Category: Books

Notes about everything related to books, including reviews of books I’ve read

Mike Pritula, Roman Zhikharev “Résumé for a Million”

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I have an interesting story connected with the book Résumé for a Million. I know both authors personally, as we worked together at Wargaming. I had already read some of Mike’s articles on résumés and hiring before, and as a manager who has conducted many interviews myself, I strongly disagreed with many of his conclusions and advice. We even had a few debates on the topic.

So, when it came to this book, I wasn’t just cautious—I was rather pessimistic. However, it’s not fair to criticize without reading. That’s why I decided to buy the book, read it, and then form my opinion.

From the title, you might expect the book to teach you how to write a résumé that will sell you for the highest price. This was, in fact, the general tone of Mike’s earlier articles on the subject. However, the book turned out to be much more than just about résumés—the authors themselves divided it into three parts.

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Fredrik Backman “My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry”

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Fredrik Backman was my discovery of 2018. As I mentioned earlier, his novel A Man Called Ove was the best fiction book I read that year. That’s why I decided that I definitely needed to read his other books—or at least give them a try, since sometimes an author writes one exceptional work, but the rest don’t live up to it.

Backman’s second novel is intriguing from the title alone—My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. It immediately makes you curious about who this grandmother is and what she’s apologizing for.

The main character of the book is a girl named Elsa, and her grandmother is quite a character. If Ove—the hero of A Man Called Ove—believed that life should be orderly and by the rules, Elsa’s grandmother is the complete opposite. She doesn’t accept any rules or laws, and Elsa adores her for it. Partly because every night in their dreams, they fly off to the magical land of Miamas together. And her grandmother is always on the lookout for adventures. Even her final quest for her granddaughter promises many mysteries and discoveries.

The most interesting thing is that, despite my super positive attitude going in, the first part of the book didn’t flow as smoothly for me as A Man Called Ove did. With Ove, I couldn’t put it down. Here, the rhythm was different, and while the grandmother is a colorful character, there’s just so much fantasy and make-believe that she feeds to her granddaughter.

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Uladzimir Karatkevich “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt”

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It just so happens that I had never read any works by Vladimir Korotkevich (Uladzimir Karatkevich, if translated from Belarusian), even though my wife really enjoys his writing. I had been planning to for a long time, but I finally decided to start my acquaintance with the relatively short novella King Stakh’s Wild Hunt.

The novella tells the story of the main character, a collector of Belarusian folklore, who travels to distant marshy areas to find local folklore among the people. He’s kind of like Shurik from a famous Soviet film, but from an earlier time and in Belarus, not the Caucasus.

Luck smiles upon him, and he quickly learns about the legend of the Wild Hunt of King Stakh—phantom hunters who torment all the descendants of an ancient noble family. Since the last descendant is a lovely young woman, the main character decides to investigate the situation and protect the innocent victim. It’s a detective story with a blend of Belarusian motifs and constant reflections on the place of ordinary people in history. Initially, the narrative progresses slowly and measuredly, but after about a third, the pace changes, and events start to unfold more and more rapidly.

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Don Norman “The Design of Everyday Things”

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The book “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman absolutely did not meet my expectations. The reason for this was a misunderstanding of the synopsis on my part. I expected a book filled with numerous examples of good and bad design, a sort of entertaining read, and perhaps even colorfully illustrated. But the book turned out to be something entirely different.

This book is about proper design. And it’s not limited to just objects: it covers anything from the things around us to technological devices, rules, and procedures. The key idea is that the solution should best fulfill its purpose.

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Oleg Divov “Tech Support”

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A brand-new novel by Oleg Divov, fresh off the press, “was still running this morning.” The book Tech Support is presented as if it were a report about events that the general public is not supposed to know. Complete with all the necessary “confidential” and “approved for use” labels from the Schrodinger Institute.

The story takes place in the not-too-distant future (just a few decades ahead) when the Russians sold good-quality, but no longer cutting-edge, weaponry to an African country. Well, more accurately, they went there to sell it. And there, events took their own course, following a distinctly Russian-African trajectory.

