I started reading the Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine free digest recently. Very enjoyable, including the book reviews, particularly when I read Michelle West's review of the sequel to the Name of the Wind (no spoilers for either book here):

The rest of the review does contain spoilers, I assume -- I stopped right there and went to buy the Name of the Wind, which proved to be quite a wonderful and addictive read indeed. Warmly recommended! The writing style is quite original and the story and world grip you in straight from the beginning.

I'm holding on -- with great difficulty -- getting the sequel, to try to space the books out while waiting for the final volume of the trilogy to be out. We'll see how long that lasts...

The Talent Code brings us on a tour of the brain to explain how talent is acquired, weaving the science (and sometimes bold assumptions about the reptilian brain) with plenty of illustrative stories and anecdotes reminiscent of Gladwell's Outliers. Basically there's no such thing as "innate talent", only hard work :-) The 10,000 hours rule is mentioned a few times.

We learn that it's all about the myelin, a substance that wraps around synapses to make the signal between 2 neurons less likely to "leak" and therefore makes the impulse arrive stronger and faster. This explains why, as we become more skilled at something, it feels more effortless. This is also why there is no shortcut for practice: to become good at something, you need to fire the signal over and over again to build myelin around the right synapse/behaviour you want to excel at. This cannot be done by reading books, where different signals would be fired.

The premise for the book is the author's curiosity with regard to "talent hotbeds", these places in the world that seem to consistently produce top talent -- be it in football, classical music, tennis, etc. We follow the author in his travels and interviews, and while looking at these places with him we come back again and again to myelin, while also realising the importance of "deep practice" and why it makes a huge difference when learning a skill.

We also look at ignition, the initial motivator that gets someone started learning a skill, as well as how one's environment and personal circumstances impact the likelihood that they will keep at it until they become an expert. Ignition needs to be fuelled to sustain motivation, and having an environment full of cues that tell you that "you should learn this, you should do this" helps -- cues that talent hotbeds appear to have in abundance.

Great coaches and teachers are also mentioned, including references to studies that investigate what these people do that make them great. For instance one study discovered that 75% of the remarks imparted by a coach during training were purely informational and offered at key moments, as opposed to constant compliments or criticisms.

There are a couple of pictures and diagrams included, cuts of myelinated (huh... spelling?) cells, others to explain the myelination process. Very cool!

I was recommended and lent "The Sin of Wages" a few weeks ago. That was an interesting read ;-) The book, particularly the beginning, contains a lot of interesting ideas that challenge the way we currently look at wages and the negative effects of the traditional pay system -- "if you pay for time, you get time ; if you pay for results, you get results." Lots of ideas that make sense in the way pay should better reflect the reality of the business and its profit margin, ups and downs, and how if all employees' incentives were better aligned with business results/profit, employees would be better motivated to increase profit and perform activities relevant to the business.

Although I like the general idea, I found myself getting sceptical about the implementation. It all seems based on the idea that we can accurately measure individual performance and efforts, and how it correlates with the bottom line. As the book went on I found it more and more difficult to understand how that would apply to the reality of a software job. Ideas? It seems easier to map "individual output -> profit" for say manufacturing or a role where you must handle a number of similar requests or produce clearly defined items.

Employee results would be then compared to a previously established "Performance Scorecard" (with a reference to 2 other books from the same author on how to create an effective one, guess that's where I should look for implementation huh...) to calculate how much they should earn based on their results, the idea being that base pay (bare minimum) would be 15% below market rate and that by meeting their goals employees could earn up to 30 to 60% above market, depending on how the company sets up the system. Nice idea for top performers, but again, how and what do you measure in a software job? The example performance card for a salesperson contain both short term and long term goals, such as "customer satisfaction" as measured by surveys. I wonder how many customers would take the time to do that every time.

There are other nuggets of good ideas amongst the first few chapters, such as describing results rather than activities in a job description: how can someone improve a process if they don't know what it's for?

Gripes I had with the book: whenever the author disagrees with something in the traditional pay system, he makes a comparison with Marxism or communism in a strange attempt to evilise it (I think. It felt out of place.) Also, at the end of an early chapter (on page 92) he summarily dismisses any study that could prove his system wrong, in one single sentence -- and a short one at that:

Unfortunately, all the studies appear to contain problems in their methods and findings.

