I can’t remember why Tobias Wolff’s Old School ended up on my reading pile, but I grabbed it and tossed it in my bag for my trip to San Francisco. I mistakenly thought that Wolff had written a bunch of novels and that this was one of his “classics.” It turns out that Wolff is actually one of the great short story writers of our time (as well as a master of the memoir – e.g. This Boy’s Life). Of course, Amy has all of his other books which she just brought to me with a big smile (e.g. Brad – you philistine you).
Old School – written in 2003 – is his first full length novel. And what a novel it is. While the pretty silver “Finalist: PEN/Faulkner Award” medallion on the cover is a not–so-subtle hint, I still wasn’t expecting to get sucked in by the book. After about 30 pages, Wolff had me and I slowed down and started savoring each paragraph. I realized that I was reading something different. Unlike so much that I read today – where the writer is telling a story, but hasn’t “crafted it” – Wolff takes his time, tells his story, and gives you a rich, flavorful burst of words with every bite. The story is simple – that’s part of the beauty of the book – since the story doesn’t get in the way of the words.
It’s rare that you read the word “boner” in the middle of a sentence and thing “that was perfectly placed.” Robert Frost and Ayn Rand make appearances and Hemingway plays a central role in the plot – none of these things make you think “eh – self-indulgent writer crap.” It’s mostly perfect. Yum.
Harry Potter is up next – I’m managed to pry the books out of Amy’s hands since she gobbled them up while I was on my trip. I never got around to reading the blue one (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) so I’ve got 1600 pages of Harry Potter ahead of me this weekend.
If you like to read, think, or even breathe, you must read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. After Amy finished it the other night, she told me it the was best book she had read this year (and she reads more than I do.) I think she was being understated.
I’m sitting here looking at the ocean and the mountains in the late evening Alaska dusk. When I think about 9/11, or the recent London Bombings, or any number of other tragedies that humans perpetrate on each other, I am grateful to be alive and relatively sane. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and, most importantly – you’ll feel – as you read this book.
The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, is a literary genius. And – he’s young – so hopefully he’s got plenty more where this came from. Wow. Between Foer, Rawicz, and Frey, I’ve had an awesome summer of reading so far.
I’ve always had poor impulse control when it comes to buying electronic toys. Amazon hasn’t helped, as I can satisfy my cravings with a single click. While I was listening to Daily Source Code from a few days ago on my run, I heard Adam Curry talking about how the Amazon affiliate feeds from the ad on his site for a Senseo HD7810/65 Single Serve Coffee Machine was making him enough dough to buy his whole family a cup of joe each day ($300–ish / month). The combination of partially subsidized toys, daily coffee, and the idea that all my really cool toys have a story inspired me to start a “toy of the month” category on my blog.
July’s toy is a Roomba 4210 Discovery Floorvac Robotic Vacuum Cleaner from iRobot. Amazon delivered two of them to my house in Homer on Wednesday and I set them up the other day (one upstairs / one downstairs). We named them after our dogs (Denali is the upstairs one / Kenai is the downstairs one). We had an old model at our house in Boulder which – like the one Tom Evslin has blogged about – would do its thing and then eventually run out of batteries and fall asleep wherever it happened to be at the time. No longer – the new ones are super smart and come with a docking station. When they get tired, they simply find their way back to their docks and recharged themselves (and do a funky robot wiggle dance to get lined up to go into the dock.)
The best part of getting my new robotic pets is watching Amy play with them. She misses our golden retrievers a lot (ok – I do also) and she’s obsessed with vacuuming so what could be better than watching my wife watch a robotic vacuum cleaner do its thing (very effectively – I might add)? She even jumped up and down with happiness when the little blue dirt detect light came on and Kenai spent more time getting the dirt I tracked in cleaned up.
iRobot will go down in my history as one of those companies I was too stupid to invest in. I’ve had plenty of chances to invest in successful companies that I’ve passed on. David Cowan has a great list of deals Bessemer chose not to do (their anti-portfolio) that went on to be huge winners. The phrase “Robotic Vacuum Cleaner? – c’mon” comes to mind. However, I don’t have any excuses here – Colin Angle – the CEO of iRobot – is a frat brother and a friend (when we are old and gray, at least I’ll still be able to say “I was Colin’s pledge trainer.”) Colin even called me for advice when they were raising a round a few years ago and said “hey Brad – would you guys have any interest in taking a look?” I thought to myself – “robotic vacuum cleaners – now, my partners will NEVER support me on that one – remember Feld, you’re a software guy” and – after a short discussion with several of them – decided to pass on taking a serious look.
