I got an email from my friend Rob Shurtleff of Divergent Ventures this morning that said “So I looked at your bookshelf for ideas. It is a bit like walking into a library without an idea of what I want to read.  So here is the challenge, we are driving to Yellowstone for 4 days of hanging out at old faithful before xmas.  I would like to grab a few books on my iphone for the drive 12 hours each way.  How about putting up two lists:  The Ten Non Fiction books you really should read and The Ten Fiction books.”

I’ve read 72 books so far this year – I’ll probably be around 90 given my typical book a day rhythm when I’m up in Keystone.  So I’m only going to list the top five non-fiction and top five fiction (ok – approximately five) from this year since that’ll be less than 20% of what I’ve read.  Here you go – you can’t go wrong with any of them if you are a reader.

Non-Fiction

Zeitoun: New Orleans + Katrina + Muslim American + Heavy Bad Stuff

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else: Successful Ad Exec finds himself in the dumps later in life.  Fixed by a job at Starbucks.

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves: The Financial Crisis of 2008 unfolding in great detail.

Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska: Actually, in really remote Alaska.

Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital: The story of General Georges Doriet and the start of the venture capital industry.

Fiction

The Scorpion’s Gate and Breakpoint: Brilliant contemporary spy vs. spy stories by Richard A Clarke.  Yes – I realize this is two books – read them in order.

The Player of Games: An Ian Banks classic.  Particularly interesting if you are addicted to Zynga games.

The Orpheus Deception and The Echelon Vendetta and The Venetian Judgment: David Stone is my favorite new mental floss writer.  Three books – read them in order.

Daemon: Easily the best cyberthriller I’ve ever read.

Supreme Courtship: Anything by Christopher Buckley always makes the list.  Especially poignant given my Supreme Court visit this year.

Amy and I just had an awesome week (mostly) off the grid at the Rosewood Mayakoba for my 44th birthday.  Lots of sleeping, running, massages, eating, consensual activities between two adults, and reading.  Lots of reading.

Hothouse Orchid: I started the trip off with some light mental floss to get in the swing of things.  Some of my favorite Stuart Woods characters, including Holly Barker and Teddy Fay kept me entertained for a few hours.

Saturn’s Children: I’ve been fascinated by robots since I read Asimov’s I, Robot as a small child.  In fact, I just realized I haven’t read it in 20+ years so it’s now magically on my reading robot (my Kindle) after two clicks of the mouse.  Charles Stross consistently blows my mind and Saturn’s Children delivers.  One shouldn’t underestimate how difficult it is to write the first person account of a sexbot in a world where humans (who the sexbots were created for) are extinct.  Oh, and it turns out that this particular sexbot is also an assassin, but doesn’t yet realize it.  As the book unfolds, the hierarchy of society that has been created by the robots is fascinating and Stross’ projections of the future are eerily believable.  It’s a long, steady romp through a bunch of classical science fiction ideas portrayed on a different backdrop.  Yummy.

Beginning Ruby on Rails (Wrox Beginning Guides): I have some strange fantasy about learning to program in Ruby on Rails.  I can’t quite figure it out, but I keep buying books about it.  In this case I read the first third and then skimmed the rest as this was a pretty crummy intro book.  My programming repertoire ends around 1989 as I’m proficient in BASIC, Pascal, Scheme, and DataFlex with some proficiency with CLU, Clarion, FoxPro, Paradox, and Access / VBA.  And then I stopped programming as I had too many other things to do in my first company.  I missed object oriented programming completely and find the level of complexity to do simple things in today’s languages completely baffling.  At some point Amy turned to me, asked me what I was reading, and then mocked me by referring to me as “Nerd Boy” for the rest of the day.  That was the point at which I started skimming.

Chasing the Bear: A Young Spenser Novel: I felt like some mental floss after being called Nerd Boy so I read the latest Robert Parker book about Spenser as a child.  It’s a kids book – aimed at diversifying Parker’s audience – and I thought he nailed it.  Even though I just turned 44, I easily slip back into my 14 year old boy persona and it was easy to love this book.

