Here’s the last list of books worth considering for you or someone you love (or even like a little) over the holiday season. Sorry it’s a little long. These are the ones I’ve yet to crack. Some are on my desk. Some are on their way here. They will all get packed and lugged lovingly from place to place on our family holiday midwestern tour.
Again, I’ve flipped through most of these, but I don’t have a good sense of review. I’ll tell you what piqued my interest in each.
Web Analytics 2.0 – The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity – author Avinash Kaushik is a friend and colleague of several of my friends and colleagues. No one’s got a bad word to say about him as a man, but when I read and hear what they have to say about his ideas and tools to measure the rapidly evolving online world, I see their eyes grow wide at his genius. Sign me up.
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp – The older I get, the more impressed I get by discipline over creativity. That is to say, creativity doesn’t pay bills. Applied creativity pays bills.
Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence – As a student of what makes people do the things they do, I’ve long been interested in personality type. David Keirsey’s one of the most thoughtful students of the subject. Here, he elaborates on Myers-Briggs types and adds a new level of depth to them.
Confessions of a Public Speaker – I’ve read several great things about this book – written by Scott Berkun – and its ability to teach while making you laugh. I’ve flipped through it and already smiled a few times and laughed out loud once. As someone who’s seen my share of hotel rooms and airports, I’m looking forward to escaping into this book.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments – I delude myself into thinking I have enough grasp of the English language to write pretty much anything I read. I look at an author’s passage, deconstruct it, and foolishly tell myself, “yep, I could have done that.” Yes, it’s stupid, but we all have our guilty pleasures. Two authors mercilessly remind me I gotta long way to go. The late David Foster Wallace is one of them. He chews up language and spits it back at you in such shockingly good arrangements that you don’t so much read his words as ride them.
My Stroke of Insight – A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey – Over a four-hour period, a 37-year-old Harvard brain scientist tracked the massive stroke she experienced. Yes, you read that correctly. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor now calls it the best thing to ever happen to her. Here she shares her absolutely unique perspective on the human brain and its capacity for recovery.
What are you interested in reading over the holidays? Lemme know.
As epilogue:
Check out Holiday Reading Part I
Check out Holiday Reading Part II
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