This is dishonest.

The system is called "Total Performance System" and is abbreviated as TPS in the last few chapters. I find myself wondering if this is where the Office Space movie got the TPS reports from!

"The No Asshole Rule: Building a civilised workplace and surviving one that isn't" by Robert Sutton is a short and interesting read. To understand what it's about, the title and subtitle say it all!

The definition of an asshole for the book goes like this: they do or say something that makes the target feel worse about themselves, and they target people who are less powerful.

The book goes on describing negative effects of assholes, at many different levels: emotional, organisational, and even financial, handy should you ever need a $$$ breakdown to make your bosses or company understand why it would be helpful to get rid of the assholes or at least prevent them taking over the company and culture. There'll be a lot of echoes and parallels you can draw with a few unhealthy open-source communities (e.g. earning the right to be a jerk once you've proven your technical chops, etc.), particularly if you've seen the excellent Poisonous people tech talk.

Other interesting aspects covered in the book include how to survive assholes when you really have no other choice, without becoming one yourself, and also what to do when you are the asshole. I thought that was really interesting! It's easy to get reading and imagine yourself as the recipient or appalled onlooker rather than the asshole dishing it out, but truth is we've all had our bad days. The book truly aims to be thorough, even touching on the benefits of behaving like an asshole, and how setting up a 'no asshole' policy can backfire: if it's only lip service, suddenly you become an hypocrite in addition to being an asshole.

Reading the book, it's obvious and clear that maintaining and establishing a workplace with a "no asshole" rule is a much better and healthier alternative for everyone, assholes included, and for organisations themselves. Hopefully the book will also act as a guide and help for people who want to expose, flee or get rid of the assholes around them.

Late last year I took a shine to the Dragon Age game, and since I enjoyed the story and the world so much I though I would -*gasp*- read the franchise books and learn more about it, starting with the Stolen Throne. Now both books are your average fantasy book, heavily stereotypical on the story, characters and their antics, and here even most of the plot... Still it ended up being quite an enjoyable backstory, that genuinely helps understand some of the characters in the game better; we follow Maric and Loghain as they meet and attempt to drive the Orlesians out of Ferelden.

There are a few things that didn't seem to make sense to me, however the author is the lead writer of the game so I must assume I didn't pay enough attention while playing (e.g. the Dalish elves speak a different language? If you play one in the game they keep saying how much of their past is lost, including the language.) In the end if you're able to overlook the lack of originality, you'll have a good read, particularly if you enjoyed the game's world.

I don't know if I had less patience when I got to reading The Calling but I found it a lot more disappointing. I may have come to it with the wrong expectations. The story occurs 15 years later and I was hoping it focused on Duncan like the first book focused on Maric and Loghain. Even taking into account that Duncan is much younger than when we meet him in the game, I didn't recognise him at all and didn't see either any evolution toward becoming the man we meet in DA. The character may as well have been named Bob the Grey Warden. (Then again, maybe I missed this side of him or misunderstood him in the game.........) Additionally, nearly all of the story occurs in one location -- the Deep Roads, which makes for a fairly repetitive scenery. The only bits I found interesting were echoes from the first book but they only carried the story so far, especially as Maric and his angsty angst started angstying on every other paragraph. Ah well. Time to go hunting for more trophies until it's time to play Dragon Age 2 ;)

I got "How to survive your first year in teaching" after finding some very positive reviews and it's been worth every cent -- from the beginning I had to stop reading to take notes and add bookmarks for future reference. The target is "real" teachers (at the primary and secondary level) who are preparing for the first year of teaching on their own after their training.

At my level (volunteer unqualified teacher), I found the book tips very good to help structure both a course and specific lessons. There are many activity ideas to try out in class and suggestions to avoid sticking only to one teaching style (e.g. lecturing) -- it doesn't matter what age group you're teaching, there will be something useful and I've already been applying some of them. I'll be re-reading the behaviour and class management chapters when I teach high school students again (having a clue what to do will hopefully help in these situations!)

