Ahhhh.  That felt good.  In my ongoing commitment to my marriage, I give Amy one solid week a quarter of uninterrupted “Brad / Amy time.”  This quarter I handed my handheld to her as we boarded the plan in New York on Monday the 10th and she returned it to on Monday the 17th when we disemarked in Minneapolis.

We had a glorious and much needed vacation together.  2007 has been an intense year so far – one that I’m very pleased with – but has demanded (and required) unyielding focus.  Amy has been amazingly patient with me but some serious together time was in order.

We spent a great week in Rome and Venice, but enjoyed the semi’s and final’s of the US Open with my brother and his wife before we disconnected completely from our daily life.  We love to watch tennis and Amy rewarded us with unbelievable seats (row 3 for the semis; row 8 for the finals.)  Federer (and the entire experience) was magical.  We even enjoyed the trips back and forth on the #7 train.

We’re huge Italy fans so Rome and Venice were fun, although I don’t like boats so Venice was a little tough at times.  Vacation for us is a lot of eating, sleeping, relaxing, reading, doing some husband/wife stuff (feel free to use your imagination), sleeping some more, walking around, a few runs, and a lot of chilling out.  No computers.  No cell phones.  No work.  Rome and Venice, especially the superb San Clemente Palace, provided a great environment for this. 

As usual, we both consumed about a book a day.  My list – which is heavily slanted toward Italy and Venice this time – follows.

Japan and the Internet Revolution – I’m not really sure how this ended up in my reading pile.  While a lot of it was dull and tedious, it has a few fun sections, including about a dozen pages on Softbank, Masayoshi Son, and a handful of things I saw first hand between 1996 and 2000.

Category 7 – I needed some fiction after that one and picked this up in the airport in Amsterdam.  The subtitle “It’s The Biggest Story in History” set the stage.  Pretty good – especially if you are curious about how a weatherman (Bill Evans) would construct a novel about the world’s worst storm and the evil genius that creates it as it is about to wipe out New York City.  Good mental floss.

Italy: A Short History – I’ve never been good at geography and I’m even worse at history.  After reading this book, I realized how completely clueless I had previously been about the history of Italy.  This was a great primer and should be read before you head over there – superb context in an easy to consume package.  Man that place has had a lot of governments.

Growing Up Guggenheim: A Personal History of a Family Enterprise – I love the Guggenheim.  While one of my unsuccessful dotcom-era investments was one curiously called Guggenheim.com (and rated a paragraph in Peter Lawson-Johnston’s memoir), the experience did not diminish my fascination with all things Guggenheim.  We went to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (wow! what a collection) and I picked up this book while I was there.  Lawson-Johnston tells a good story.

Since the Layoffs – Time for some more fiction.  I spent an afternoon by the pool at the San Clemente Palace and polished this one off.  Iain Levison is fucking hysterical.

The City of Falling Angels – While I inadvertently saved the best for last, I should have read this before I went to Venice rather than on the plane on the way home.  John Berendt wrote a beautiful book that uses the backdrop of the Teatro La Fenice Opera House fire of January 29, 1996 to describe Venice in intricate and glorious detail.  I rarely think of a book as “luscious” but that’s the best word for this one.  Yum.

I’ve been back for about 48 hours and am finally caught up just in time to head to San Francisco tomorrow.  It’s great to be back on the grid, but it was superb to check out for a week.

My march through Vonnegut continues.  Cat’s Cradle was the best yet – as predicted by everyone that saw me carrying it around the past few days.  Ice-Nine was not a new concept for me, but I was unaware of its melting point (114.4 degrees.)

While I often ponder how busy, busy, busy my world is, I’ve been noticing a lot of foma’s lately, especially being spewed by several wrang-wrangs.  Sometimes they are sin-wat’s; other times they simply want to try to provoke pool-pah’s for no particular reason.  Most of these people are granfalloon’s, which is just fine by me since I’m very happy with my karass.

Heh.  Just read it.  Guess what’s next?  The same book that eight million other people are reading: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I paid $34.11 (including tax) today at the Boulder Bookstore when I could have just ordered it on Amazon for $17.99.  Oops – poor impulse control.

Shelfari is running a great competition called Seven Days of Harry Potter.  The grand prize is a signed first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  First prize is five tickets to see Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix.  Second prize is a broomstick.

As you know from reading this blog I’m a huge reader.  I tend not to be a trendy reader so it surprised even me that I’ve loved the Harry Potter books (as is Amy.)  Today is the day it begins again.  I’m pretty sure I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

And – for all you readers out there, the New York Times has a fun article today titled C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success.

Every now and then I read a book that terrifies me.  The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor is one such book.  I’m not entirely sure why I grabbed it at the bookstore last week – it might have been that I recognized the author’s name (William Langewiesche) or that it wasn’t a very long book. 

I sat outside yesterday afternoon and read it as the sun went down and my dogs played.  As I turned each page, I felt myself getting more and more anxious.  The core story is that of Abdul Qadeer Khan and Pakistan’s rise as a nuclear power, but all the usual characters (Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Russia) are a deep part of the story.  Oh – and the United States.

Langewiesche is an incredible storyteller.  This could easily have been a tedious book.  It moved along more rapidly than most of the junk nuclear crisis fiction crap that I read as part of my mental floss program.  I was also introduced to a new journalistic hero – Mark Hibbs.  Hibbs writes for McGraw-Hill / Platts publications such as Megawatt Daily, Emissions Daily, and Dirty Tankerwire.  While these could be the titles of porn sites, they are most definitely not.  Hibbs has been digging in the nuclear dirt for a long time and some of his discoveries are amazing.  Frightening, but amazing.

