I love books (I know, hard to tell).  Yesterday, before we saw Serenity, Amy and I ended up in the Strand Book Store at 828 Broadway (and 12th).  It was unbelievably great – 18 miles of books, lots of old stuff – some dusty, some yellowy, but all delightfully full of paper.  And – most remarkably – there wasn’t a chair or a latte in sight.  Just like your father’s bookstore used to be.

If you are a frequent flyer like me, Ask the Pilot is a must read.  The author – Patrick Smith – has been a pilot for about 20 years and has been writing about it for Salon.com for the past two years.  The book is an extended Q&A session broken up into logical topics.  Smith is witty, acerbic, and spares no one.  I’ve read a few titillating “insiders guide to air travel” books (flight attendant stories, sex in bathrooms, dogs exploding, near collisions in the air) and they never really did much for me.  Smith’s book is much more practical and interesting – I actually learned some stuff and – even though I’m not a nervous flyer – have new perspectives and have had some myths debunked.

I’m hell on laptops.  I fondly remember my first Compaq luggable (aka “the sewing machine”) – it’s still up in my parent’s attic somewhere.  Every year or so I get a new one, and my IBM T40 had served me well. 

I’ve been jonesing for a tablet PC for a while.  I tried the first Compaq when it was released (it sucked – returned) and recently tried the new HP Compaq Tablet PC tc4200 (ok, but lousy screen and marginal keyboard – returned). 

So – it was with relatively low expectations that I awaited my IBM X41.  It was released in June and it didn’t show up until mid-August.  But – it was worth every minute of the wait.  This is the first tablet I’ve used that is completely interchangeable with a laptop (e.g. you want a laptop – fine, you want a tablet – fine.)  While this is a Lenovo computer (instead of IBM), I can’t tell the difference between it and my IBM T40 (which was an IBM computer) – the IBM to Lenovo handoff appears seamless so far. 

Without question, this was the best toy of the month.  I’m only five days into September, but I came home to a few fun toys, so next month may have some competition.

My goal this summer when I was at my place in Alaska was to read a book a day. I didn’t make it, but still covered a lot of ground by reading 28 books in the 60 days we were there.  Following is a short synopsis with ratings from 1 to 5 (1=sucks, 5=awesome) with the books segmented by category.  If I’ve reviewed the book on my site, I’ve linked the rating number to the review.

The best book of the summer – uncontested – was Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  I highly recommend all of the books I rated as 5’s.  All the 4’s are also must read if you are into the topic.  The rest are hit or miss.

Biography

• The Long Walk: (5): Incredible story of Slavomir Rawicz’s walk from Poland to Russia to India.
• My Friend Leonard: (5): James Frey’s awesome follow up to his memoir A Million Little Pieces.
• Starting Something (4): The story of Neoforma from the eyes of founder Wayne McVicker.
• Planetwalker: (3): The story of John Francis’s journey of 22 years of walking with 17 years of silence.
• iCon: Steve Jobs (2): Read only if you are a Steve Jobs / Apple fanatic.

Business

• FAB: (5): The “personal fabricator” will be to innovation what the personal computer was in the 1980’s.  Read about the today’s version of the future of custom fabrication.
• Economics of Innocent Fraud: (4) John Kenneth Galbraith’s short treatise on a very contemporary topic – fraud.
• Jim Cramer’s Real Money: (1) Don’t waste your time – watch CNBC’s Mad Money instead.

History

• 109 East Palace: (4): Excellent history of The Manhattan Project from a new perspective.
• What The Dormouse Said: (3): Good, but Fred Wilson liked it a lot more than I did.  I guess I haven’t done enough drugs.

Literary Fiction

• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: (5): Hands down the best book of the summer.  Jonathan Safran Foer is a genius.
• Old School: (5): Tobias Wolff’s first novel – and it’s a great one.

Mental Floss

• Killing Rain: (5): John Rain solves problems and gets laid – with grace.
• How I Paid for College: (5): Absolutely hysterical.  I picked it up randomly at the Homer Bookstore – a high school senior’s romp through – well – teenage stuff (sex, drugs, rock and roll, parents, college, money, sex).
• Metro Girl: (3): Janet Evanovich tries a different set of characters – it’s pretty good.
• Eleven on Top: (1): I think I’m done with Stephanie Plum.

