Robynettely

The dude who wrote this book came to my office for two one-day seminars to turn all of us R&D types into more efficient designers, and the person who hired him bought some copies of the book, which he left around for us to read. Being a bit of a keener and wanting to get ahead, I took one home. Wow. The presentation we took was eight hours of PowerPoint and anecdotes, and the book seemed like it was written pretty much from those same slides. The anecdotes weren't nearly as great when written down. It seemed like there were less of them, or maybe there was just more content in between them. I finished the book on a vacation day in one giant 90-page slog because I just wanted it over with, and wow, every section seemed like it was a fleshed-out slide heading, and then a list of bullet points underneath, kind of like this: Reducing Boring Reading There are four reasons to reduce boring reading, as described in the next paragraphs. First of all, you should not read boring books, b...

Notwithstanding the author having the same combined last names as one of my favourite kids' authors, he is also the current writer-in-residence at the TPL, so I thought I should get out one of his books and read it so if I went to one of his events I could at least look intelligent. It's like going to a job interview and having read at least the one-page corporate bio on a company's website. It took me about two weeks to actually get around to starting this book. I read the first two pages when I got it out, and then sort of abandoned it to the point where I read an entire book that I almost randomly picked up (the Book of Absinthe) before returning to this one. But yesterday I decided to bite the bullet and get started. And today I'm writing the review, so clearly it was a one-day read. At only 180 pages and with a light word words per page ratio, this was not a "stay up all nighter". The chapters were short, often four or six pages, though there were a few t...

Picked this up once before at the library and read the intro, but put it back because I had too many other things to read. So on Saturday I was sort of trapped at the library for an hour or so (the horror!) and sought it out. Cultural histories are the way history should be taught. I've read a few -- John Hawkwood's bio, the Basque History of the World... This one had amusing interludes about why more writers tend to be drinkers (maybe because it's a job you can't exactly escape from, though I've found things like running through dance steps sometimes keep me awake at night, so maybe any job can stick in your brain and not let you go), the interesting timing of Absinthe being banned in France (just after the start of World War I, the invading teutonic bock-drinkers were going to overrun the deranged Absinthe drinkers), a bit about the american goth subculture. But it did seem oddly organized at times. It didn't run linearly from the invention of absinthe to its ...