For non-professional teachers like me, there are a number of chapters that don't apply, like class decoration or school administrative tasks. I still found them interesting on my first read-through though I'll likely skip them on subsequent reads (and I learnt a bit about the UK school system... for instance I thought "houses" only existed in the Harry Potter world :-)).

The kind of sections I bookmarked: activities to try in class, balanced lesson planning, setting aims and objectives, differentiation, resources to spice up lessons, assessing and marking (great to understand the types of feedback you can offer), grading and writing reports (feedback to students once again). I was pleased to read the section on differentiation and find that I had figured out a lot of it on my own, though I could definitely improve on differentiating for weaker students. Might need some additional resources on the topic. Anyone has recommendations to offer?

Blink talks about using our instant instinctive reactions to our advantage (as opposed to overthinking things), as well as how they become more useful and accurate as our experience builds up. The book also spends a good amount of time describing the dangers and dark side of these instinctive reactions, as they easily bring up unconscious prejudice against people -- say, against the blacks (as mostly criminal) and women (as mostly pertaining to domestic life).

To illustrate all this, the book brings up various stories of war and politics. There are lots of insane statistics; for instance we tend to associate "being tall" with an impression of leadership, and this reflects in e.g. the representation of tall people in Fortune 500 CEOs (14.5% of American are 6 feet or taller, while 58% of those CEOs are).

The book continues with other ways the "blink" effect can be used and what we currently understand about first impressions. An example of this: if you ask people to explain their first impression they will either make it up, or change their mind and usually become less accurate. There's a "select the best jam" story illustrating this -- people would get it right when tasting and saying directly what they thought, but would change their choice (poorly) when asked to judge factually on the texture and other attributes.

I found the first few chapters a lot more engrossing, perhaps because when the book begins and we're not familiar yet with the concept it's all mind-blowing amazing stuff. Then the reader gets used to it :) Or it could be that there's a lot more that affects me personally at that stage of the book, as I don't physically match the expectations of what someone good in my field usually looks like. The short Implicit Association Test in the early chapters is quite powerful in surfacing various levels of unconscious prejudice and bias, that you end up having whether or not you believe you do, due the myriad of societal messages surrounding us. The IAT site I linked to contains a few sample tests, if you want to understand what I'm talking about.

I really recommend this book:

• to understand yourself better, as a human being. You'll gain a better feel for when to trust your instinctive response and when to question it, and sometimes understanding where an impression comes from;
• for the many amazing stories, statistics, research results and incredible facts (the love lab, Warren Harding, the research on faces, ...).

I'll finish with a quote from page 97 of my edition, on how to counteract bias anchored deep into the brain.

If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way -- who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites -- it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become familiar with the best of their culture [...].

The last story of the book is about gender equality in classical music orchestras. When context was removed and "blind" auditions began, where the musician plays anonymously behind a screen, the number of women in classical orchestras suddenly increased fivefold. Until then no one thought or realised that they were also listening with their eyes.

The dip is a very short book, less than 80 pages, that aims to answer a single question: whether you should quit or whether you should stick to something (just like it says on the cover!). It could apply to a project, a market, a relationship, a career decision...

The book starts strongly on giving a sense that "it's ok to quit", which I personally found a bit overstated, but perhaps this is because I realised a while ago that sometime it's time to cut your losses and accept a change of strategy. Later on the author lists some reasons why you should quit, and others why you shouldn't (e.g. you shouldn't quit because you're scared -- that's not much of a strategic decision).

According to the book, your main goal or drive should be to "become the best in the world", and to keep that in mind while making your decision: that is, if you can't become the best in the world, find another problem to solve. I'd say for some of the questions you might be thinking about, it's not always the appropriate answer/goal but it doesn't make the book any less relevant.

Overall I enjoyed and appreciate the description of what is essentially a framework for making a specific kind of difficult decisions. I found the end of the book clearer and more helpful in deciding whether it's the right time to abandon an effort. The first 2/3rd really aim to hammer home why quitting is ok (sometimes) and why you should consider it, or even consider considering it.

Monstrous Regiment was a pleasure to read, it's a very good story -- and the first Pratchett I read in English! Don't know if it's this particular book or reading in the original language, but I didn't get any pun-overdose related headache this time, yay.

