Books You Can’t Live Without.
I love my Kindle 2. Other than my iPhone 3G I don’t know if there is a piece of technology that I like better. (OK, my MacBook Pro is way up there, but I digress).
For a road warrior, it is fantastic. It holds a gazillion books, you can subscribe to mags, newspapers, blogs and other media that just magically show up. It has lots of battery capacity and it downloads books in a blink. It’s small and light, which are musts for travelers. I don’t know exactly why, but the material presented in this digital format reads faster. Sounds weird, but it really does. I read a book on speed-reading earlier in life and I think it has something to do with peripheral vision, mechanics of page turning and quantum physics. Anyway, it just reads faster.
I’m working my way through Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” currently. Sorry to say that it is not one of his better books when compared with “Blink” and “Tipping Point” but it’s interesting.
My question for everyone is what books would you keep with you at all times if you could carry hundreds of books with no extra weight? Short list for me….
- The Bible – NIV Student Edition (Worldwide bestseller, lots of wisdom, source of my faith and candidly, I fly a lot…)
- Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company (Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Shameless plug.)
- Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
- The Art of War – Sun-Tzu (Strategy cannot be overrated)
- The Trusted Advisor – David H. Maister (Brilliant professional services insights)
- The Effective Executive – Peter F. Drucker (Best executive management book out there)
What would you include?
Fighting my Luddite tendencies on the Kindle….but might have to try it.
I really enjoyed Outliers, though..have to disagree with you there. I think we (as a nation) as so focused on being politically correct that we pretend real differences in culture, biology, etc *don’t* make a difference….but they can and they do.
I can’t recall the novel (I think it’s a Ursula Le Guin) but there’s a novel where, in order to have a truly equitable society, they put extra weights on ballerinas….to handicap them..mathcing everyone’s weight to the heaviest person who WANTS to be a ballerina….
It’s an extreme metaphor, sure….but we get tied in knots sometimes pretending that everyone can do anything he *wants* to do…Gladwell’s book argues, very well I thought, that there are real limitations and/or predilections to consider/leverage.
My 2 cents.
1Book’s are like people. Or is it more so that people are like books? In either case, the difference is that people change and a book cannot. Concepts in the human mind are fluid, but to stay with a handful of books throughout a lifetime is as confining a situation as driving just one car or eating just one food. Of course all these things are material, and our materialistic society demands we try everything and crave the availability of every option. So setting that aside, the question “what five books” is a great one. For me one would be “The Wizard of Ads” by Roy H. Williams. And if I was 15, maybe “Twilight”.
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