incarcerated.
Having said all that I think that the approach is generally right and I appreciate that at several points in the book Ries states that there are no easy answers and no substitute for good judgement.
5/5
The best new SF series in quite some time draws to an end. Sad to see it go, can't wait to see what Hugh Howey comes up with next.
4/5
Understated X-Men shenanigans in thriller format.
5/5
The best new SF series in quite some time draws to an end. Sad to see it go, can't wait to see what Hugh Howey comes up with next.
4/5
Understated X-Men shenanigans in thriller format.
3/5
Very much a middle book in a series. vN was outstanding, iD picks up where it left off and it's good if you read vN but probably doesn't stand alone. I'm looking forward to a third installment.
4/5
The Bat - recently translated into English. This is the first in the Harry Hole series and it's a very good one. Most of the rest were translated some time ago and it's a little odd that it's taken so long for the initial installment. I was expecting it to some sort of rubbish embarrassment but Nesbo is on top form here. My guess is that the problem was that it's set in Sydney which is probably a hard sell for fans of Scandinavian crime.
5/5
I don't normally do SciFi series books... but this is Alastair Reynolds doing Doctor Who. Jon Pertwee era with UNIT and The Master. If the BBC had a 300 million Pound budget for a Doctor Who story line in the 70's this is what they would have made.
4/5
I always enjoy Po Bronson and he's typically on form here with fascinating research and anecdotes around the topic of competition. There is a lot of new evidence on how hormones work that I'd never seen before and an interesting theory that competitive sports are a precursor to democracy. Much of this book is about how competition brings out creativity and drive. I wonder it it's missing a trick here and that the real factor is operating under constraint with competition being just one of many possible forms of constraint. In addition to the studies showing that art was better when a competition was involved I'd like to see how this worked out when one set of artists was limited to using just brown and silver... I'd bet the results would look pretty similar.
2/5
By the numbers. OK, but not great.
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