Fixin' Supper

Update: See end of post.

I set out at the beginning of the year to read a book a week. I don’t think I quite did it. Let’s see how close I came. I’m going to list the books by category, but keep in mind that these categories are made up by me, and the distinctions between several of them are quite fuzzy.

The Best Stuff I Read
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation Read this book. Steven Johnson’s stuff is always thought-provoking, and this one is no exception.

The Girl Who Played with Fire The Larsson trilogy is a page-turner and well written.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Rework Well, only read this if you work in a really entrepreneurial environment. Otherwise, you’ll just find it frustrating.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Great book about human motivation — what works [not what you'd expect] and what doesn’t [we're doing it all wrong].

Cognitive Surplus I’m a ginormous Clay Shirky fan. This book is important. Great thinking on how the information economy is helping us communicate in ways that are very natural.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Read this for my book club over the summer. I may be the only one who liked it. It’s not a Hollywood ending, but it’s outstanding fiction.

Fiction
Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey

The Pale Horseman

The Last Kingdom

The Help

The Handmaid’s Tale: A Novel

Content Strategy, Web Design, Other Stuff Related to My Work
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites

The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World

Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?

Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand

Content Strategy for the Web

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations

Business, Health Care, Psychology, Motivation
Radical Honesty, The New Revised Edition: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth

The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE

Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty

The E-Myth Revisited

The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Parenting/Family
The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable About Restoring Sanity To The Most Important Organization In Your Life

How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid: The Straight Dope for Parents

Raising Girls

Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know

Nonfiction
He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back: The True Story of the Year the King, Jaws, Earnhardt, and the Rest of NASCAR’s Feudin’, Fightin’ Good Ol’ Boys Put Stock Car Racing on the Map Great book by my friend Mark Bechtel.

Making Toast

Thirty-four, all told. I’ve read 35 books this year. I just realized I also read Search Patterns, a great primer on search application design theory. [This sentence updates the total.]

I am not happy with my total for 2010, but I am pleased that I read far more books than I’ve read any year in recent memory. I will say that this wouldn’t have been anywhere near as long a list if I hadn’t read a number of books on my iPhone and then later in the year, on my Kindle. If you want to make reading more convenient, I highly recommend a Kindle.

OK, so for 2011 I’m going to shoot for a book a week again. I have a number of things planned for the year that may make that even more challenging than it was this year, so I’d better jump on it today!

P.S. See my professional blog for some of the books I’m planning to read in 2011!

I was an Eat, Pray, Love skeptic. I did not read it until one of my book clubs assigned the book. And then I even missed the meeting when we discussed it. But what a joy. Elizabeth Gilbert’s autobiographical journey spoke to several sides of me: the part that would like to indulge her wanderlust, the part that’s curious about other cultures, the part that likes to eat.

In Eat, Gilbert’s year-long journey is spurred by an ugly divorce. She’s seeking self-healing and wisdom on her trip. In Committed, she’s struggling with the need to marry the man she met on her Eat, Pray, Love journey. [He's not an American citizen, and thanks to some fun with INS, they must either marry or live the rest of their lives outside the United States, problematic for them both.]

I was excited to read Committed after enjoying Eat so much. I don’t understand the critics who’ve called this book self-indulgent. Of course it’s self-indulgent. So was Eat, Pray, Love. This is serious navel-gazing. Gilbert notes as much and doesn’t apologize for it. So that’s pointless criticism to me.

I will say, don’t pick this up if you don’t like chick lit. It’s not chick lit exactly, but I can’t see a lot of men I know choosing this over a military history, for instance. My love of this book was quite personal, though. Gilbert struggles mightily with the mental anguish the failure of her first marriage caused. I divorced my first husband years ago, but it’s difficult to explain to others to this day, though I remain convinced it was in both our best interests. [I mean, not that it's any of your business.]

It’s easy to understand a divorce when someone cheats or commits another egregious fault like spousal abuse. I think that if those things have never happened to you [as they never have to me], you are alarmed not by a divorce that follows one spouse’s indiscretion — but you are terrified by divorces that have no visible explanation. If it can happen to them….