The book works very well as a stand-alone, for readers like me who are not exceedingly well versed in the Discworld universe. We follow the story of Polly, as she dresses up as a man and pretends to be one, to go to war and find her brother. Her regiment also includes a vampire and a troll, hence the title. The story sometimes pushes "suspension of disbelief" a bit far but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy every page anyway! The feminist thread of the story is incredibly well done, with the related thoughts and internal conflicts beautifully characterised in Polly's head, all along the story.

It's the first Malcolm Gladwell book I read and I'm well impressed. It's a pleasant read that challenges various preconceptions. It does seem heavily based on anecdotes but I think the people used as examples illustrate the points made well enough. The overall style of the book often reminded me of "Freakonomics" -- if you didn't like the style you probably won't like this one either.

The thesis of the book is that there is more than "hard work" and/or "being smart" to becoming an outlier in any field. People who make it big were also given incredible opportunities to learn and put in their 10,000 hours of training before they could shine. They worked hard for sure, but most of the time when and where you're born matters just as much. "Genius" and mastery aren't necessarily innate and don't matter as much as many people like to think either.

The second section of the book talks about cultural legacies and is fairly interesting as well, showing the impact on domains ranging from plane crashes to maths & reading ability to local feuds. As someone who's been living in a fairly different culture than my home country's for a few years now, I enjoyed reading chapters that clarified some of the things I've experienced but could not explain (like the effect of the "power distance index" on human interactions).

It's a light read that I have no problems recommending. I'm going to get "Blink" from the same author next.

Despite finding it a bit hard to start, I tremendously enjoyed Chris Beckett's Marcher novel -- I would recommend not reading the extract at the beginning of the book. The italicised prologue is a bit heavy too, but provides some context and once you get through it the story gets interesting already, following Charles, an immigration officer dealing with "shifters", people using a drug to move between the worlds, or more accurately alternative timeline our world could have taken. People who have enjoyed Beckett's short stories will recognise the world and happily notice echoes of other stories (I'd recommend reading The Turing Test first, even though you don't need to!).

There's a social comment thread of the story that can't be separated from the main plot, and sometimes doesn't feel so far from home. In this world the poor and unemployed are confined to special "inclusion zones" where they get a chance to "pull themselves together" and benefit from social welfare in the meantime, and as we explore these places and meet the social workers who work in them, we get to see the less-than-ideal reality of this social system's implementation. The tension begins when shifters start appearing in the inclusion zones and hiding there before committing horrible crimes, and shifting away before facing the consequences.

The book is littered with many distracting spelling mistakes, words doubled, "to" instead of "two" and so on. Grr. Bad editing job. Besides that annoyance, the story is fantastic, especially as it picks up when the strange crimes start happening and we follow some events from a shifter's point of view. I read in the bus and was starting to look forward to traffic jams to have more time to read, and eventually had to stay home and get to the resolution of all this! This is very entertaining science-fiction, combined with an interesting look at society.

Another lovely look into Feynman's life, this book is a collection of letters Feynman sent during his lifetime. Witty replies to friends and laypeople, humble (and sometimes annoyed!) comments about the Nobel Prize, encouraging answers to students and many different types of letter make for a very interesting and entertaining read. The letters are arranged according to different time periods, with major events explained at the beginning of some chapters and other contextual information lightly interspersed.

I'd still recommend first giving a shot to "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman" as an initial glimpse into Feynman's life, but this is a very nice addition, and if you've enjoyed the other one you'll like this one too.

Stones into Schools is the follow-up story to Three cups of tea, starting in 2003 where we left Greg Mortenson looking to expand the Central Asia Institute mission to building schools in Afghanistan. As expected the story is just as engaging and fascinating as the one narrated in the first book, and beautifully advocates for education, especially girl education and promoting literacy for girls and women. It also offers a candid view of life in countries suffering from their proximity or association with the Talibans, and of people and their daily life that's otherwise difficult to grasp from only watching the news.

It's heartbreaking to read about their work and the descriptions of horrors and tragedies during the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, when nearly every day we hear about the terrible flooding the country is now suffering from. I wonder how many schools and CAI schools are affected and if the CAI is able to help...

