Category: Books

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

Olivia Judson “Dr.Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation”

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It’s not often that you start reading a book after hearing it advertised on the radio. That’s exactly what happened with Olivia Judson’s Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. While driving to work, I heard it being praised in a morning show, where they essentially read out the book’s synopsis. I fell for it right away.

Strangely enough, the book is indeed about sex. But not about family life problems and how to overcome them (the ever-popular topic), but about how it all works among different species that inhabit our planet.

The book is a popular science work, but it’s different from others in that it’s structured as answers from the fictional Dr. Tatiana to readers of her column. And the readers are not humans.

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David J. Anderson “Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business”

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Kanban is a flexible management tool that originated from Toyota. Over the past few decades, it has become very popular in the IT industry, alongside other agile methodologies. David Anderson has worked in IT for 30 years and has been an advocate of the Kanban methodology for many years. The title of the book, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, suggests that we’ll learn both about the methodology and the best ways to apply it. At least, those were my expectations. Especially since it’s praised by various experts in the annotations.

However, I found the book difficult from the very first pages. I pushed through to the end to form a complete opinion, but it only confirmed my initial thoughts rather than changing them.

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Simon Sinek “Leaders Eat Last”

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The book Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek initially caught my attention because of its title. It immediately sparks different images in your mind, and you start imagining what the author meant by such a title… so it was worth reading to find out.

I read it almost in one go and took more notes than with any other book I’ve read. However, I struggled for a long time to decide what rating to give the book, as well as what I really liked and what still needs further thought. That’s why I’m writing this review three weeks after finishing the book.

The book is about what it means to be a leader and what the right company culture should look like.

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Fredrik Backman “A Man Called Ove”

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I’ll start with the strong points. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman is the best piece of fiction I’ve read in at least the last five years. I didn’t even know about this author until my wife recommended the book to me, saying, “Read it, it’s about you.”

Fredrik Backman is a Swedish writer who started out as a truck driver, then began writing articles for a newspaper, eventually opened his own blog… and later wrote the novel A Man Called Ove about a character who first appeared in his blog. And his life changed. The novel became popular, was adapted into a film in Sweden, and was later nominated for an Oscar. After that, Fredrik Backman continued writing, and his subsequent novels are also said to be very good.

The book tells the story of a simple man, Ove, and begins on the day he retires. No, Ove isn’t exactly a simple man. He’s a person with very straightforward views on life (compared to many others), yet he has a strong backbone and firm beliefs. Beliefs so firm that they can lead him to fight for justice through official channels for years, or refuse to speak to a neighbor for twenty years because of them.

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Boris Akunin “The Walnut Buddha”

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The latest book in the fictional subseries History of the Russian State in Novels and Stories is a supplement to the volume about Tsar Peter the Great and consists of just one main novella. As with all of Akunin’s books, the writing style is very light — I practically “devoured” the entire novella. But as for the content… I liked the documentary volume about the tsar less than the earlier ones in the series, and this novella didn’t turn out to be much better.

There are interesting characters here, but the author doesn’t allow them to fully develop. Moreover, the novella is more about Japanese Buddhist teachings than about the era of Peter the Great. It’s a story about a “path” with a lowercase ‘p’ and the “Path” with an uppercase ‘P’. With lessons on how one should live and what is most important in life.

As for the events taking place and the country and time period through which this path unfolds… that’s all not particularly important.

It was an interesting read, but it feels like Akunin forcefully tied it to Peter’s era.

My rating: 3/5

Alexey Pehov, Elena Bychkova, Natalya Turchaninova “Kindrat”

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I really love Alexey Pehov’s work. For me, he’s already become a kind of personal brand — I buy any new book of his as soon as it comes out, even if I don’t plan on reading it right away. My wife and I have different opinions on which of his books is the best. As for his collaborations with Elena Bychkova and Natalya Turchaninova, I had only read a few novellas and stories before, and over ten years ago, I started the vampire series Kindrat.

I say “started” because, at the time, only the first volume had been published. I read it, but it seemed weaker to me than Alexey’s other solo works (yes, I know they’re not exactly solo). So, for many years, the books from that series were left on the shelf.

But recently, I decided to give the series a second chance, especially since the topic of vampires has always interested me. Since I have a peculiar memory for books, I began by re-reading the first volume. Interestingly, my feelings about it remained exactly the same after ten years. But now I didn’t have to wait for the second volume to be released, so I started reading it right away. And you know what? It worked. The pacing of the narrative changed dramatically, the “annoying” moments from the first book disappeared… and in the end, I read the entire series with great pleasure.

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Edward Ross “Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film”

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How badly I wanted to read this book! And how great my disappointment turned out to be! It’s much easier to list what’s wrong with this book than to find anything good about it.

In Russian the book is titled How Film Works: Theory and History of Cinema and was marketed as “an extensive study presented as a stylish and engaging comic.” But contrary to the title and description, it’s not about how cinema works at all. Frankly, the translators share some of the blame here, as the original title is Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film, which didn’t claim to be about how cinema works, nor about theory or history.

So what is it actually about? If I were to sum it up briefly, I’d say this: it’s a collection of completely unrelated paragraphs that try to appear as a scholarly article with deep insights. More often than not, these “insights” come from other people, whom the author frequently quotes throughout the book. This is criticism in its worst form, where the writer attempts to explain what the filmmaker intended to convey, or what they were thinking. But reality shows that often the filmmaker wasn’t thinking about anything of the sort (there’s a great example with the horse in the film Afonya, which Georgiy Daneliya wrote about in his memoirs).

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Eugene Rogan “The Fall of The Ottomans”

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Living in Cyprus, where the island has been divided into two parts for the past 40 years and the topic of the Turkish occupation is very painful, I suddenly found myself increasingly interested in the history of these lands. At some point, I realized that I actually knew very little about the Ottoman Empire, whose influence on the local way of life would be foolish to deny. Then, I randomly came across a book by Eugene Rogan titled The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East.

I must say, that most people from Soviet and post-Soviet backgrounds know more about the Great Patriotic War. Even about World War II as a whole — less so (for example, in school we didn’t really study the war in the Pacific that the Americans fought). And as for World War I — even less, with only the basic clichés: gas attacks, trench warfare, Archduke, and revolution ending the war. I personally had no idea that there were battles in the Middle East at the time. That’s why I found it extremely interesting to learn about life there and why the war led to the collapse of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire. From Soviet history, I remembered that Russians had fought the Turks for centuries. But I knew much less about the details. Here, however, a Western author painstakingly reconstructs the history of that time, also relying on Turkish sources that are now available.

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Richard Rumelt “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”

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Some books come into your life at just the right time. I first noticed Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy a few years ago and bought it immediately. I didn’t get around to reading it right away, but once I started, it suddenly became very popular among my colleagues, which gave me the chance to discuss various points with them.

A year passed, my thoughts settled, and I realized that the book was so good that it deserved a more thoughtful re-read. So that’s what I did this time.

So what is this book about, and why did I read it twice in roughly a year and a half?

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