The novel is written in a very light style, with a sense of irony and humor, generously seasoned with recklessness, nonchalance, and the typical Russian “let’s hope for the best” attitude. But it also carries a certain degree of political incorrectness that we’re familiar with: black people are called “negroes,” (which doesn’t care any negative attitude in Russian, by the way), cultural stereotypes are mocked, and so on. I can’t even imagine letting a Western audience read this novel—they’d tear it apart.

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Peter Bregman “18 minutes. Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done”

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The book “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done” by Peter Bregman had been recommended to me several times, although I no longer remember by whom. It’s about improving focus, avoiding distractions, and accomplishing what you set out to do.

Even though it’s written in a fairly easy-to-read style, I didn’t like the first half at all. It felt like a typical business book, full of fluff, self-praise, and similar things. Something along the lines of “I was a loser, but then I saw the light, and now everyone should follow my lead.” I’m exaggerating, of course, but that’s the feeling I got from the tone between the lines.

However, later on, the author switches to practical examples and more actionable advice.

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Shaun Bythell “The Diary of a Bookseller”

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I’ve loved reading since childhood and have almost always held books in reverence. My parents had a fairly large library, and I enjoyed browsing through the books, cataloging them, and even keeping track of everything I’d read. Later, I started buying books myself and often felt pleasure simply from owning them, even if I hadn’t yet had time to read them. Just having a book on the shelf was wonderful in itself. At one point, I even seriously considered getting into the book business but eventually limited myself to making good acquaintances in that world.

Then, out of the blue, someone recommended The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell to me, saying, “If you love books so much, you absolutely must read it.”

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Boris Akunin “Eurasian Empire. The History of the Russian State. The Era of the Empresses”

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I love Akunin’s books, including the much-criticized series The History of the Russian State. Yes, the author is often not very objective and adds much of his own perspective and worldview into the text. However, because of this, his works are often more lively and interesting to read than more scientific but dry historical books.

Now, he has finally reached the 18th century, the period after the death of Peter the Great and up until the reign of Alexander I (which will be covered in the next volume of the series). Akunin calls this period the “Era of the Empresses” because women largely dictated Russia’s development during this time. Men were also in power, but far less frequently compared to the empresses.

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Sergei Lukyanenko “Labyrinth of Reflections”

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At one time, Sergei Lukyanenko’s book Labyrinth of Reflections made a massive impact on the IT world, a world few people even knew about back then. It practically became the bible of that generation.

The internet was still a novelty at the time, and no one fully understood what it would become, but many geeks already had personal computers at home. Communication took place on FidoNet, where people lived, debated, and created — including Sergei Lukyanenko and most Russian sci-fi writers of that era.

In fact, the novel Labyrinth of Reflections reflects this very generation, which suddenly transitions from the Fido network to a world of virtual reality. But not the kind we see now — it was from the same era of networks and computers that seemed cutting-edge at the time but now, twenty years later, are hopelessly outdated.

The central idea and fantastical premise is that someone invented a program that puts users into a trance, making everything on the screen feel like reality, while the user understands only intellectually that they are in a constructed world — the Deep. From there, the author shows how such a discovery irreversibly changes the world.

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Boris Akunin “Sister Pelagia”

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I really love Boris Akunin’s series about Erast Fandorin. The last few books were less interesting, but I’ve reread the early novels in the series several times. However, I had always kept the trilogy about Sister Pelagia “on the back burner.” In fact, I read the first book, Pelagia and the White Bulldog, about 6-7 years ago, but back then I had no desire to continue with the series. Now, I’ve decided to correct this, so I reread the first book and then went on to read the other two.

The most interesting part is that you can’t really say that Sister Pelagia is the main character of the series. Yes, everything revolves around her, and she’s a sort of local detective. But I’d say there are several key characters, including Pelagia, the metropolitan, and a few other residents of the town of Zavolzhsk, where the events take place.

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