And Gilbert starts in such a hard place to contemplate her second marriage. The end of her first was so painful that she cannot think of marrying again, and her new partner is also pleased to be forever connected, forever unofficial about it. When the United States Homeland Security administration tells them they must marry for her partner to re-enter the U.S., they are truly conflicted, but decide to go ahead with plans as soon as he is allowed back.

I think even some people who loved her first book will find her difficulties with remarriage to be disingenuous, but I believed every word. I don’t have any way to know how much my thoughts about marriage have changed simply because I am older, how much was shaped by my first marriage [though I must assume quite a lot there], and how much by what I want for my children. I just know that I think about it almost completely differently now than I did when I first married in 1993. So I found Gilbert’s journey and philosophizing both genuine and interesting. Your mileage will vary, depending on your perspective, I suspect.

The Visual Miscellaneum is one of my favorite kinds of books. Though I’m in no way a designer, I am a very spatially oriented person. As much as I love words, I love the images that instantly tell the story a thousand words only begin to tell. So Strange Maps is a favorite website of mine, for instance.

When I saw this book advertised on Amazon back before the holidays, I quickly added it to my wish list. And I was incredibly disappointed when, after the NYC sister and her husband ordered it for me, it was backordered. I was so delighted the day it arrived about a week ago.

And I really wanted to rank this book as “Highly recommended! Don’t miss!” But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Because the only thing I can say is, I hope this was somehow rushed to press [though one of the charts in the book is a 4-page explanation of exactly how long it took to create the book, so that seems unlikely]. Because it’s riddled with errors — some small, and some more consequential.

In my case, the small ones are actually the more bothersome. Throughout the book, you’ll see two spaces randomly stuck in the middle of a sentence, kind of like  this. I’m not sure the average reader will notice these, but I’ve proofread copy my entire adult life, and I can’t not see that dumb error. [I even notice when there are two spaces between sentences in printed works. Unlike what you learned in typing class in high school, one space is now the standard. It has to do with computer-based typography, but I won't bore you with further details.]

But the reviewers on Amazon point out that there are actually errors in the graphs as well, and for many people, that will be a bigger issue.

I would say, you’ll probably enjoy reading this, and you’ll learn a lot from the unique perspective McCandless brings to data visualization, but read carefully.

The Help has been getting a growing level of buzz over the past few months, and as soon as I heard about it, I knew I’d need to read it. But now I’m feeling a bit bereft because I need more people to discuss it with before I’m 100% sure what I think of it. So I’m hoping some of you have read it.

The book has been pretty widely reviewed, but in case you aren’t familiar with it: The Help tells the story of Jackson, MS, in the early 1960s through the eyes of a young white woman and several black women who work as maids. Skeeter Phelan is just out of Ole Miss without a husband or serious prospects, much to her mother’s dismay. She wants to be a writer, and she decides to interview local black women working as maids for her friends.

Reviews of this book tend to focus on whether or not the experience of the maids, and their vernacular, is believable and authentic. Let me first tell you that I don’t have a lot of way to know. I was born in 1971 and grew up in rural West Tennessee…which just isn’t the same thing at all as Jackson in the early 1960s. At the same time, I lived my childhood in the South just a few years removed from the height of the Civil Rights movement. I still don’t think I fully understand what I’ve seen and experienced in my lifetime. My views on race and the implications of race in politics and economics continue to evolve. I see my childhood and young adulthood through a different lens today than I did even 5 years ago, and a completely different way than I did at the time.

My family had a maid when I was growing up. Henrietta came to our house at least a couple of times a week throughout my childhood. She was our babysitter when my parents went out. She was a confidante to my sisters and me. And she loved us dearly, and we her.

I really can’t say our experience [either ours or Henrietta's] was like those described in The Help, despite the obvious similarities that we lived in the South, and that she was our black maid. The 10 years made a lot of difference, as did the distance between Jackson, MS, and my hometown. Henrietta worked in the produce department at my dad’s grocery store the other days of the week. I’ve never heard my parents use the n-word, and they were saddened by racist attitudes that were common in our hometown. I know their attitudes — probably not the majority views of white people in my hometown at the time, to be honest — were critical in shaping the way I viewed race.

And yet.