Philosophy

• Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: (1): Buddhism plus psychiatry. Dull.  I tried.

Reference

• Hacking Movable Type: (3): In preparation for MovableType 3.2, I thought I’d tune up my template skills.
• Firefox Hacks: (2): Surprisingly, I found very little new information in this one.
• Selling Online: (2): On the list for novelty factor – this was the guide to First Virtual’s Payment System (a gift from Charley Lax early this summer – thanks Charley – I read it).
• The Know-It-All: (2): A nerd writes about reading the encyclopedia.  Stick with Wikipedia. 
• Frank Shorter’s Running: (1): Beautiful pictures, but completely dull.
• The Experts’ Guide to 100 Things: (1): Massively overrated.  Several people told me it was great – clearly a coffee table book.

Science Fiction / Fantasy

• This Day All Gods Die: (5) I love Stephen Donaldson – his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series still rate as some of my favorite books.  This is his foray into science fiction.  All five of the books are good, but this one – the finale – is awesome.  If you are a sci-fi fan, it’s worth reading the full series starting at the beginning.
• Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince: (5): The best HP yet.  Finally, a really good guy dies.
• Chaos and Order: (3): You’ve got to read this one to get to the real juicy one (This Day All Gods Die).
• A Dark and Hungry God Arises: (3) You’ve got to read this one to get to Chaos and Order.
• Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix: (3): I realized I’d never read this HP.  It was ok – nothing earth shattering.

Happy reading!

I can’t remember who recommended Planetwalker to me (if it was you – thanks – please post a comment) – but I bought it immediately after finishing Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk which was a truly remarkable book that I read in July.

There’s a forest fire nearby so Homer has been “smoked in” all day (there’s basically a complete white out at our house – like heavy fog but with ash mixed it) so we sat around reading in an agitated state all day since we didn’t really want to be outside.  My day was tinged with irony as I read about the amazing journey of Dr. John Francis, Ph.D., the founder of Planetwalk.

I’ve long been fascinated with acts of extreme human endurance and discipline.  Francis’ is up there – he spent 22 years on foot walking around the world and 17 years without speaking.  During this time, he traveled widely, became a well recognized environmental thinker, and earning degrees through a Ph.D., all without talking.  This was inspired when – in January 1971 – he witnessed the effects of an 840,000 gallon oil spill beneath the Golden Gate bridge that was a result of a collision between two oil tankers – the Arizona Standard and the Oregon Standard.

Francis’ journey takes him from a confused young man who is trying to sort out what to do with his life to a powerfully developed thinker and “environmental practitioner” (his desired phrase – rather than environmentalist).  Planetwalker – his first book – is an extremely vibrant telling of his story.  Francis’ does a great job of letting the journey lead and his philosophy follow which makes the book both subtle and more enjoyable than if it had been the other way around.

I hadn’t heard of Planetwalk prior to this book, but Amy and I will certainly add it to the list of environmental organizations that we support.  If you’re looking for a good adventure that you can have from your couch, give this book a try.

I’ve read eight books since my last book review – none were notable enough for me to write about (although What the Dormouse Said came close, but Fred Wilson covered it.)  I just finished Wayne McVicker’s book Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation & Corporate Culture.  It was fantastic.

Wayne was the co-founder of Neoforma – a pre-bubble startup that was one of the early 2000 B2B IPO’s.  It’s peak market cap was over $3 billion – today it is a publicly traded company with a $150m market cap, $3m / quarter of revenue, negative gross margins, a $15m loss last quarter, and about $25m of working capital – basically, a small-cap Internet bubble survivor that has a questionable future.  Wayne left Neoforma in 2001 and spun out a new company called Attainia. 

Starting Something is Wayne’s story starting at the inception of the concept for Neoforma.  It’s deeply personal and autobiographical – Wayne writes beautifully about his experience.  Each chapter is a month in the story, is artfully titled, typically has one key concept, and has two metrics at the beginning (# employees and valuation) to help you keep pace.  While Wayne changes some names to protect the “innocent” (or not so innocent), the characters are easily recognizable if you are either in the venture business or were in the bay area frenzy at the end of the century.

