Books I should read
Oh dear. If my list of Books I Should Have Read wasn’t long enough, here is the list of books people have suggested I read as well:-
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Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives: Books: Satyajit Das (Steve Patrick)
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China Shakes The World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation: Books: James Kynge (Steve Patrick)
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Who Runs This Place?: The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century: Books: Anthony Sampson (Steve Patrick)
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Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software: Books: Charles Petzold (Chris Hind)
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Tricks of the Mind: Books: Derren Brown (Malcolm Dick)
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The God Delusion: Books: Richard Dawkins (Steve Patrick)
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Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe: Books: William Rosen (newspaper review)
Another plea then: how do people read so much? My journey to work is short so I can just about read The Economist in a week. At work I do work. At home I attend to my family. I don’t watch television or have a hobby or do anything that could be displaced in favour of reading.
How do you manage it?
Footnote: these lists are now on del.icio.us – Books I should have read and books to read. In the spirit of JP’s NewTailBlog meme, perhaps other people could use the same tag for their lists and see what happens when we aggregate the lists.
4 Comments
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I have another one: “In Search Of Stupidity: Over 20 Years Of High-Tech Marketing Disasters” by Merrill R. Chapman.
Looks at how 9 of the top 10 software companies in 1984 had managed to disappear by 2001. No, the answer isn’t “Microsoft have an illegal monopoly”: all the studies show how companies shot themselves in the foot, sometimes repeatedly.
So MicroPro – market leaders for word processing – managed to release a new word processor that competed with their own market leading product; Ashton-Tate provoked the dBase development community and the press into hunting them down and killing them; IBM did absolutely everything they could do wrong with OS/2, and so on. Very amusing to read.
Sadly I don’t have any hints on how to read more: I do my reading on the tube and when the baby’s in bed.
Thanks Chris. I’ve added it to the list.
Traders, Guns and Money is a waste of time imho (sorry Steve!) – at least for anyone who’s spend any time at all in a trading floor environment. Tries too hard to be cool (a la Michael Lewis) and comes off being dumb. Admittedly I gave up about 40% through so maybe the second half is spectacular…
A must read is “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital” by Carlota Perez. Not exactly a page turner, but very insightful.
Thanks Sean,
I’ll put Traders, Guns & Money to the back of the queue then :-)
I’ve never heard of the Carlota Perez so I’ll add it to the Books I Should Read list as a strong recommendation.
List still getting longer rather than shorter, although I’ve now done The Long Tail at last. Best book I’ve read from the list so far, largely due to the presence of numbers and graphs rather than just anecdotes.