The Numerati: I can’t remember who recommended The Numerati but several people did.  I was disappointed.  I knew a few of the stories in depth already and Baker’s description of them exaggerated reality.  He made his points reasonably effectively, but since I knew the backstory it was tough to swallow the way he described a few of them. 

Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played: Wertheim writes almost as brilliantly as Federer and Nadal play tennis.  This was the story of the 2008 Wimbledon final and if you are a tennis fan, you must read this book.  ‘Nuff said.

The Scorpion’s Gate: When I read Breakpoint I decided that Richard A. Clark had a long and successful career as a cyberthriller writer in front of him.  After reading The Scorpion’s Gate, I realized I should have read it first since he does a great job of growing his characters (making him a broader writer than I’d expected).  While I don’t have a strong opinion on his government service track record, he’s certainly been around the block and has great depth in his storytelling.  Oh – and he makes his point beautifully with his story that we just have no clue how deep the rabbit hole in the middle east actually goes.  Great book and especially timely given our re-invasion of Afghanistan. 

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law for Unity in Physical Law: I can’t remember who recommended this one to me, but I really enjoyed it even though I only understood about 50% of it.  Peter Woit is a physicist at Columbia University who is highly critical of String Theory, writes a superb blog titled Not Even Wrong, and has a gift for explaining the very complex in a way that humans (albeit smart humans) can understand.  Physics was the only science that really captivated me in high school (although I loved my Biology teacher – I just didn’t love Biology) and I had Physics on my brain when I went to MIT.  This lasted about three weeks – my bubble burst when I got a 20 on my first 8.01 (freshman physics) test.  I don’t remember what class average was, but it was much higher than 20, so I’d solidly failed the test.  I went in my room and cried for about thirty minutes, decided physics wasn’t it for me, but got it together and did ok in the class.  Every now and then I read about physics history and am entranced (same with the history of mathematics).  While the vast majority of the string theory went over my head, the book was a joy to read as I like to fantasize about being a theoretical physicist (or mathematician) in a parallel universe.

As we flew home, I started reading a book about Zombies which Niel Robertson recommended to me – I’m halfway through and it’s incredible and deserves it’s own blog post which you’ll get separately.  Oh – and it’s not really about Zombies – it’s about humanity.  And zombies.

You may be thinking “what do these things have to do with one another?”  Well – they are all in my browser this morning after I returned from my run with Reece Pacheco of Overtime Media.  And in case you are wondering, Reece is an ex-lacrosse star who is now running Overtime – which makes HomeField.  They are a young company, but are working with about 200 sports teams at colleges across the country to get the video of their games online.  Reece met me at the NY Entrepreneurs Roundtable Event that I spoke at on Monday, sent me an email about running, and off we went this morning.  Reece – thanks for making sure I got out of the hotel to get my run in.

Back to my browser.  Here are some thoughts for the day.

Techstars Boston plans spring startup program: The TechStars Boston program is happening in the spring of 2010 – March, April, May.  Applications are now open – the deadline for Boston is January 11th at 11:59:59pm, but don’t wait because there are some special bonus happy things if you apply early.  We decided to offset the timing of the Boston and Boulder programs (Boulder will happen June, July, and August) to address of a couple of things, including the ability of me and David Cohen to spend more time in Boston during the program if it doesn’t overlap with Boulder as well as the migration of many Bostonians to the Cape for parts of August.

PI Window on Business – Live Webcast with Me Talking about the Startup Visa: The title of the program is more provocative – “Diminishing Prospects: How U.S. Policy is Undermining Entrepreneurial Vision” – we’ll see what I can add to the program on BlogTalkRadio.  It’s tomorrow (11/20) at 12:30pm Eastern.

iRobot Looj on Daily Grommet: Periodically my friends at Daily Grommet ask me for nerd toy suggestions.  This time I gave them a very practical one – the iRobot Looj.  iRobot will always have a warm spot in my heart because the CEO and co-founder, Colin Angle, is a fraternity brother (I was his pledge trainer – bwahahahahaha).  Need your gutters cleaned?  The Looj is for you.

eCornell Entrepreneur Video Conference: For the next few weeks (deadline is 11/30/09) eCornell will be accepting video submissions from entrepreneurs to showcase their creative approaches to meeting customer needs. Registration is free and easy, and the first-place winner will receive a full scholarship to A Systems Approach to Product and Service Design certification program ($3,500 value).

