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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Practical Application of "How To Read A Book"
In response to a reader comment I've expanded on my use of "How To Read A Book" and where it fits in the arsenal of the well-armed information warrior. [More...]
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 2:44 PM
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Categories: Books, Learning, Productivity
Terry Frazier at 2:44 PM
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Tuesday, October 4, 2005
What's On Your Bookshelf?
|Matt| asks What's on your bookshelf? What do you keep close at hand? This is a picture of what's sitting on my desk at the moment. Some of these change pretty often - like the books on web design and such - depending on what I'm working on. Others stay around all the time as reference books - mostly on research, grammar, and writing. Lots of these are old, too. The Kilpatrick and Zinsser books I've had forever. I still love 'em.
From left to right:
- Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
- Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
- The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing for Small Business by Tom Antion
- Publish & Flourish by Garry Schaeffer and Tony Alessandra
- Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property in the Information Age by Adam Thierer
- The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail J. Sellen, Richard H. R. Harper
- Internet Publishing and Beyond: The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property by Brian Kahin (Editor), Hal R. Varian (Editor)
- Management Research: An Introduction by Mark Easterby-Smith, Richard Thorpe, Andy Lowe
- The Craft Of Research by Booth, Colomb, and Williams
- Essence of Marketing Research by Peter Chisnall
- How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren
- The Writer's Art by James J. Kilpatrick
- The Ear Is Human by James J. Kilpatrick
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser
- Fowler's Modern English Usage
- English Composition and Grammar (an old high school text book)
- The Chicago Manual of Style
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
The Midnight Disease
This past weekend I was in New York City for Book Expo America, a large tradeshow for book publishers and booksellers. It was my first time to attend and quite interesting to see all those books. But none of them were for sale and, as a bookaholic, that was painful. So on Saturday I took time out for a little wandering around Manhattan. I went to Grand Central Station to look around a bit and meet John Mohan of Rosebud PLM, Inc. for lunch at Pershing Square. While wandering the terminal before lunch I stopped in Posman Books. I was standing at a table piled high with paperbacks when suddenly a stack of books tumbled off the table (I didn't touch them! Honest!) and scattered across the floor.
The title was "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain" by Alice W. Flaherty. This immediately caught my attention. Flaherty is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and teaches at Harvard. She also suffers from manic-depressive disorder and hypergraphia. Hypergraphia is the compulsive need to write, which Flaherty puts to good use. Midnight Disease is a compelling book. Though dense (it's not a book I can skim) there is rarely a wasted word. In a style similar to Oliver Sachs (author of "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", among others), Flaherty weaves a tale of science, history, and analysis that is rich with anecdotes
and medical histories of writers past and present.
I've only managed to get through the first 100 pages so far, but Flaherty's scientific exploration of creativity is fascinating. It's a refreshing change from the plethora of new-age, right-brain creativity books on the market and balances historical perspective with recent case studies to build a unique view into the human mind. Anyone who's interested in writing or its practitioners, professional or otherwise, or anyone who's ever struggled to write should find this book worthwhile. In fact, I think anyone interested in the origins of creativity will enjoy it.
BTW, Rosebud PLM makes a cool collaborative editing plug-in/service for Adobe Acrobat that lets multiple users do real-time, shared editing of a PDF document without having to use e-mail or a WebDAV server. If you have to do document reviews or editing of any sort you should check it out. And Pershing Square has the best bacon I've ever eaten. Because I hadn't had breakfast on Saturday I had a 3-egg omelet with a side of bacon for lunch. It was so good I went back on Sunday for breakfast. The bacon was nitrate free. I didn't know such a thing existed. Worse, I didn't know that nitrates were the cause of the dry, salty aftertaste that hangs around for hours after eating bacon. I don't often eat bacon but, in the words of Will Smith, "I gotta get me some of that!" If you're a carnivore you should try it.
Good food, good books, good show. I love New York.
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
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