The Notes of Glitch the Hamster
Alexey Gerasimovich's blog about books, music, Cyprus, and everything else
Boris Akunin is an extraordinary author. Whatever he writes, it always turns out to be interesting. True, some of his books may not be great overall, but they are always engaging to read. In much the same way, I used to follow his posts on LiveJournal, where Boris Akunin would share notes about people and events that piqued his interest.
The book “The Life of Remarkable People and Animals” is essentially a collection of those posts, gathered under one cover and published in book form.
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Interestingly, the book Mama, Don’t Worry! by Sasha Galitsky was given to me by my wife. Not with any specific intent, she just liked the description, and she knows that in recent years I’ve been very interested in the topic of growing up (see my previous post, which touches on this as well—We Will Sing With the Voices).
The book has a subtitle: How to Learn to Communicate with Elderly Parents Without Losing Your Own Mind? It’s not that my parents are elderly yet (may they outlive us all), nor that I’m losing my mind when talking to them. But it’s interesting to explore why this issue might arise at all, and where I might end up in my own “development.”
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Before diving into the book Death by Meeting, I’d like to share how I first became acquainted with the author’s work.
Patrick Lencioni is a very unconventional business writer and consultant. He is best known as the author of the bestseller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This isn’t a typical management book—many refer to it as a business novel. I’m not sure if Lencioni invented this style or if someone else had done it before him, but when I read the book, I found the approach intriguing. It’s a book about management, but written as a work of fiction about the life of a team. Essentially, he takes a business problem, “creates” a company and characters around it, and tells a story that illustrates how to solve the problem in question.
I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team about five or six years ago, and I really liked it. That’s when I realized the author had earned his own spot on my “to-read” list.
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Just a couple of weeks ago, I knew nothing about The One Minute Manager until a colleague told me about a book he had just read. He mentioned that, in his opinion, as a manager, I was already following all four rules for “managing monkeys.” That piqued my curiosity, and I decided to figure out what kind of monkeys I was supposedly dealing with.
Ken Blanchard, a well-known author of management books, coined the term One Minute Manager in his book of the same name. By this term, he refers to a highly productive leader who follows some fairly simple rules. Blanchard’s first book, co-authored with Spencer Johnson, sold millions of copies and has been translated into nearly 40 languages worldwide. It kicked off a series under the same name, in which Blanchard, collaborating with various business authors, presents different productivity methods.
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As an experienced father, I hadn’t heard of Lyudmila Petranovskaya. Turns out, my wife has known about her for a long time and reads her articles. I discovered her book on the recommendation of a colleague, a man. That’s when I learned that L. Petranovskaya is a well-known child psychologist in the modern world. And her book The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life introduced me to her as an author.
The book’s main message is to show that children always need their parents and that they seek support from them. However, they do this in different ways during different stages of life, which is why certain behaviors and “problems” manifest.
What really stood out from the first pages is that the author doesn’t try to present her opinion as the only correct one. She immediately states:
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I have written more than once that the topic of the Holocaust is very important to me. I’m certain this is directly tied to the fact that the extermination of Jews during World War II personally affected my family. But this is also an example of something people must never forget so that it never happens again.
The book Auschwitz by Laurence Rees didn’t exactly fall into my hands by chance; modern algorithms recommended it to me because I had read other books on this topic. Until that day, however, I knew nothing about the author. Laurence Rees is a British historian who has devoted much of his career to studying Nazism, its causes, and its rise. Auschwitz: The Nazis & the Final Solution is just one of his books, in which he attempts to explain not only the history of one of the most infamous death camps but also the development of such a horrific concept as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
Before I share my thoughts on the book, I’d like to quote the author’s own words with which he concludes the book. I couldn’t put it better myself (I have read the book in Russian and couldn’t find the original quote so here I place the back translation from Russian, sorry):
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Most Soviet children of my generation were probably quite knowledgeable about Greek mythology. And we owe this to the magnificent book by Nikolai Kun, Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece. Moreover, after having spent quite a bit of time recently with real Greeks, it seems to me that we knew their mythology better than they did.
That said, even I don’t remember much now. So, what do we remember about Perseus? That he killed Medusa the Gorgon, who could turn people to stone with a single glance, and that he avoided looking at her directly by using her reflection in his shield. And that’s about the extent of my knowledge after all these years.
The same goes for many other characters. The book contained an enormous number of them, but we mostly focused on the feats of various heroes: Perseus, Theseus, Heracles, the Argonauts… That’s who was interesting. As for the rest, we left them behind. Can you remember the names of Perseus’ grandchildren? Or that he even had grandchildren? And do you know who was Heracles’ mortal father (since Zeus was his official dad)?
Well, Perseus’ grandson and Heracles’ mortal father were actually the same person—Amphitryon. It was he whom H.L. Oldie made the main character of their dilogy The Grandson of Perseus, the third book in their Achaean cycle. The first was A Hero Must Be Alone (dedicated to the story of Heracles), followed by the dilogy Odysseus, Son of Laertes. It was with the first of these that I began my acquaintance with Oldie’s books.
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A month ago, I celebrated my 10-year anniversary working at the game company Wargaming.net. However, my entire professional career actually began with video games, back when I used to write out the program for a computer version of Monopoly in a notebook. I never finished it—making games is tough, especially when all your work can vanish due to a faulty audio cassette where it was saved. But even my first programs were related to games: business simulations, educational, and card games. So, you could say I’ve been in the industry, with breaks, for over 25 years.
That’s why it was especially interesting for me to read Jason Schreier’s much-talked-about book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which, as its subtitle suggests, reveals “stories behind how video games are made.”
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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 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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