Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The novel of the 11th of September is a heartbreaking, painful, funny, delightful story. Written from a child narrator's point of view (and sometimes reminiscent of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time because of that), the story of Oskar and what his father left behind on that day is utterly absorbing and engaging. (****)
- Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands
A satisfyingly accessible thriller, set among small boats, shifting sands and torrential seas in the first decade of the 20th century. The plot can be difficult to follow at times, not all of the characters are very well fleshed-out, and some of the narratives are helped by the provision of maps - but then, reading the map alongside the story helps the reader to feel that they are part of the adventure. (***)
Spencer Johnson: Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Change happens. If you accept it and get used to it, you will cope. Influential and important, even if it can feel patronising and simplistic sometimes. (****)
Chow Hou Wee & Fred Combe: Business Journey to the East: An East-West Perspective of Global-is-Asian
Slightly odd guide for westerners wanting to do business in Asia (=China, or dealing with Chinese business mindset elsewhere in Asia). Some revealing insights, lots of reference to Sun Tzu (but not in a simplistic "art of war for executives" way). (***)
Mark Forster: Do it Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management
A good book to read in sucession to David Allen's "Getting Things Done". All about switching from to-do lists to will-do lists. Useful tools - might not suit the less obsessive/compulsive, but still a wealth of good ideas that will help anyone to be more productive with their time. (****)
Timothy Ferriss: The 4-hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich
An entertaining guide to how to get rich quick. So very clearly pre-crunch, but it still has some interesting ideas. I quite fancy the idea of having an outsourced pa, someone in India dealing with my phone calls and email ... (***)
David Allen: Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity
The glorious bible of achievement through list-management. Read this book and you will really will clear your intray and your inbox, and you will become a slightly creepy GTD evangelist, ever explaining to others how to manage their email "problems".
(*****)
Edward R. Tufte: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within
An excellent pamphlet, criticising the overuse of PowerPoint - which everyone who ever uses that software (ie - everyone) should read and reflect upon. (****)
Jonathan Wilson: Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics: A History of Football Tactics
Jonathan Wilson's "Inverting the Pyramid" is the history of football told through the evolution of tactics.
With the basic idea that tactics are everything - a team of skilful players with no tactival structure can be beaten by a less talented but better organised team, this excellent book follows the steady move from playing with five up front - which I actually remember playing in for the worst team I ever represented, Blackhall Primary School, in the late 1970s - to the schemes used today, with only one or even no actual forwards. The story is told not just as a chronological progression, but explores what happened in different parts of the world at different times, in a satisfyingly journalistic style peppered with interesting anecdotes - such as the English commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme being astonished by the Hungarian players playing keepie-uppie before they demolished the English side in 1953, or about Di Stefano swapping shirts with Eusebio after the 1962 European Cup Final to signify the passing of the mantle of the greatest player in the world from the first to the second.
But the most amazing thing about it is the five pages it devotes to Eduard Malofeev, statistically Hearts worst ever manager, who ran the team in the early part of 2007. He was, we now learn, one of the two great Soviet coaches - the other was Valerie Lobanovski, who achieved great things with Dynamo Kiev and the Soviet Union. And where Lobanovski was pragmatic, Malofeev, his Byelorussian rival, was all about flair and beautiful football. But sadly, without a decent translator, his ideas fell oh so flat at Tynecastle. And, by then, they were also twenty years out of date. (****)
Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
The book that I was reading in November, at the time of the election. And I found it genuinely engaging and inspiring, with so many little stories such as when he first met President GW Bush (only four years ago), or his thoughts about John McCain (long before the presidential contest).
My story to go with the book comes from getting the train from Doncaster to Sheffield one evening, on the way back from London. On a very crowded local train, stopping at hopeless little former mining villages, three kids (aged like, 15) get on and start larking about. Two girls and a boy, all black (which is quite unusual round there - there aren't very many black people in that part of dismal South Yorkshire). Playing with their phones, shouting at each other etc etc. The rest of the train is being all English and reserved, almost tutting at these kids. The boy sits down next to me, sees what I'm reading, says to me "I've read that. Good book." and gets up and scampers off to play with his girlfriends some more. I felt quite inspired by that random moment of positiveness from that kid; the whole book made me feel better about other people, and that little incident certainly did. (****)
- Colonel (Doctor) M.Medhi: Oman Through the Ages
A lovely book, part travelogue, part memoir, part history and part hagiography (as all books published with the kindness of his benevolence HM Sultan Qaboos inevitably are - my, he is a kind and generous ruler, motivated only by his love for the Omani people).