I find the book incredibly believable. Every bit of it. Stockett didn’t set out to write a social history, but a novel. And I find her novel to be one that speaks to an ugly but awakening time in our history with an authentic voice.

We’ve all suffered through horrible PowerPoint presentations, and too many of us have even created them ourselves. In Presentation Zen Design, Garr Reynolds gives you several principles to simplify your presentations, and improve the design — and therefore make them more effective.

Of course, the challenge is in executing his simple principles. Reading this book reminded me that so often, the PowerPoint we see is just the second or third draft — not a final presentation. I’ve been guilty of this in the past myself. I get all my thoughts out in PowerPoint and then I tweak them a bit, and I act like I’m done.

But Reynolds [who authors a popular blog on the same topic, Presentation Zen] reminds us that PowerPoint [or Keynote, or any other slideware program] is meant to be a presentation aid — the presenter is supposed to share the information. If you can most effectively share your information via the slides, why would you do a presentation at all? Couldn’t you just forward the slides and save everyone from a needless meeting?

Instead, Reynolds wants your slides to augment the presentation you’re making. So, no more itsy-bitsy type, no more 10-bullet-point slides, no more boring images or poorly designed tables. Instead, he wants you to figure out what the essence of your presentation is, and put that on your slides. And that’s the work that many of us never do.

The real takeaway in this book is that you should be working harder on almost every presentation you make. If you can commit to doing that, Reynolds can give even non-designers some basic design principles to make your point more effective.

[Thanks to Michael Hyatt for this book recommendation. If you are in digital media or publishing and not reading his blog, well, fix that right now!]

I loved Freakonomics, so I was expecting to enjoy the sequel, and I did.

The criticism leveled at this book [and somewhat at its predecessor] is that the authors are too clever by half, and they are more interested in telling a good tale than in elucidating the solutions to any vexing problems facing our society. And that perhaps they’re distorting the truth a bit to make their stories entertaining.

I guess my question to those critics is, what are you looking for? I certainly can’t speak for the authors of this book, but I would think their point is more to encourage us to think in new ways, and not to just take the conventional wisdom for granted. Many things we assume to be true — even based on “evidence” — simply aren’t.

So I like books like SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, that make me review why and how I believe what I do.

I’m off on a quest to read a book a week in 2010. In classic overachiever mode here, I’m going to start with the book I read the week of Christmas 2009, In Defense of Food.

Some of you may be shocked I haven’t read this book already, since it ties in with a lot of what I believe about how we should eat. Honestly, when it came out, I read the reviews and thought, Yep, I agree, and didn’t feel the need to read it right away since I suspected Michael Pollan was just preaching to my choir.

But Ashby received the book for Christmas this year, and I quickly appropriated it.

I did enjoy it, and I highly recommend it to you if you are interested in the food-industrial complex or if you’re trying to eat healthy and local. Pollan does a nice job of de-myth-ifying lots of what we believe about food, showing us how conventional wisdom came to be — why we think eating low-fat is good, or why we think carbs are bad — and showing that many of these common assumptions are half-truths at best.

I found one thing frustrating about the book, though. While Pollan spends a lot of time debunking common food assumptions, he does not devote time to his own original research about food. And he’s up front about that, by the way — it’s not a hidden agenda. But I just found myself wanting the same rigor applied to what we ought to know about food, as he applies to that which we think we know, but don’t.

Ah, but part of his point is that we haven’t done the research, and/or don’t yet have the technology, to understand how food really works. At any rate, I found this book a nice companion to Marion Nestle’s What to Eat, long my bible for food-related questions.

Well, before the FTC lost its mind today, I’d planned to tell you that I’d received a review copy of Marcus Buckingham’s new book from his publisher, Thomas Nelson, and that in exchange, I’d agreed to post my review of the book on this date.

I suspect I would even have mentioned that if you buy the book from Amazon at this link, I’ll make a few cents.

Now, I’d really prefer to spend my time railing on the FTC, but I’m going to tell you about the book first, then go over to my other site for the FTC rant.

I’m a Marcus Buckingham fan from way back. I am not generally a fan of the whole self-help genre, but at some point, someone convinced me to pick up his book, “Now, Discover Your Strengths,” and I found it an incredibly helpful personal and professional development tool.