Over the weekend, I read what I think is going to be my “best book of the year.”  It’s Zeitoun by Dave Eggars of McSweeney’s fame.

Some people just know how to write.  And Eggars is one of them.  Wow.

As I ran around downtown Manhattan this morning thinking about how radically different my run today was from my typical runs around Eldorado Springs and Boulder, I couldn’t help drifting back to Zeitoun.  It’s a stunning story about one man – Abdulrahman Zeitoun – and his family before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.  But Katrina was only the foreplay for the book – the real story is what happens a week after the storm when Zeitoun disappears.

I won’t ruin the book by telling the story here as it’s worth letting it unfold gradually.  But, gradually in Eggars time means that I read the entire 300 page book in one sitting on the couch on Sunday.

America is an awesome place.  At 6am, in the dark, I ran around one of the biggest cities in the world.  I felt safe.  I saw all different shapes, sizes, colors, and types of people.  It was a completely opposite experience to running near my house, where I can do an entire one hour run and not see another human being.

And then I thought of Zeitoun and how insane humans can get, even in this country.  Take my word for it – it’s powerful and may be the best book of the year.  Get it and read it.

Silly disclaimer for the FTC – I get paid an affiliate fee by Amazon whenever someone clicks on the link above and buys a book.  I’m not sure how much money I get and I’m not motivated to blog about the book because of the payment – this was truly a spectacular book.  In fact, I’m never motivated to blog about anything based on the affiliate fees I get – I do it just to better understand how this stuff works since, ahem, I invest in these types of companies and believe I’m a better investor if I actually use the stuff I invest in.  I can’t tell from your guidelines if they even apply to me (and I don’t think they do), but I thought I’d post this just in case.  Plus it made my post longer and more substantial.

Wow – I guess Web 2.0 is happening somewhere (fortunately I have a delegate there – my partner Ryan McIntyre).  That not withstanding, the tempo of stuff going on today is staggering.  I’m having a blast sitting here in Boulder just trying to stay mildly ahead of all the stuff flying around.  I thought I’d share some of it with you in case you need a fifteen minute break like I do.

Angels Weigh In on Net Neutrality: The WSJ has an article talking about the letter a bunch of VCs (including me and my partner Jason Mendelson) sent Julius Genachowski in support of Net Neutrality.  I’m seriously bummed out that my good friend and Representative Jared Polis is opposed to Net Neutrality – if you are in Jared’s district (or any district) fill out the FreePress Save the Internet petition and have it sent to your congresspeople. (update: it looks like according to the OpEd that Jared wrote yesterday that he supports Net Neutrality.)

Incubating Change to Immigration Law with the Startup Visa Movement:  Mark Hendrickson over at TechCrunch has a nice post up on the Startup Visa Movement.

Lijit contributes analysis to Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009: If you are a stats geek, Lijit has some great info for you including Search Engine Referral Data (some of it is surprising), average blogroll size, the impact of Twitter, and some special ad tag info.

When you need an “app for that”, Slice of Lime can build it: My friends at Slice of Lime are now building iPhone apps built on the NewsGator TapLynx framework (more on that soon).  If you’d like to carry me around in your pocket, give the Foundry Group iPhone app a try.

Gowalla + Foundry Group: I like to play with Gowalla.  I like it so much, that they created a special icon for the Foundry Group spot.  That’s one (very effective) way to get my attention.

Music Hack Day Boston: Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin Media point this out to me.  It’s happening on 11/21 and 11/22 in Boston at Microsoft NERD and includes plenty of friends (such as Harmonix, Sonos, and Boxee).  If you are into music + tech don’t miss it.

