Tag: books
July 14, 2018
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Review
My Absolute Darling (Gabriel Tallent, 2017)
This was fantastic. Very dark and disturbing, but essentially redemptive in the end.
July 8, 2018
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Review
Echopraxia (Firefall, #2) (Peter Watts, 2014)
Still full of fascinating ideas, but didn’t work for me the way the first book of the series did. The Vampires and Gods and what have you were a bit too fantastic for me and take the foreground in this installment, leaving me less satisfied.
July 3, 2018
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Review
The Colonel (Firefall 1.5) (Peter Watts, 2014)
A short story that tells us what’s been happening on Earth while the Firefall saga continues in space. Onward to book two in the series!
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Review
Blindsight (Firefall 1) (Peter Watts, 2010)
Hard SF with… vampires? Okay, sure. I love books that can stretch my understanding of what’s possible – real flights of imagination. Not just “West Wing on a gas giant” or “King Arthur, but robots” stuff. This fit the bill quite nicely. If there are aliens in the story I really want them to be, well alien.
June 29, 2018
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Review
The Freeze-Frame Revolution (Peter Watts, 2018)
Got to love a novel that measures time in millions of years. This is my first encounter with Watts, but I’m diving into one of his bigger, more challenging novels (Blindsight) immediately after reading this.
June 27, 2018
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Review
In The Distance (Hernan Diaz, 2017)
I’ve read a few novels about the final days of the American frontier, but none have given me this visceral sense of the immensity and the brutality of that landscape.
A (very) rare five-star review from me.
June 24, 2018
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Review
Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (Translator), 2018)
A short glimpse into the very odd existence of a misfit in a world with little room for misfits. I’d mention Catcher In The Rye and Confederacy of Dunces as American counterparts, but this feels less grand and more subtle.
June 22, 2018
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Review
American War (Omar El Akkad, 2017)
Reading this during the Trump-induced immigration crisis and creation of internment camps made this a difficult respite from the news. Still, what a fantastic read.
El Akkad spends little time on exposition about this climate-shocked future America. Instead, he focusses on the impact of geographic and political upheaval on a small group of climate refugees in the American south some 70 years from now.
I found it fascinating, compelling, and beautifully written.
June 11, 2018
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Review
Sea of Rust (C. Robert Cargill, 2017)
This was loads of fun. Having killed all humans, robots now need to worry about being killed by global AI.
June 6, 2018
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Review
The Outsider (Stephen King, 2018)
King mixes real-world police fiction with supernatural horror with greater success in The Outsider than the Mr. Mercedes series. I got mad at the latter because it flipped genres without warning and I felt cheated. I knew what I was getting with The Outsider, so it didn’t bother me.
June 1, 2018
May 12, 2018
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Review
The Overstory (Richard Ford, 2018)
Absolutely wonderful. Such rich language, such wonderfully explored characters.
October 7, 2007
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Thought
I just finished Douglas Coupland’s latest novel “The Gum Thief”. The novel was a light, likeable read but the ending left me rather unsatisfied. Those new to Coupland’s funny but heavily stylized prose might do better to start with “Jpod” or “Microserfs”.
September 6, 2007
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Thought
I just finished the third in my series of “why I was right to never believe in god in the first place” books, namely “god is not Great”. I listened to Christopher Hitchens’ audiobook version which I highly recommend. Hitchens is a total character and his fearlessness shows through in his reading.
December 16, 2003
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Online Marketing Book Recommendations
Recenting I asked a whole whack of smart online marketers (the AIMS Discussion List) if they could recommend one definitive, current online marketing book.
I got a bunch of responses, but no one could identify one book that provided an overview of the essentials of online marketing. I can’t believe that the subject is too large because authors tackle much broader topics (like, say, how to market in ALL channels). It must be that publishers have lost THEIR appetite for this topic.
Here’s a summary of the feedback I received.
Pete Mosley says you can start and stop with:
“The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual”
Rick Levine, Christopher Locke
Doc Searls, David Weinberger
Howard Firestone of iPerceptions suggests anything written by Seth Godin and particularly points out Seth’s latest:
“Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable”
by Seth Godin
Lisa Wong of the City of Calgary thought SEM was key and that this book was essential reading:
“Search Engine Visibility”
Shari Thurow
While not really a marketing book, Brian Bimm suggests you might want to check out:
Online! The Book
by John C. Dvorak, Chris Pirillo, Wendy Taylor
So my search continues. If you come up with other online marketing books worth a read, let me know.