The author is an Indian doctor who arrived in Oman around 1970, the year of HMS' ascent to the throne, and it is a remarkable account of the situation then and the changing years that followed. A lovely book for spotting places that you have visited, with some excellent pictures and sparking great comparative thoughts about Arabian Sands. (***)
Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams: Wikinomics
Densely written economic analysis of the wisdom of crowds. Interesting and useful in a few places, but not fantastic. (***)
- Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmand: Scotch on the Rocks
What a strange book. A political thriller about an alternate Scotland of the 1970s, where tensions are mirroring Northern Ireland and bombings and civil insurrection are realiry. It was published in 1971 and is co-written by Douglas Hurd (three years before he was first elected as an MP).
As a thriller- not very thrilling. Politically - interesting. I first heard of it through a reference in "How the Scots Took Over London", which discussed why there never was such violence in Scotland. Some of the political ideas now seem silly - a revolutionary Scotland's enthusiasm for retaining the Royal Family but an aversion to receiving support from overseas communists. However - the scene where a scheming SNP leader sits down with the Conservative PM of the UK to plot a future that suits them both seems very plausible. And it also taught me that the word ned - like, to describe neds (translation: ruffians) - is not as contemporary as I had thought. A curiosity, (***)
Gordon Burn: Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel
Hmmm. A very interesting concept. It's a novel about last year - particularly about last summer. And it is remarkable how much that was not forgotten but that had been put aside comes back as you read - Madeleine McCann, torrential rains and flooding, Tony Blair no longer PM, Gordon Brown becoming PM, Tiger Tiger, Glasgow Airport, John Smeaton ... but it is much more than just an "I (heart) 2007" review. It is remarkably readable, written in an accessible journalistic style that sometimes feels like a literary train station novel with its references to the works of other writers, and different issues are cleverly linked; there are no characters beyond the narrator and those that are in the public eye, although the narrator's voice is clunky and the sense that it has been rushed to print sometimes comes through (proofreading could have been more thorough). Without doubt a book worth reading, and definitely one that is worth reading this year - it will lose currency as time goes by. (***)
Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke
A spectacular and confusing novel. It is deliberately confusing - set in and around the Vietnam War, the 'Tree of Smoke' of the title - a biblical reference, normally translated as 'pillar of smoke' - is a psychological warfare operation that is being undertaken below the eyeline of the US military and which draws in - to a greater or lesser extent - all of the characters and the reader, leaving you unsure who is who and what is what. The prose is precise and evocative, whether describing brief and terrible moments of war or the hot and complex feeling of south east asia by day or night. (****)
Ian McEwan: Black Dogs
Overwhelmingly powerful, too much so. Reading the key passage made me feel physically sick, which no other book has ever done. Another book has made me cry, others might have made me scared, but this is the only one that has made me sick. (**)
Wilfred Thesiger: Arabian Sands
A great desert book, far more readable than Lawrence can ever manage to be. Describes an Oman that is gone forever, which is all the more astonishing given that it describes a time - the late 1940s - that is still well and truly within living memory. (****)
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach
A perfectly crafted book. A very short book (I read it in one morning, on Salalah beach - very different from Chesil), but a flawless exploration of love, desire, uncertainty and the consequences of decisions.
A very Ian McEwan book, with all that his books think about personal relationships and brooding possibilities of disaster. Faultless. (*****)
Tim Harford: The Undercover Economist
Another pop-economics book, following in the path that Stephen Leavitt's Freakanomics began. I enjoyed it - it has good a very good explanation of how Starbucks' business model being to let customers decide just how much they want to spend on a coffee, and some very persuasive pro-globalisation arguments, which you don't see very often. (***)
Alasdair Gray: Lanark: A Life in 4 Books
The most epic and ambitious of books. See Lanark blog entry. (*****)
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