wildpokerman

So it’s time to take a breather from fiction and spend a few moments writing about business books. I end up reading a few of these, mostly because I feel guilty if I spend slack time at work reading fiction. Plus once I get into a good business book I secretly get excited about what I’m learning and blaze through it like it was a Raymond Carver story. Well without the cool pauses and reflections.

An unfortunate problem with mass market business books is that they try to show applications that apply to every business. Unless you have a creative mind that can think around corners a lot of the advice seems plain impractical.

This book suffers from a lot of that. It does have some good chapters on how to turn satisfied customers into your best marketers. Unfortunately a lot of the ideas aren’t applicable to every business. For example one chapter focused on hosting events like dinners, ski trips, parties and so forth with your clients. This is all hard to pull off if you work for someone else or are on a shoestring budget.

Overall I’d say it was an easy read and probably worth a spin if you’re looking to increase your referral business, just don’t expect to get full value if you don’t run your own, already profitable business.

Sometimes you need to take a trip back to your childhood. When I was a young lad, I was completely obsessed with the adventures of The Great Brain.

For those of you who are not familiar with the aforementioned illuminato, the Great Brain is a fictionalized version of the brother of the author of the series of the same name, John Fitzgerald. John grew up in central Utah in a family where his mother was a Mormon and his father was Catholic. He also wrote a book called Papa Married a Mormon

In all, seven books of the Great Brain series were published and they were illustrated by Mercer Mayer. Unfortunately, most of them are out of print and are also pretty pricey on Ebay and Amazon. Luckily the first three of the series are still in print so I ordered them for my sons. Because my sons seem to hate anything that I introduce to them, I assume they are suspicious that anything I like has a mathematical theory somewhere in it, I ended up reading the book myself.

The Great Brain, Tom, spends his days and nights dreaming of ways to scheme the local children his age out of their allowances. He spends as much time swindling his brother John as he does on the rest of the city. Once in a while, such as the time when Tom saves some of his peers who are lost in a cave, his great brain has ideas that are socially beneficial as well.

When I was younger I loved the books for the stories, I too dreamed of becoming a small time con man and making money the easy way. Now I value the books for the good background of small town Utah society. It brings me back to a time when you know who the “non-members” (of the Mormon Church) were on your street. If you even had any, you actually knew who they were in your local “ward”area so anyone who wasn’t a member within a five block radius was pretty well identified. John’s mixed religion family is interesting and even if it’s an idealized portrayal of childhood, it’s nice to see that his parents seemed to get along.

For me this series was a nice literary trip back to childhood. What book from childhood would you like to re-read? Put in a comment below and tell me about it!

This was a little number from the used book store business section. It’s a diminutive book that is short in length but it has a lot of great advice for career searchers.

The book talks about how the technique of sending a resume along when you hear about an opening, just won’t work anymore to get you the job that you are looking for. The book was published back in 2001 when times were a little tough, but unemployment wasn’t nearly as pervasive as it is now.

The advice seems solid. You should learn about the company, preferably by talking to people who work there. You need to find out what specific issues the company is having and your plan to address them. You should learn who the decision makers are and market the hell out of yourself. In spite of the title the book even discusses how to write a resume that will pack a wallop when they read it.

I haven’t had the chance to apply for a new job since I read this but the advice all sounds good. Next time I’m looking for a change I’ll let you all know how it works.

This book was recommended by one of the managers at work. It’s subtitled as “The ONLY social networking book You’ll ever need.” I completely agree. Personally I had no real idea what a social network was. I guess you could say I had friends, coworkers, acquaintances and so forth but never thought of them as a network.

The main thing the book adds to your normal social network is it talks about keeping it organized, tells you how to keep in contact with people and tells you how to maintain a network. The first has pretty handily been taken care of by technology. The second is almost taken care of by technology, but if someone is really important to you the conversation should involve more than a Facebook happy birthday. The third, well the third is basically just the golden rule of giving what you would like to get.

Who do people want to network with? People that can point them towards good jobs, good people that can solve their problems and good advice. It’s about looking out for the people that you care about and helping them when it counts. Basic but powerful stuff and the more organized you are about your network the better you’ll be able to help people when they need it.

I rate this as the best business book I’ve read so far this year. I don’t regret it at all and have been recommending it to anyone who has been looking at a career change or on how to get out there and meet some new people in the office. Also if you are in my network, hit me up, I have a copy sitting around to share.