Dumb dumb dumb. iRobot has sold over 1 million vacuum cleaners, has announced Scooba – the robotic floor washer (er – mop) and – well – is just kicking ass as a company. Congrats Colin and gang. Maybe I can contribute a little to helping keep the world cleaner by helping sell a few robots. If you have poor impulse control, a wife that likes to watch robots vacuum, or just want to play with a robot (it comes with a serial port and the rumor is that an API will be released soon), buy yourself a Roomba.
Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk has replaced James Frey’s books as the best book of the year. Several people recommended it to me and it was simply awesome.
Rawicz tells the story of his arrest, interrogation, trial, and sentencing for espionage in Russia in 1939. Of course all of this is bogus as he’s merely Polish and has done nothing wrong, but he is stubborn and – rather than admit false guilt (and surely be executed), he hangs in there for a year of abuse and is sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp.
This is where the real story begins. Rawicz describes – in horrifying detail – the deportation to the labor camp. Upon arrival, not surprisingly, the first task for the new prisoners – in the midst of a hideous Siberian winter – is to build their own shelter. This kind of stuff goes on for a while and about 100 pages in, Rawicz starts plotting his escape.
Rawicz and six of his fellow prisoners split one night. The second half of the book is the incredible story of their journey south from northern Siberia, across Russia, through Mongolia, across the Gobi Dessert, over the mountains of Tibet, and finally into India. My description couldn’t do justice to this journey – Rawicz’s description is excruciatingly magnificent.
The entire journey – most of it on foot – is over 4,000 miles from Moscow to India. If you are ever having a difficult day, feel like giving up hope, or merely view the things ahead of you as “a challenge”, pick up this book, open to any page, read 10 pages, and be humbled (and re-calibrated).
Spectacular. Thanks to all who suggested I read it.
My summer “book a day diet” began with a chewy one. Fortunately it was short (a “bookette” – only 62 pages). John Kenneth Galbraith is 95 years old. So – that makes him the Yoda of economists. And – sometimes – I felt like I was reading something Yoda written had.
Economics of Innocent Fraud is not the first of his books that I’ve read; I hope it’s not the last. Galbraith takes on the gap between “conventional wisdom” (a phrase he coined) and “reality” and uses the construct of both unintentional (innocent) and intentional fraud to explain how humans continue to snooker themselves. His writing is dense, but delightful (almost poetic at times) and his wit is beyond acerbic. About halfway through the bookette I let out a giggle and said “now he’s going to take on Greenspan and the Fed.” Amy looked over at me with an amused twinkle in her eye and said “you really are a geek, aren’t you.”
To give you a taste, following is the concluding paragraph from the chapter “The Corporation As Bureaucracy” where Galbraith asserts the “conventional wisdom” that management is accountable to the stockholders of a corporation is baloney.
“There are times when the need for economic and political understanding requires direct, openly adverse comment: Reference to corporate management compensation as something set by stockholders or their directors is a bogus article of faith. To affirm this fiction, stockholders are invited each year to the annual meeting, which, indeed, resembles a religious rite. There is ceremonial expression and, with rare exception, no negative response. Infidels who urge action are set aside; the management position is routinely approved. The shareholders who previously suggested some social policy or environmental concern have their proposals printed with supporting argument. These are uniformly rejected by management. The only significant recent exception has been at the meetings of the highly intelligent, socially eccentric and financially success Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. of Omaha, Nebraska. Proposals by its stockholders are frequently accepted; some have thought this by prearrangement with management. In any case, it represents a highly exceptional tolerance on the part of the corporation. No one should be in doubt: Shareholders – owners – and their alleged directors in any sizable enterprise are fully subordinate to the management. Though the impression of owner authority is offered, it does not, in fact, exist. An accepted fraud.”
When I read James Frey’s first book A Million Little Pieces, I thought it was the most intense book I had read in a long time. Frey’s second book – My Friend Leonard, which continues where the first book leaves off, is even more intense.
This book starts at the bottom (like the first one does), starts to climb a little, and then turns you upside down and smashes your head into a concrete floor over and over again. I started it in the Seattle airport last night on my way to Boston on the red eye – I figured I’d just get started and then put it down when I settled in on the plane to fall asleep. Bad plan. An hour into the flight, I finally gave it up and went to sleep. I finished the book off after I woke up in Boston this morning. The roller coaster ended – finally – on page 357.
Frey is incredible on numerous dimensions. For starters, this dude is unbelievably stubborn. It works against him for a while, but it ultimately works for him in major ways. Next, he transitions from a devastating first 24 years of his life into a supremely articulate, yet rawly emotional, human. While he struggles, is afraid of himself, hates his fear, and suffers, he never gives up, especially since he knows that giving up will mean death for him.
