What are you reading?

Currently, I am reading Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale.
The book is an amazing read. I look forward to my 2nd and 3rd reviews.
I really like the fact that he shares a lot of his own stories that you can even relate to situations outside of selling.
If your looking to increase your knowledge about how " A Real Sales Call " in any industry should go, here you can find more business information.
Anyway, no one better than Zig.

I am reading ‘The Swarm’ by Frank Schatzing.
Still a very good sci-fi novel and very well informed. It is about the potential release and extraction of methane from the ocean, an interesting topic since there is twice as much methane in the earth as natural gas and it’s a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2 with a natural oxidation span of a decade. Moreover there are some tipping points in earth’s climate such as the melting of permafrost which can lead to either drastic heating of the planet or a new ice age. Things to think about.
On the list are also Hacking Growth and the Tesla Revolution, both from this year.

I’ll have to check that out.

Just finished book one of The Silence series.

Nice. Ikigai is an immensely popular book in Europe at the moment - it applies to design as well. And I like how it does not put the company, you as a designer or society in the center, but rather the purpose of life itself. I feel like this diagram is like a top-view of an Eiffel tower like 3D structure that you can climb by combining the different areas.

I like this. Kurt Vonnegut would like it as well, I think. His take was a bit more pithy:
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
I think that hits all four quadrants.

I just finished up “Stealing Speed” by Mat Oxley. It’s about the development of 2 stroke racing motorcycles in the '50s and '60s. It’s a story that I knew little about before reading the book. It ends up that a brilliant East German engineer figured out how to get incredible power from a 2 stroke (200+hp / liter, naturally aspirated!). The communists wanted to use technology to show their superiority. After some wins in international racing, the top communist rider defected to the West along with a briefcase of parts and drawings. The communists cancelled their racing program. The rider was hired by Suzuki.

There is so much to love about this book though: the human story of both the rider and engineer, the history of the Cold War, the story of innovation. It’s also really well written, although a tad short.

It’s currently out of print and insanely priced used, but one can get it for a reasonable $10 or so on Kindle.

Currently about 800 pages into Seven Eves by Neil Stephenson… it isa bit challenging. Sometimes there will be 5-6 pages devoted to orbital mechanics. He also seems to obsessively go over the more technical aspects of getting a thousand humans into space and the psychological and health issues it creates… but i stuck with it. And then you get about 2/3rds in and a page says “5 thousand years later…” jumps from present day to that far forward… a bit of a cognitive shift.

Recommended by both Bill Gates and President Obama (that was nice to type).

That’s a Stephenson literary device common to his novels. In ‘Cryptonomicon’ there’s an extended explanation for the inner workings of a WW2 British-made machine gun and how it is similar to an even older sawmill. You get a couple pages of this geekery and then its back to the story. Seveneves was great. You can tell he is really tied in to the space industry start-ups around the Seattle area by his detailed descriptions of orbital mechanics and lasso-ing asteroids. The jump-cut to the future is like Kubrick’s 2001!

I chickened out of meeting Neil at a local book signing when it first came out.

Just finished ‘Legends of the Samurai’, Hiroaki Sato. Historical accounts of samurai in both leadership and retainer roles, from about 1000 years ago to turn of 20th century.

No real design content here, although there’s quite a bit of poetry. Its fun/sad/enlightening comparing ancient days to modern times…Flynn, Manafort, Price, and heck maybe even Comey and Kushner would have disemboweled themselves by now.

Neal Stephenson is awesome. I loved the first part of Seveneves. Act 2 jumped the shark a bit.

PS: Is this the Sci-Fi movie you’re doing concept work for?

Ha, no. It is a different, less intellectual movie, but still fun.

Rats :slight_smile:

But I’d love to work on the design for some of the vehicles for Seven Eves! :slight_smile: I love that one of the characters in the book is so blatantly supposed to be Neil deGrasse Tyson… I read all of that character’s lines in his voice.

I took a break from heady SciFi and am now reading “A Long Way To a Small, Angry Planet” which is pretty hilarious. Amazon.com

If you dig Stephenson, I highly recommend Reamde if you’re avoiding “heady SciFi”. Fun read.

I recently finished head up:


Forsaken Skies was a fun space opera. I need to get the other books in the series (why is everything a series now?)
Seven Eves. Very good, very complex.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Fun space adventure. Mildly funny.
The Return. After a nice set up and act 1, the rest of the book just didn’t go anywhere. A premise that ran out of steam 75 pages in.

I started The Punch Escrow last night. I’m liking it so far. It is witty and quick with a fresh premise.

I’m reading On Things As Ideas edited by Robert Stadler and Alex Valliant. Its excellent so far, definitely challenges my mind in relation to design theory.

Just finished “The Comedians” by Kliph Nesteroff. It’s a brief history of comedy. The first 3-4 chapters are hard going because I had no reference for the people he was talking about. The rest of the book was great though. It gave me a small glimpse into the real life characters of some of the comedians I grew up listening to.

The Martian.

Honestly have been reading this since January this year, and halfway through the book I got stuck on a chapter chock full of scientific/technical stuff. I haven’t watched the movie yet, and for this book, I look up anything that’s unknown to me for a better picture (MAV, chemical processes, etc). I also get more out of reading this during +1hr sessions. OK I promise I will finish the book this year. Great book though… gets the gears turning and is hilarious at times!

A few recent reads