This book reinforces that it could all be gone in a flash.  Langewiesche does an awesome job of not being alarmist – he’s very pragmatic – both about the underlying facts around the global nuclear weapon industry as well the challenges of “bad guys” creating an atomic bomb.  At the same time, he shows how utterly chaotic, messed up, and bureaucratic the existing global nuclear infrastructure is and why the dynamics that the US and Russia have unleased on the world – first in World War II – and then during the cold war – is outside our fundamental control (and containment) at this point.

Langewiesche has written a balanced, detailed, riveting, and terrifying book that should be read by any child of the atomic age who hid under his desk at school during an atomic bomb drill.  Wow – boom.  Time to go for a run and enjoy this planet.

I’m not a huge baseball fan.  I grew up in Dallas and dealing with the Texas Rangers in the Billy Martin / Jeff Burroughs / Ferguson Jenkins / Jim Sundberg era was a tough gig.  Plus, by that time the Dallas Cowboys were America’s team and Roger Staubach was every kids hero (at least in Dallas.)

By the time I moved to Boston in 1983, I was ruined on baseball.  I go to a couple of games a year – mostly just to generate stories that people can tell their grandkids.  Amy is a big fan, but since the scores at the Rockies games are really football scores (I’m always surprised when the winning team doesn’t score at least double digits), it’s mostly just a good time to hang out and get a sunburn.

When David Halberstam died a few months ago, I decided to read all of his books (similar to what I’m doing with Vonnegut.)  I had a copy of Summer of ’49 (<— note the SmartLink – play with it) on my shelf of infinite books to read so I grabbed it and consumed it over the last few days.  It seemed fitting to finish it up on the 4^th of July.

I thought of my dad 5,417 times while I read this book.  These were his and my uncle Charlies’ Yankees.  My dad was 11 that summer and it must have been an awesome time for him and Charlie.  The Yankee / Red Sox rivalry was at one of its apexes, DiMaggio was the man, Yogi Berra was behind the plate, and the great Yankee run under Casey Stengel had just begun.

The age of radio was at its peak and the dawn of the TV age was beginning.  Mel Allen was the great Yankee radio announcer.  Halberstam captures the relationships between everyone well – including Allen and the writers – and his descriptions of the games helped me understand the difference between radio baseball and TV baseball.

Overall, Summer of ’49 is a beautiful book.  You don’t have to be a baseball fan to love it, but you do have to be interested in understanding the summertime in a different era.  Members of the Red Sox Nation will also love this book, even though it is heartbreaking at times, since that’s something all card carrying Red Sox Nation members understand.

Next up – The Design of Everyday Things – a book at least 11 people have recommended I read.

My buddy Ben Casnocha had his book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley reviewed in the NY Times today by Harry Hurt III.  Ben told me about this last week and is justifiably excited.

One of my favorite lines from Ben is “I don’t want to be normal.  I want to be something else.”  Hurt picks it as the theme of his review and does a great job capturing the essence of the book.

I’ve never wanted to be normal either and I love having friends who aren’t.

Ben Casnocha’s book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley is at the top of Amazon’s Movers and Shakers list today.

Daily rank of #127 (up 18,848% from yesterday as of 4pm Eastern Time.)  Congrats Ben – that’s really cool.  Updated – at 4pm, it was actually ranked 94 and up 29,131% from yesterday.

Over the last few years Amy and I have become close friends with Ben Casnocha.  We adore the guy.  Ben started his first company – Comcate – at age 14.  As of today (age 19), he’s now a published author as his first book – My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley – is officially available. 

As an early reader / reviewer of the book, I highly recommend it.  The story is oriented around Ben’s experiences as a teenager trying to deal with the pressures of both teenage and adult “business / entrepreneurship” life simultaneously.  He does a magnificent job of articulating the characteristics of a startup without being preachy and weaves in a number of vignettes from experienced friends and colleagues.  It is simultaneously personal, educational, and emotionally deep.

If you are an aspiring (or existing) entrepreneur, My Start-Up Life is required reading.  If you are a TechStars entrepreneur, Ben will be out in Boulder in June – pick up a copy so you can pepper him with questions

In addition to recommending that you buy the book right now, Ben and I are going to do a giveaway on this blog of an autographed copy of the book to the commenter who has the best haiku with the word “start-up” in it.  Join in the fun – now!

I’m in Boston this weekend for the annual Feld Men’s Trip with my dad (Stan), my uncle (Charlie), my brother (Daniel), and my two cousins (Jon and Kenny.)  We had tickets to tonight’s Red Sox vs. Braves game (very expensive ones – thanks StubHub) and have tickets to tomorrow afternoon’s game (and now rescheduled evening) game.

The weather has not cooperated.  I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon and it has been raining continuously.  We just finished our traditional annual steakhouse dinner at Abe & Louis (don’t ask what veggie-boy Brad ate) and we slogged our way back to the hotel in the monsoon.

Since it’s all of 8:11pm, I thought I’d check a few things online before bed.  I saw a note from Tom Evslin that his new Amazon Short titled The Interpreter is up.  I loved Evslin’s last book Hackoff.com (and think Tom is a hysterically fun nerd writer.)  I downloaded the PDF and am struggling to toss it on my Sony eReader.  Not quite as fun as a Red Sox game, but a lot less expensive.

Update: Getting the book onto the eReader wasn’t a big deal.  However, reading it will be a nightmare because of the lack of font formatting (font standards – uh huh.)  And the eReader software seems to think the name of “The Interpreter” is “Microsoft Word – Main.doc.”  Other than that, it’s great.