GoogTweetBing: Yeah, you read it hear 3,412,413th.  Google+Twitter and Bing+Twitter.

I just punked my partner Seth (I expect he’ll figure it out before he reads this) and had my first good run in about 30 days.  Now if the sun would come out I’d be uber-happy.  Back to work.

Periodically I get way behind on my “daily routine” and skip my RSS feeds for a while (up to a week).  This week was one of them – I had two 4am wakeups that led me to the airport followed by a 7am wakeup (due to me being glued to my bed) followed by a 8am board meeting.  So – no RSS feeds.  This morning, after sleeping 12 hours, I spent an hour and read through what I missed this week.  There’s some great stuff that came out of it (most from the last few days) – here you go.

GigaOM Special Event: What Comes Next for the Web? October 19, 2009: 9.30 AM: Om has a great live discussion of what comes next for the web that includes Caterina Fake (co-founder, Flickr & Hunch), Tom Coates (Yahoo), Bret Taylor (Facebook & co-founder, Friendfeed), Jeff Veen (TypeKit), Doug Bowman (Twitter) and Dave Winer.  It’s a three hour detour from the discussion of the “real-time web” that explores the implication of (a) super-speed broadband and (b) the growing pervasiveness of super phones (e.g. the iPhone). 

The making of Zyng’a’s Cafe World, the fastest growing social game in history: I am extraordinarily proud of everyone at Zynga for the amazing company they have created.  Their newest game, Cafe World, is now the fastest growing social game in history (eclipsing FarmVille, the previous leader, also a Zynga game).  I’m a huge FarmVille and Cafe World (and Mafia Wars) player, and not just because I’m an investor in the company. 

The History of SharePoint: SharePoint 2010 is going to be disclosed at the SharePoint Conference starting Monday.  Because of my investment in NewsGator and our huge success with NewsGator Social Sites (Enterprise Social Computing built on top of SharePoint), I’m deep in the SharePoint mix (and use it daily at Foundry Group.)  This post walks through the SharePoint history starting in the last 1990’s.

The End is Not Fixed: Short and sweet advice referenced by Ben Casnocha.  Remember, the lights will go out at some point and you never know the exact moment.

Boston startup events, resources, people you need to know: I spent plenty of time in the past year in Boston in and around the entrepreneurial community while I helped get TechStars Boston up and running.  I lived in Boston from 1983 to 1995, started my first company there in 1987 (sold it in 1993), and made my first angel investments there including NetGenesis (IPO), Thinkfish (acquired by CA), and Harmonix (acquired by MTV).  In the past year a bunch of people have worked hard to re-energize the Boston/Cambridge software / Internet scene with great results.  Don Dodge from Microsoft (who has been an important part of all of this) has a great summary post up about this.

Small c: The penis post: I’m a huge Jeff Jarvis fanboy.  We’ve only met a few times and haven’t ever worked together, but I’ve always found his writings at BuzzMachine to be interesting, informative, and insightful.  His recent post about his penis is extremely personal, but shows the power of how you can “let it all hang out” when you blog.

My life as a one-armed man: Jeffrey Kalmikoff showed up in Boulder a few years ago and immediately became deeply involved in the startup scene here.  He left a few months ago to go to San Francisco (I hear there’s a girl involved) and is now at Digg (Jeffrey – we miss you – a LOT).  He posts a very personal story that describes the “almost loss of his arm” around 2003 along with some other health issues.  If you’ve got alphabetical order figured out, you’ll realize that I read about Jeff’s penis and then Jeffrey’s arm close to each other.  Wait, that’s not what I meant.  As a special bonus, take a look at this amazing video on Jeffrey that I found via Andrew Hyde’s blog post titled Brilliant Short Film on Jeffrey Kalmikoff.

Making of an Entrepreneur: While we are doing some multi-media stuff, my Dad (Stan Feld) interviews Larry Nelson of w3w3.com on his (Larry’s) story.  Hey Larry – turnabout is fair play!

Nowhere: I told Amy that there is nowhere I’d rather be today than in Eldorado Springs with her.  I hope she doesn’t read xkcd.

