As I read books I like to write reviews. Check this page for updates on how I’m doing.
Other years available: 2015
Reading List 2016 - Last year I aimed for 15 books and ended up reading 18. I also let myself start almost a full month early, but the reality is I wasted more than a month not reading at all during the year. So this year I’m aiming for 20 books. Hitting those 20 books won’t really be so […]
Dune by Frank Herbert - Renewed interest in reading is a recent success in my attempt to be a less horrible person. It would shock many of my friends to learn just how few books I’ve actually read. Dune is one of the several books that come up in conversation as, “how have you not read that yet?” along with 4 out of […]
Getting Things Done by David Allen - I try to avoid being overwhelmed simply by avoiding tasks. Ever invited me to something? I got all cringy and didn’t want to talk about going to it, right? Yeah – I avoid tasks. It’s not a social anxiety thing, it’s a “I have way too much stuff asking for my time to sign up for yet […]
Project Management For You by Cesar Abeid - After reading Getting Things Done by David Allen, I was excited to get to work. With clarity about my system and tools, I made better Next Steps and forced myself to confront the things I could do and what I needed to defer or delegate. But on some items, I found myself running in circles. Things big enough […]
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi - Foolish I was, to believe that I would read this book super quickly. Zoe’s Tale is a parallel story to Scalzi’s previous novel in the Old Man’s War universe, The Last Colony. We go through the experience of the Roanoke colony, but this time from Zoe’s perspective. I thought this meant I could shoot through the story and […]
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss - I’d been meaning to read this book for a while. Friend and then-coworker, who is also named Patrick but is not the author of this book, recommended it to me back in 2012. In April 2016 I bought the damn book when the price dropped for the Kindle copy. In November, I finally got around to […]
You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop by John Scalzi - It’s kinda my fault that I didn’t like this book any more than I do. I kinda thought it was going to be like War of Art by Steven Pressfield. But I was kinda dumb. The actual words used to describe the book on all marketing materials make it clear this book is Scalzi’s writing about […]
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon - One of my favorite literary devices is an unreliable narrator. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time turns that notion on its head by providing a most truthful narrator: a teenage boy with an autism spectrum condition. The narrator, Christopher, is mentally incapable of lying (though he has a talent for noting loopholes) and therefore presents […]
Alex Gustafson 