Tag: I-recommend

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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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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techsupport

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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Misconceptions about Feedback

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One of the best articles on employee training and feedback. It challenges much of what we are taught by various “gurus” and what many companies implement in their corporate processes. It offers a fresh perspective on what happens within teams and with individuals. Interestingly, I have personally discovered and applied some of these principles intuitively, even when they contradicted official doctrine.

I highly recommend reading it: https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy

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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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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Auschwitz: A History in Photographs

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auschwitz

In 2013, my wife and I took a road trip through Poland. One specific stop on our itinerary was Auschwitz, not the town, but the museum located on the site of the former concentration camp. This was a place I absolutely wanted to visit. The genocide of the Jews is part of my family’s history.

I won’t talk about the museum itself right now, that’s a subject for another conversation. But before leaving, I bought a photo album titled Auschwitz: A History in Photographs from the shop near the exit. It’s one of the few books I took with me when we moved to another country. However, for some reason, I only started to study it in detail five years later. I don’t quite know how to write about this book, but I still want to.

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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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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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