Videos: Google Wave Acts Out Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting: I continue to really struggle to understand Google Wave.  Joe Sabia tries to explain it.  As a bonus, take a look at the Good Will Hunted trailer.  

Founders Visas: A Good Idea: As far as I know, Chris Douvos is the only “LP blogger” out there.  He recently wrote a blog post coming out in support of the StartupVisa effort.  Thanks Chris!

The ‘We Need to Own’ Baloney: Fred Wilson aggressively (and appropriately) calls bullshit on the VC’s nonsense on insisting they own a certain percent of a company.  Josh Kopelman follows up with a great post titled “Company Math vs. VC Math.”  If VC’s said “I want to own” they’d be expressing a rational and honest perspective.  By saying “I need to own”, the entrepreneur should respond with “why are you starting this relationship out with a lie?”

The VC Gender Gap – Are VCs Sexist? More provocative and appropriate VC fodder from a VC.  This time Jeff Bussgang asks why there are so few female VCs. His conclusion – “Otherwise, our industry is tragically losing out on 50% of the world’s best talent!” is the same we reach at NCWIT for why there are such a lower percentage of female software engineers.  This isn’t about feminism, it’s about getting a whole bunch more smart people involved in what we do!

Well – that should keep you busy for a while.  Time to go for a run – my first in a couple of weeks since I’ve been apparently struggling with a bacterial infection.

Yesterday morning I spent the day at my semi-annual MIT Sloan Executive Advisory Board meeting.  During breaks, I got into two separate conversations about a book I read last week called Breakpoint by Richard A Clarke.  Clarke was chief counter-terrorism adviser for Clinton and Bush and – among other things – has become a superb science fiction writer. Breakpoint – like Daemon – is an absolute must read in the cyber-thriller category (BTW – thanks Kwin for the recommendation.)

The conversations started out around the book, but quickly evolved in the work that I do and how I think about investing.  As part of that, I explained that I learn an enormous amount by both thinking about the future, but also reading science fiction from the past that maps to the present time.

For example, I decided this would be “the summer of Dick.”  I bought all of Philip K. Dick’s books (about 60 of them), put them on a shelf in my Keystone house, and have been systematically working my way through them whenever I’m in Keystone (I’ve read about 15 of them).  I’m completely fascinated by how Dick – in the 1960’s – thinks about computers and travel in the early part of the 21st century.  Some of his projections of what computers will be like completely miss (Auxtape, Magtape, or some other variation of “tape” is the storage device", computers have sexy voices) while others are a lot closer (computers have evolved into learning machines that are self-correcting).  Travel, on the other hand, is a complete miss – you can get from Europe to the US in five minutes in Dick’s worlds.

When Kurt Vonnegut died, I did the same thing as tribute to him – I bought all the Vonnegut books and read them in order (I still have a few left).  As I read Dick, I recalled that I felt Vonnegut sometimes got computers right and sometimes got them wrong, but also completely missed it on travel.

After seeing the latest Star Trek in the theater, Amy and I Netflixed Star Trek Season 1 and started watching it from the beginning (I’ve seen most of them, but I was never fanatical about Star Trek so there are a few I missed.)  Same drill – it’s cool to see Spock’s “bluetooth-like ear implant communicator thingy”, but why the fuck does the elevator take so long to get between levels on the Enterprise?  And what’s with the sexy computer voices and all the flashing lights?

When I think about all of the information I synthesize both by going backward in time and reading forward (Dick, Vonnegut, Heinlein, Asimov) as well as starting today and going forward 5 – 30 years (Clarke, Suarez, Stross, Banks, Stephenson, Gibson, Sterling) I realize that I’m creating a subconscious framework in my brain for a lot of the stuff I’m investing in.  Sometimes it maps directly; sometimes it’s the stuff that misses that it so interesting.

Oh – and it’s really fun!  BTW, where is that jetpack I was promised (still my favorite West Wing moment of all time):

“Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised… Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don’t even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh Lyman: The personal computer…
Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where’s my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?”

