There something about a hammock outside a quiet house on an abandoned stretch of Tulum beach, Kindle and glass of Jura Poulsard in hand that drives me to read.
Much more so than in my normal frenetic pace of life where streaming a movie late at night is a more natural way to end the day.
I wrote this en route back to New York from vacation. Four of the six or so books that I read are worthwhile noting.
Heads up–none are light reading.
The Circle by Dave Eggers
I didn’t enjoy reading this book as well written as it was.
It grated, it bothered me, yet it was an essential exercise.
Eggers has challenged in fiction most of the core tenets of my online life—transparency, focused disclosure, crowd-sourced value, social proof and the power of communities online to impact how we live offline for the better.
The fictionalization of these traits was unnerving, uncomfortable and a bit of a lingering nightmare. Like painful squeaking of chalk on my mental blackboard.
Five days later, I’m still bothered.
This is exactly what I needed.
I thank Fred Wilson for challenging me to read this and my good friend David Semeria, for pushing me to download and try it.
Being confronted by a caricature of my beliefs is as cleansing, unsettling and useful as it gets.
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the Aids Epidemic by Randy Shilts
How could I have lived through this Holocaust and not realized it?
How could areas in cities that I lived in–the West Village in NY and the Castro in SF been decimated and I had only a cursory awareness of this happening?
How could I not know the economic and political stalls of the Regan and Koch administration? The painful suffering of people who basically were told to go home and die. The massive head-in-the-sand perspective of the country, the government, the press, and a straight society ignoring this underclass.
I’m 20 years late (exactly) to this story in it’s excruciating chronology and detail.
A freaking amazing book–in depth, painful, eye opening journalistic recalling of the AIDs epidemic, from the 24 hour bicentennial celebration in New York that started it, the travels and exploits of Patient Zero, the ‘NO’ of the world to acknowledge and help till the horror of the virus literally bled out of the gay community to the broader population.
Not for the faint of heart or the closed minded. It’s thriller, a page turner only not fiction and not on most summer reading lists.
I internalized this story and think not how much better but how different this would have been if we had had the web, a culture of information exchange and transparency, and integration of the gay population as we do today.
I’m still reading this (very long book). It pounds home that then, and now, what we don’t see is the largest part of reality we live every day. .
Lianna Sugarman couldn’t have been more right that this would grab and shake me hard.
The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
I like reading business books by people who have been in the trenches, been in charge and won. There’s a combo of smarts, skill and made luck that is worth learning from people who have done it from the ground up and truly changed the world.
Ben is certainly one of those.
It was my pleasure to pay $14 to live through the sweat and anxiety of the really hard decisions that building a company is all about. Dollars running out, clients cancelling, firing your friends, sleepless quarters and unfathomable difficult decisions that we all make by locking ourselves in a room with trusted advisors, grabbing the data at hand and taking a shot.
Fred Wilson mentioned this book in a post. Aaron Klein’s comments encouraged me download it and give it a morning on the beach.
I know personally that the glamorization of building a business is just bullshit.
It was refreshing to hear it from someone else who loves his business successes but doesn’t mythologize them
Uncommon Stock Version 1.0 by Eliot Peper
Eliot is a first time author, young , easy with words and a light touch with dialog.
He creates a fictionalization of startup lore and life. Almost a novelization of all the truisims about startup life as documented in a host of blogs.
A smart theme that holds together because he is honestly inspired his main character Mara and Boulder as a place. It lacks a bit of real life sweat and anxiety that is core to start up life, but notable nonetheless.
Eliot has lots of talent. If he finds a way to imbue the passion that he puts into off road biking and road running, rock climbing and exercise into the realities of startup business, his stories will be long-term keepers.
Big congrats to Brad Feld and his new venture FG Press which published this.
Enjoy these books should you care to try them.
Light reading these are not. Important uses of time? Absolutely!