Despite and around all this, I found myself getting excited and worried and anxious every time the CAI "Dirty Dozen" worked their ass off to get a new school built, as each always seems to bring so much suspense and so many challenges. I think their school tally is up to 131, at the end of this book completed around August 2009.

The story gives an interesting perspective on the American military, that I certainly appreciated as someone usually suspicious of that establishment. Conversely, the narrator isn't always very kind when comparing the CAI work style with that of other NGOs working in those areas. Other NGOs tend to appear out of touch, e.g. traversing poor areas in expensive black SUVs with gigantic antennas... Perhaps the sentiment is justified.

A minor grip I have with the book would be a writing style quirk whereby every few pages a section ends with a phrasing like "but little did they know blah blah", it feels a bit like a cheap trick especially used so heavily, when it's unnecessary considering how compelling the story is on its own merit.

This really is a fantastic, inspiring and instructive story, I would recommend to anyone with either an interest in education or who generally enjoys reading to give one of these two books a try.

For the past few years I read very few, if any, fiction at all. Techie books, check, biographies and other real-life-documentary-like books, sure, but for some reason I couldn't stick to fiction storylines anymore.

Then a couple months ago I rehashed an old pet peeve of mine to a friend, about how most science-fiction books try so hard to focus on an idea that they don't care about making interesting, believable characters and sometimes don't ever bother that much with plot either. It's all about "the idea" and it makes for a dull read, that has been keeping me mostly away from SF literature.

In response I was lent "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes, and wow, what that interesting and moving and with absolutely non-bland characters! I really enjoyed it, and finished it in a few days once I actually took the time to sit down and start it. It was a very good read. The summary on the back cover kinda gives away a lot, but it doesn't take at all from the story, because the point is following the main character's evolution and changes and personality and struggles. I hear there's a movie too, I'd like to watch it at some point.

Then a couple of weeks back, I was walking in Waterstones and saw a book with this awesome cover (and a title that can only attract a software developer, "The Turing Test"!) Who cares about not judging a book by its cover, it inspired me. It's actually a collection of short stories by Chris Beckett, who I hadn't heard of before (the introduction by Alistair Reynolds is interesting in a meta sort of way), and the stories are just fantastic. They use SF as a way of exploring inherently human concepts like identity, life, art, soul, with characters that are profoundly humans (except when they're not... or are they, really?) and endearing. The stories suck you right in. Many of the worlds keep vividly haunting my mind long after I moved on to the next story. Some of the stories overlap, either set in the same world at different times or having you meet similar characters or concepts again. It's awesome. I loved it. I'd say I loved them all but I actually had a bit of trouble understanding the first story which gives its name to the book... Do not let this stop you!! Keep reading!

After this, the next time I saw another book by the same author, Holy Machine, I acquired it and happily realised it was set in the same world than one of the stories I really-really enjoyed in the Turing Test, likely set a bit later in the world's history. It was a delightful read and I finished it in a couple of days. Recommended too! I'll definitely keep looking out for the author's other books. :)

Thanks for hooking me again on reading fiction, Barry!

As part of my quest of becoming better at public speaking, I recently finished reading Presentation Zen. The first striking thing about the book is how beautifully designed it is all along (probably another one that wouldn't work well on an e-reader), which of course highlights the principles the book aims to impart.

The structure flows well, and every chapter contains lots of tips and clear steps to look at when preparing a presentation. Often a chapter will offer some background on why something work, or why you should try to get away from the traditional (and boring) way of doing presentations. Also why it might be difficult to do so, depending on the culture you live in.

The book is nowhere only about slides, but in the chapters about designing and preparing them I really enjoyed that there were so many examples, including "before" (traditional) and "after" (following the presentation zen principles). Mostly what the book really describes is a general attitude one should develop with regard to presenting, preparing for a presentation and respecting your audience.

It's an absolutely fantastic read if you want to get better at presenting and generally get away from being boring and hampered by bullet points, but you don't know where to start.

I'm trying these new principles now for my Sugar talk. I think it definitely improved my preparation, by helping me think more about flow and using slides to support what I say rather than as a crutch. When it comes to being able to deliver the talk though, it'll be another story. We'll see!