Reading List

12 Mar 2017

Recently, I've been trying to read more long form literature. It's been an interesting experience to wane myself off of social media and that experience certainly deserves a post of its own soon. Until then, here are some of my thoughts on the books I finished reading this year:

The Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande

The title gives away the premise of the book - which is about the art of managing and creating efficient checklists. This may not exactly sound like a jaw-clenching thriller, but Atul Gawande manages to keep the pages turning with interesting anecdotes about maintaining checklists. A surgeon by profession, Gawande lists instances about how his carefully curated surgery checklist saved lives in the operating theater. As an aviation geek, I enjoyed the story of how creating a pre-flight checklist for the Boeing 299 (now known as the Boeing B-17) saved Boeing from the brink of bankruptcy in the fiercely competitive aviation market of the 1940s. There are narratives about the flip side too. For example, verbose checklists with too many steps for the user to follow, may do more harm than having no checklist at all.

For the most part, the book reads as a collection of anecdotes of varying quality. Pointers on creating a good checklist is scattered too thin throughout the book to be useful. That said, my opinion of this book is probably not the best one to go by as I finished the book over a period of months which broke the continuity of the book.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything - Levitt and Dubner

I've seen this book practically everywhere. I've heard praises sung about it at length from friends. I've even been listening to the Freakonomics radio podcast for quite a while. But, it was only last month I picked up this book. The cover makes bold claims such as "…Explores The Hidden Side of Everything" along with some terms of endearment from Malcolm Gladwell. Coming to the content, the book covers a range of bizarre topics such as 'What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?' and 'Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?'. Which is great, because the book makes convincing conclusions on these two topics. However, this cannot be said for some of the other chapters such as 'What Makes a Perfect Parent?' and how a child's name is detrimental to their future prospects. I feel the book doesn't spend enough time establishing how a certain cause leads to an effect in these chapters. The authors do include a pretty long list of citations for each fact at the end of the book (nearly as long as the content itself!), so their claims might be substantiated after all.

Russian Roulette - Anthony Horowitz

It took me forever to find this book. I used to be an avid fan of Alex Rider in school, but I lost track of the series in my dry spell of reading in 11th and 12th. Russian Roulette is something of a spin-off book, set somewhere in the middle of Stormbreaker in the Alex Rider timeline. The book is about all about Yassen, a key character in the Alex Rider series. Like most Anthony Horowitz books, it's not a particularly well-written book. Rather, it keeps one engaged with a fast (but somewhat predictable) plot. I liked some of the parts from Yassen's past in Russia, though the rest read like a rehash of Scorpia. Still, I finished this book much faster than I usually take to finish a book of its length.

Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott

In this book, Anne Lammot speaks about the joys and frustrations in the solitary world of a writer. From the outset, I loved this book. Lammot's writing style is hilarious and is loaded with dry wit and sarcasm. As with The Checklist Manifesto, the book follows on tangents with no central plot to speak of. On my first read of Bird by Bird, I couldn't help feeling that this book would read better as a blog than a novel. Though it of a much higher quality than a typical blog, the rant filled content would slide in perfectly for this format.

Lammot also peppers the book with some very quotable passages. I won't spoil it here, but it's a must read for anyone into the publishing industry or writing business.