Tag: book log

The Back of the Napkin was disappointing, perhaps because I’m not in the target audience. As far as I can tell, the target audience is people who work in a consulting firm or a big corporate environment, don’t like drawing, and don’t know what a Venn diagram is.

In the service of better business meetings, the book brings together basic visual displays, superficial insights from cognitive science, and the five w’s of journalism, wrapping it all in a nicely designed but gimmicky napkin-shaped book printed in black and red.

The author sets out some good principles and good examples, but at the end of the day, I just felt like he was showing off the successes of his own career; none of it seemed particularly likely to help me, and somehow it didn’t make for compelling reading.

When and Why I Read The Back of the Napkin

Bought it in Atlanta in 2014. It’s been waiting its turn long enough.

Genre: non-fiction (business)
Date started / date finished:  26-Mar-17 to 20-Apr-17
Length: 276 pages
ISBN: 9781591843061 (hardcover)
Originally published in: 2008
Amazon link: The Back of the Napkin

When I read Airframe, what struck me most, apart from the author’s finely honed ability to build and sustain tension, was how outdated 90s communication technology seemed. Beepers, CD players, video recorders that use tape, faxes, landline telephones, television screens that aren’t flat… and what the heck is a telex, anyway?

More thoughts on this un-put-down-able techno-thriller below.

Continue reading Airframe by Michael Crichton

I have mixed feelings about Travels, Michael Crichton’s collection of autobiographical anecdotes.

On the one hand, Crichton is an intelligent, educated and interesting person with stories to tell that are exotic and absorbing, and he’s a good storyteller. On the other hand, a third of the material is about his rocky medical career, and another third of it relates to paranormal stuff, and in a couple of the non-medical, non-paranormal chapters, Crichton relates some nearly lethal experiences of the kind that involve water and thus cause me disproportionate anxiety.

In short, I like how he writes, but I didn’t like much of what he wrote about in this book.

For more on what stood out for me as well as more on Crichton’s oddly unscientific treatment of paranormal phenomena, see below.

Continue reading Travels by Michael Crichton

Edward Tufte was a byword among the publishing professionals I worked with in 2004–2008. If you had anything whatsoever to do with the design or illustration of serious books, you had at least one of his four giant tomes on your shelf, if not all of them:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Envisioning Information
• Visual Explanations
• Beautiful Evidence

Visual Explanations is the only one that’s made it onto my shelves so far, but at least now I’ve read it. Now I know what all the fuss is about.

Tufte’s lovely, informative book shows readers how data has been displayed throughout history in a variety of fields and how it is clarified or obscured by the manner in which it is displayed. He shows you illustrations of magic tricks and data from the Challenger disaster as well as 17th century book frontispieces; snapshots from computer interfaces as well as images from works of art history and natural history.

When and Why I Read Visual Explanations

On the to-read list since June 2012. Ties in with The Back of the Napkin because it’s about visual thinking.

Genre: non-fiction (information design)
Date started / date finished:  30-Mar-17 to 08-Apr-17
Length: 151 pages
ISBN: 0961392126 (hardcover)
Originally published in: 1997
Amazon link: Visual Explanations

Phew. Okay. Saint Anything was way less heartwrenchingly dire than Dreamland!

I loved the ongoing debate about what the band should be called; reminds me of the Zits comic in which Jeremy’s mom offers the band some goat cheese pizza during practice, and “goat cheese pizza” thus becomes the name of the band.

I’m always impressed by Dessen’s fake world. At least some of the time she reuses the same town and high schools, which makes the places feel familiar and real even if they’re not. Her world also has its own shops, restaurants, brand names and pop stars. The culture her teen characters inhabit is specific and authentic without being real. It isn’t tied to a specific place and time.

I have noticed technology creep in over the years, though, which might give readers a way to place the setting in time. For example, the characters didn’t have smartphones in earlier books… but nobody had smartphones in 1996 when Dessen published That Summer! The characters; computers and phones aren’t an important part of the novels, but teens reading the earlier ones might scratch their heads wondering why tech isn’t as important in the characters’ lives as it is in their own.

When and Why I Read Saint Anything

I’ve read all Sarah Dessen’s books so far.

Genre: fiction (YA)
Date started / date finished:  04-Mar-17 to 06-Mar-17
Length: 417 pages
ISBN: 9780147516039 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2015
Amazon link: Saint Anything