Recently in Books Category

An excellent book that I've been reading is called Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo.

The book has all kinds of interesting discussions about running development teams, based mostly on the idea that you can inspire them best by empowering the team members to take more control of their own environment.

However, in order to trust the team with such a heavy responsibility, one has to be able to trust oneself. You can only trust others of you trust yourself. This makes alot of sense, the essence of which is contained in the following quotation which I've taken from the chapter about respect for each other:

You must believe in yourself and stay true to your own reason and common sense, even when others disagree with you. You should only change your mind when new insights have convinced you, not when other people have pressured you to reconsider. Because doing something that you don't believe in is an act against the trust in yourself. A self-reliant person has confidence in himself, while still allowing new information to change his mind.

The last point is just as important as the rest. You want to avoid the situation of becoming too hardened to resist change and thereby becoming an unnatural obstacle to moving forward. That's why it's also imperative that you regularly listen well and try to empathize, even though your course might be set in a given direction.

Here are some links that might also be interesting:

• Management 3.0 Homepage
• Jurgen's Blog
• Agile Alliance

Although it was nearly midnight, and I was feeling pretty drowsy, with only one more chapter to go I just had to finish the book. I was glad I did, as the last two sentences at the end of the book provided me with just the right inspiration to fall asleep quickly and get myself fully re-energized for the following day of exciting challenges.

"With a balanced time perspective that learns from the past, draws energy and emotion from the present, and is guided by a clear vision for the future, each of us as individuals and all of us as a world can accomplish great things. Our hope for the future includes a balance and harmony of the past, present and future; of thinking and feeling; of people and nature; and an abundance of happiness and health for all."

The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd.

One of my favorite scenes in "The Angel's Game" by Carlos Ruiz Zafón is when David finally finds Cristina wandering aimlessly on the frozen lake:

...

I followed the tracks as far as the park that bordered the lake. A full moon burned over the large sheet of ice. That is when I saw her. She was limping over the frozen lake, a line of bloodstained footprints behind her, the nightdress covering her body trembling in the breeze. By the time I reached the shore, Cristina had walked about thirty metres towards the centre of the lake. I shouted her name and she stopped. Slowly she turned and I saw her smile as a cobweb of cracks began to weave itself beneath her feet. I jumped onto the ice, feeling the frozen surface buckle, and ran towards her. Cristina stood still looking at me. The cracks under her feet were expanding into a mesh of black veins. The ice was giving away and I fell flat on my face.

"I love you," I heard her say.

I crawled towards her, but the web of cracks was growing and now encircled her. Barely a few metres separated us when I heard the ice finally break. Black jaws snapped open and swallowed her up in a pool of tar. As soon as she disappeared under the surface, the plates of ice began to join up, sealing the opening through which Cristina had plunged.

...

There's more and it gets better and better, but I don't want to spoil it all for those who want to read this fantastic novel.

This is just one of many gripping parts of the book which takes place in the old, shadowy sections of Barcelona and surroundings. The story is an excellent read, although you will probably want to reread certain sections in order to get the most out of the darker and more mysterious chapters, trying to figure what's real and what's coming from the author's fantastical mind.

I'm now reading the book "Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh and really like it. I like it so much that after having read the first one hundred pages, I found it so entertaining that I went back and read it all over again just in case I might have missed something (I did and maybe I should reread it again).

The backdrop of the book takes place during The Opium Wars of the eighteen hundreds, and the way the author writes pulls you into the story with such force that it's like you are walking right next to the characters and seeing stuff they see. Take the following excerpt for instance and upon reading it close your eyes and imagine you are there:

"The town was small, just a few blocks of houses that faded away into a jumble of shacks, shanties and other hut-houses; beyond, the path wound through dense patches of forest and towering, tangled thickets of sugar cane. The surrounding hills and crags were of strange, twisted shapes; they sat upon the plains like a bestiary of gargantuan animals that had been frozen in the act of trying to escape from the the grip of the earth."

Trying to follow the language of the so-called lascars (crew members onboard the ship) is sometimes frustrating, but if you need a helping hand with the strange slang you might want to print out the Ibis Chrestomathy and keep it on hand while reading the book.

On the one hand you have God playing with opium and using it as an instrument of fate, and on the other hand you have a list of characters entangled in a web of complexities and deception.

Lately I've been able to spend much time in the evenings reading one book after the other. I can sit down in my simple reading chair feeling relaxed as my mind dives into and gets totally lost in one world or another. The large window behind provides ideal light until it get too dark in the evening at which time I can flick on the standing lamp to the right.


This is my reading chair.

Here is my personal review of "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer, which I just finished today.

This is not the easiest book to read. Some parts I really had to struggle through, but I must admit that the author uses some clever unorthodox ways of getting his points across. I only started understanding the plot fully when I was about half way through, and I believe that I would have enjoyed the first half better had I known in advance what the plot was about. The dual nature is of two disasters: one being the Dresden bombing during WWII and the other being the aftermath of losing a father during the 9/11 tragedy. There are two generations: a young boy named Oskar trying to make sense of things and finding a mysterious key by chance in a blue vase that he lets fall, and the grandparents immigrating after the war, the mute grandfather who for some reason left and the grandmother was has never forgiven him and becomes infatuated with the young boy. Better stop now so I do not give away too much. Read it for yourself and enjoy.

The following is an especially powerful excerpt from the book "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which in beautiful prose describes the essence of the book and the theme around which the whole plot revolves.

"By the time she had emptied the teapot and he the coffeepot, they had both attempted and then broken off several topics of conversation, not so much because they were really interested in them but in order to avoid others that neither dared to broach. They were both intimidated, they could not understand what they were doing so far from their youth on a terrace with checkerboard tiles in a house that belonged to no one and that was still redolent of cemetery flowers. It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. She thought that he would at last be convinced of the unreality of his dream, and that this would redeem his insolence."

Read it carefully once or twice until it rings true in your mind, and hopefully like me you will also be struck by the deep yet disturbing meaning.

Whenever you are feeling down, the best way to make yourself feel better is to order a bunch of books from Amazon.

I cannot believe I somehow managed to struggle through all 762 pages of the book Shadowmarch by Tad Williams.

This fantasy saga is not terribly exciting but there was something about it that kept me reading on and on to the end for some reason.

To be honest, a book must be really bad if I do not finish it after having read the first couple of hundred pages.

It's the first part of a trilogy, and before I'd started the first book I'd already purchased the second book Shadowplay (761 PAGES) in anticipation, having read so many positive reviews.

"A sublime piece of storytelling!"

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I'm not what you'd call an overly avid fan of fantasy. Hopefully the second and third books are better.

What especially appealed to me about the following book excerpt was the part about the saving rope being lowered from above, as if just by reaching up and holding onto it one is whisked away from the mundaness of the everyday world in which we sluggishly push along.

"But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego."

Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way - Marcel Proust