Unlike so many other “Internet bubble biographies”, this one is full of awesome lessons.  Wayne is clearly a thinker – he’s been able to reflect on his experience and built a coherent narrative that teaches something while telling a great story.  While there are some gossipy sections, they are woven into the story so they actually add rather than subtract from the lessons (yeah – I’ve had enough boom and bust titillation at this point.)

I deeply identified with several stories, both from the perspective of an entrepreneur, angel investor, and a VC.  Wayne tells his tale with a nuance that is precise without being annoyingly insider-ish.  And – in the end – it cycles back around to people and relationships – which is ultimately much more interesting storytelling.

This one – like MouseDriver Chronicles – is a must read for every entrepreneur (both aspiring and practicing).

I have my wife back.  Amy has been lost in a tome (1079 pages) called Infinite Jest (by David Foster Wallace) for the past 10 days (about nine days longer than it takes her to read a typical book.)  Our friend Matt Blumberg referred to it recently as “Infinite Book” – that says it all.  By Saturday evening, Amy was reduced to continuously muttering words I didn’t know the definitions of while repeating “David Foster Wallace is a genius” over and over again.  Tonight she wrote up an Infinite Post on the book – if you want to expand your vocabulary, are a reader, philosopher, wordsmith, linguist, grammarian, high school spelling bee champion, or just generally nuts, wander over to her post on the subject: “Infinite Jest: Victory.”  Of course, in the spirit of this book, she has several other posts up already about it including “Infinite Jest: Prolix” (what the hell is a “prolix”?) and “Infinite Jest: Biting Off a Big One.”  Damn – it’s still almost Tuesday.

After watching my Roomba’s play with each other I was hopeful that I’d come across something that inspired and excited me as much as a robotic vacuum cleaner for this month’s toy of the month.  While my friend Jeff Hyman, Dyson’s VP of Marketing, sent me (actually, he sent Amy) the most amazing vacuum cleaner I’ve ever encountered (the Dyson DC15), I felt there must be some unwritten rule that I couldn’t choose a vacuum cleaner as toy of the month two months in a row (or someone might make fun of me), so I’ll reserve the detailed post on the Dyson DC15 for later, but you can be comfortable knowing that we set it up, plugged it in, and then proceeded to chase the Roomba’s around the room with it.

This month’s toy is something I used 15 times (each time I went for a run) – a set of Nike SB HJ020 Lightweight Sport Headphones.  I’ve fallen in love with running with my iPod Shuffle (ah – the podcast revolution has finally caught up with me) but the stupid white trendy headphones that Apple supplies kept falling out of my ears.  On a whim, I bought a pair of Nike sport headphones; they are simply awesome.  I know I’m in headphone heaven if – after a two hour run – I’ve forgotten they are in my ears.  If you are a serious runner or biker and you like to listen to music while you do your thing, you must try these.

A few blog readers sent me some toys to play with (a nice surprise – thanks!)  The first one was a Flash Flight – a “light-up” frisbee.  Very cool, and sure to mystify my dogs when I return to Boulder.  The company that makes them is Niteize (based in Boulder) – they make a bunch of neat flashlight, lights, frisbees, and light up products.  The other was a set of Plantronics DP-500 headphones – they’ll get a good workout next month on Skype and I’ll report back later.  If you feel compelled to send – or recommend – a toy to me – I’m all ears (with headphones inserted at appropriate times.)

Killing Rain by Barry Eisler was dynamite.  I continue to make one step forward and two steps backward through my shelves of unread books (Amazon delivers more than I consume.)  After every few books I resort to pure mental floss – Eisler’s series on assassin John Rain is spectacular summer reading. 

When Killing Rain showed up via Dan the UPS Man, Amy grabbed it and wouldn’t give it up until she finished it.  It’s the fourth book in the series – if you haven’t read the others, you must start with Rain Fall, the first in the series.  The flyleaf review from Entertainment Weekly – usually shoddy stuff – is very accurate this time:

“If Quentin Tarantino ever got to take a crack at the James Bond franchise, chances are the resulting film would resemble one of Eisler’s novels about John Rain.  [Rain] is the stuff great characters are made of.”

Great stuff.  Dad / Ed – don’t both buying copies – they are on their way to you.