His friend Leonard is a major part of this. Leonard has his own issues, but is an awesome friend when Frey keenly needed one. Leonard is unapologetic, unyielding, and knows life is meant to be lived. The interplay between Frey and Leonard is awesome, especially when you toss in Leonard’s bodyguard Snapper.
This book is brilliant. Do NOT read it without reading A Million Little Pieces first.
My traveling – which was pretty intense the past few months – has slowed down. Correspondingly, my reading has picked up again. Not surprisingly I’ve got a huge pile of books stacked up (and now in boxes about to be shipped to Alaska). I’ve read three great books in a row – all covering different things – that I thought I’d share with you.
First up is The Professor, The Banker, and the Suicide King. This is the incredible story of Andy Beal – a Texas billionaire (owner of Beal Bank) – who is obsessed with beating the best poker players in the world at their game. I’ve been playing a monthly-or-so Texas Hold’em tournament style game with some of my Colorado CEO/CTO friends for the past eighteen months. We shifted to tournament style because there was such a wide range in betting tolerances and – as a result – bluffing didn’t work (someone was always willing to toss in $X just to see what you had). Beal’s strategy was to shift the poker greats outside of their financial comfort zone which he did by upping the games ultimately to $100,000 – $200,000 Texas Hold’em where there was $40 million on the table. The book is extraordinarily well written and engrossing – about the characters involved, the actual games played, and the overall super-high-stakes poker scene. A must read if you are into the current poker craze.
Next was Coach by Michael Lewis. I’m a huge fan of Lewis – going all the way back to Liar’s Poker. Lewis has written a memoir that every dad on the planet should read (there – that was my ode to fathers’ day). This is a half book (you’ll be done in less then an hour) that tells the story of Lewis as a teenage boy learning life lessons from his high school based coach (Coach Fitz). Lewis ends with the simple message from Coach Fitz that “fear and failure are the two greatest enemies of a well lived life” – something every entrepreneur should keep in mind.
I just finished FAB tonight. Neil Gershenfeld is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. I’m a software guy, so anything that involved physical materials, a tool, or assembling anything mystifies me. Gershenfeld’s book helped me understand why I should think beyond software by using a simple analogy: The 1960 Mainframe is to the 2005 Personal Computer as the 2005 Automobile Plant is to the 20×0 Personal Fabricator. FAB is full of both examples and theory and Gershenfeld writes in an incredibly accessible way. CBA claims their vision is to get to the point of “literally creating things from ‘it to bit’” and this book gave my brain a shove in a new direction. Personal fabrication is the ultimate in user-driven innovation – big ideas explained in a way anyone can understand.
I’ve been working my way through Eric von Hippel’s newest book Democratizing Innovation (Eric was my doctoral advisor at MIT – I didn’t get my Ph.D.) I needed a break (I’m reading it carefully because I’m worried that Eric will call me up and ask me hard questions about the book.) Amy and I went into Boulder yesterday for massages (the power was out at the hotel – so no massages) so we swung by The Boulder Bookstore to pick up some reading material for the time between ~massage and dinner.
Amy picked up the Sunday NY Times (great NY Times Magazine this weekend, BTW) and I picked up The Washingtonienne. I’d seen a review somewhere that it was titillating, provocative, enlightening, and a fast fun read. I found it titillating, provocative, depressing, and useful for anyone that’s thinking about blog privacy issues.
Jessica’s being a great American and turning her story into her 15 minutes of fame. If you are into blogging, privacy, or sex, there’s enough here to keep you interested for a couple of hours.
If you are a Warren Buffett fan like I am, then you’ll enjoy The Warren Buffett CEO: Secrets From The Berkshire Hathaway Managers. While Buffett’s Letters and Berkshire Hathaway’s annual reports give lots of hints about the various Berkshire companies and the CEO’s behind them, Robert Miles has in depth interviews with 19 of them. In addition to a great history on the companies and the folks running them, you get a clear sense of how Buffett – and his CEO’s – manage the business.
Miles finishes the book with several chapters of his thoughts concerning comparisons between the CEOs, their evaluation and compensation, the opportunity for a Buffett CEO, and what Berkshire might look like post Buffett. Among other conclusions, Miles characterizes all the Buffett CEOs as having four things in common:
The book was published in 2002 so it’s missing several of the more recent acquisitions, but it still feels very current. While it gets a little tedious at times as the detail can become overwhelming, it’s a must read for anyone that’s a student of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.