I regularly get asked some variant of “what books would you recommend to an entrepreneur.”  I typically send a quick email answer along with a link to the list of all the books I’ve read in the past few years.

Earlier this week, Fred Wilson forwarded me and Jerry Colonna (his old partner at Flatiron Partners) an email exchange he had with an entrepreneur.  The question in the email was:

“i’m looking for some book recommendation that have made an impact in your life, or books that you would recommend that would benefit me in a beginners life of entrepreneurship.”

Fred’s answer included two of my top three books for entrepreneurs.  My top three, along with a brief reason, follow:

Atlas Shrugged : While I’m not an Ayn Rand fanatic, every entrepreneur (or aspiring entrepreneur) must read this book to better understand the morality of self-interest (which is at the root of Rand’s Objectivism philosophy).  I find the contrast (and conflict) between “producers” / “founders” and “looters” / “moochers” to be a powerful characterization that will meaningfully impact any young entrepreneur.  This is a very long book that should be read slowly and carefully, especially John Galt’s speech near the end.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values : Robert Pirsig’s first book is a brilliant essay on quality.  I’ve never been particularly good at reading classical philosophy – Zen and the Art was one of the first philosophy books that I actually felt like I grokked (assuming you don’t include Stranger in a Strange Land in the philosophy genre.)  While Zen and the Art isn’t as long as Atlas Shrugged, it should also be read slowly and savored.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: I didn’t read this until a few years ago and it was the second Michael Chabon book that I read (after The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – also a fantastic book.)  While this book is a fictionalized account of the creation of the comic book industry it really is a treatise to entrepreneur as superhero.  Chabon is an incredible storyteller and he takes the philosophy-fiction genre to a new level.

All three of these books are on my “must read” list for entrepreneurs of any age.  As the dog days of summer wind down, pick one and go for it.  I just inspired myself to go reread all three (five!) of them.

Tired of the health care debate?  There’s a ton of other great stuff out there today.  Here’s some of the things I came across on my Sunday morning pre-run scan of all things web.

A Laser Strike at the Galactic Center: I like to learn at least one new thing every day.  The Astronomy Picture of the Day site insures this happens.  Today I learned about our Galactic Center and very powerful lasers that create artificial stars.  This is something for my Boulder Hack friends to aspire to.

Financial Times Feels Vindicated by Web Strategy: Does anyone actually believe any of this?  Does anyone find it ironic that this article is in the New York Times.  I wonder when a black hole is going to emerge and swallow the newspaper industry because of all its self-referential articles.

Scanning Headlines: Now this is more like it.  Maybe the Financial Times will learn something from Fred Wilson.  Oh – and when I page around on the Financial Times site, they appear to give me access to everything (I’m 20 clicks in and still haven’t been asked to sign up to pay.)

Editorial: X Could Learn a Lot from Vista, Windows 7:  Articles like this entertain me.  Every time I’ve ended up using a computer that runs Gnome on top of Ubuntu, I think of things like this.  Well – not really.

How To Fly Without ID: Awesome description of the real truth behind “has your bag been unattended; have you accepted gifts from a stranger; can I see your identification please?”  I’m not flying on an airplane again until September, but I’m definitely going to try some of this when I do and see if I can increase the level of harassment I receive from the airlines.

Caution: Disruption Happening: Very smart post by Micah Baldwin about disruption, some of the TechStars Boulder 2009 companies, and comic books.

The Flawed Terms in VC Deals: Suddenly VC terms seem to be an issue again.  I haven’t ever been able to figure out what drives the cycle of interest / non-interest here, but when I ran across the article Ensure VCs don’t drag you out of your venture immediately after I knew there was at least a trend.

Weinsteins Struggle to Regain Their Touch: If you are a Tarantino fan and are excited about Inglorious Basterds, read this article to find out why this is such an important movie for the Weinsteins’ empire.

I’ve always wanted to use the word hodgepodge in a title of a blog post.  I wonder if I’ll make the first page on Google – there’s not much competition other than some definitions and a few stores.