I haven’t read any of Buckingham’s other books, but they all seem to play on the same theme. In the newest book, Find Your Strongest Life, he focuses on the roles women play, and what we find satisfying and draining about our daily lives.

I will tell you up front, I had my feminist back up, and I was prepared to be offended at the slightest provocation. And perhaps in the end, what I learned was that I should scold myself for thinking a man wouldn’t have something useful to say about women’s roles in our society.

I think Buckingham is really good at two things:

• Helping you clarify who you are and what you do well
• Giving you simple tools to make that role more satisfying

If you’re looking for an in-depth psychological analysis, you won’t find it here. But you will find practical steps you can use today, this week, in taking better control of your life.

And really, that’s what his books come down to for me: Figuring out who you are, and feeling empowered to act on that knowledge.

In fact, I found myself thinking at several times throughout the book, that he really could have pitched it to people, and not just to women. I know plenty of men who feel powerless to change their lives. And that’s what a lot of the book is about: Determining where you are most powerful, most at ease, and making more of that happen.

Who should read this book: People who are looking for a clearer direction in their lives, or who don’t feel fulfilled in their current career choices.

Who won’t like it: People who don’t care for self-help/personal development.

Other things I’m going to do in 2008:

• Read all these books [Sorry, the template is funny here. I will fix that later.]
• Finish the counted cross-stitch Christmas stocking I started for my daughter in 1999, the year she was born. In my defense, have YOU ever tried to sit down and do intricate needlework with an infant? A 2-year-old? A 4-year-old? demanding your every attention? Well, she hasn’t been that young in more than 4 years, but hey, I’ve been busy.

We’re just five weeks in, but I’ve already figured out the point of third grade: Make parents masters of organization.

This [and what my friends tell me] is really scaring me about fourth grade.

So far, the 8yo’s work itself hasn’t seemed any harder to me. But the volume! And now there are points off for stuff like: The teacher can’t read your answer. Or: You mixed up the order, even though we can see what you mean. So they’re really into teaching you to be a student this year, which I applaud. You know, how to head your paper, and complete an assignment neatly. [Someone, please!, show me the neat third grader. I'm convinced that horribly messy writing and poor spatial writing skills are a hallmark of 8yos. I have no idea why someone decided this is the year to teach cursive writing, yet, just like it was 24 years ago, that's on deck for this year.]

So tonight I told the 8yo we needed to make a calendar for her homework, just like I have my calendar for, well, everything. Mostly the goal here is to prevent me from forgetting something I’m supposed to supply for her scholastic efforts, but it’s good practice for her.

We talked about how to write out the calendar on a sheet of colored paper, and in short order, she’d set up a box for each day this week and without prompting, included her regular assignments on the right days. Bless that girl. Maybe she’s kin to my mom and sisters, after all.

It took both of us to sort through the unusual items for this week:
* Collect a bag of sticks for tomorrow’s art project. [Side note: I discovered my redbud tree, which I'd presumed to be about 1/5 dead since the freeze this spring, isn't! The 1/5 part was about 3/4 full of buds and even a few blooms. We took the dead-dead part for sticks.]
* Read a book of realistic or historical fiction and prepare a book talk [1 min oral report] for next Monday. I helped the 8yo plan out what she’d need to do the rest of this week to prepare for Monday. For tonight we decided, select the book.

Here’s where we saw the real 8yo come out. First she tried to choose her animal almanac. She knows it’s nonfiction, of course. I showed her several books she has on her shelf that are historical fiction. She quickly rejected them as "too easy." She wanted to know why she couldn’t report on "Ripley’s Believe It or Not." Hmm. Fiction? Don’t worry, we rejected that, too.

Now she’s truly whining. In my masterstroke of genius, I took her out to the hallway. I have two bookcases in the hall, and 6 of the shelves are full of my books. The bottom two shelves are mostly full of books I read as a preteen. I said to her, "I think most of these books are for older kids, but you can look through to see if you find one that applies for your report."

In less than 10 minutes, she’d looked through each book, selected one for her report, two more for fun, and noticed that I’d filed the Harry Potter books with my own, and decided she’d read that for tonight’s "reading log," another fun element of third-grade homework.

Am currently very proud of myself. Please don’t burst the bubble.