Ever since I read E=MC² I have wanted to read some Voltaire. Last summer I bought Candide. It was my first even Kindle book, I didn’t even own a Kindle back then, I just used the Kindle program for my Droid. I started reading Candide immediately and fell in love with it. unfortunately a four inch back lit screen is not an ideal reading format so I gave up after a couple of hours. Soon after I purchased a Nook, and then a few months later a Kindle but by that time finishing Candide fell by the wayside for a bit. In a download frenzy of Amazon classics I picked up Zadig and started reading it.

What I love about Voltaire is that his stories sound like Bible stories in viewpoint, vocabulary and because they are told in parable form. However unlike The Bible, no divine creator sets things right. Whether things go right or wrong, fate is in the driver’s seat and we mortals are just along for the ride. The books feel like Sunday school lessons delivered by Heller or Vonnegut. I almost expected every chapter to end with “I had to laugh like Hell”.

The story of Zadig reminds me of Joseph from the bible. The book begins with Zadig about to enter wedded bliss with his fiance Simere but this is not to be. His rival Orcan eventually wins the heart of Simere and Zadig finds another bride. Now that he is distrustful of women, Zadig designs an elaborate scheme to fake his death and test the loyalty of his wife, Azora. She fails to pass the test which also involves an elaborate scheme where he fakes his own death and pretends to leave his modest fortune to his best friend.

Zadig begins to wander between kingdoms, like the Old Testament, it is set in the middle east in early days where each city and the surrounding farms or pastures are a different kingdom. He is promptly captured but like quickly rises to become an adviser to the king. After a set of adventures involving queens, fools, imaginary creatures and hermits he rides the ups and downs that fate deals him and eventually becomes a king. The ending is happy but you absolutely know that Zadig could have just as easily ended up a blind prophet in India.

The book wasn’t too long. I finished in in a couple of afternoons. I really liked the translation of the free version on Amazon.com. I assume this was a scanned version of an out of copyright translation because a couple of the letters were consistently switched. This didn’t ruin the book but was a little distracting. If you want a perfect copy you will probably have to go to the library or pony up a small amount of change. I would recommend giving up an afternoon or two to read this. Not only will you realize that people who have been dead for 350 years can make you laugh, but what’s more impressive than saying you’ve read some Voltaire at your next cocktail party?

I love reading books that get mixed reviews. If you check out the Amazon page for The Desert rose you will see critics and readers are all over the map on this one. Larry McMurtry is almost as well known for his romances as his westerns. Somehow he has the talent to pull off Terms of Endearment and Streets of Laredo. He does this by mastering the art of developing characters and making them living things who react realistically in their little worlds.

The Desert Rose is a story about a Las Vegas showgirl who is approaching 40. She used to be the most beautiful woman in Las Vegas but she has been surpassed in pulchritude by her daughter. Harmony doesn’t have a lot of profound thoughts, that’s also a McMurtry literary device. His characters generally lack the ability to engage in soul searching. You don’t see them go through a lot of internal struggle, it’s always the world they live in that they are struggling against.

The book is pretty much a pure character study of Harmony and secondarily her daughter Pepper. They both move around the same circles but rarely interact. Harmony is about to end her career as a showgirl while Pepper is about to start hers. In spite of how similar their lives will be, they are terribly lacking in shared moments. We even are denied the scene where both of them would be on stage together because the show producer, wisely, tells Harmony that to put them both on stage together would just highlight how much Harmony’s looks would be overshadowed by her daughter’s beauty.

So many of the reviews tend to excoriate Pepper for how she treats Harmony. Personally I didn’t get that out of the book. I can’t see how having a showgirl mother who has had terrible relationships with men who are drunks and criminals can put Harmony in a place where she deserves traditional motherly respect. Honestly I think there were only two scenes where the two of them were in the same room and most of that time was marked by what they didn’t say.

The book is pretty short, at 256 pages. It’s an easy read too so it’s only an afternoon or two to make it through. I wouldn’t say that I recommend it particularly but if you’re a fan of McMurtry or have a spare couple of bucks at the used bookstore I’d say it’s better than watching reruns of American Idol.

I love a good piece of literary fiction. You could almost say that’s what I live for, the rest is all just reading I do to make sense of the fictional constructs of great imaginations.

Blue Angel was a great read. It is the story of a professor at a small college who has writer’s block. He has been working on his next novel for a long long time. He passes his day by teaching short story classes. He is happily married and overall happy with his job until he meets Angela Argo. Meeting Angela exposes how thin his surface happiness is.

He ends up having an affair with Angela, she seduces him in her dorm room. He takes her manuscript to his agent and when he gets back all hell breaks loose. Angela presses a sexual harassment case against him. She claims that he used his position as a professor and his ability to present her book to his agent as leverage to make her have sex with him.

The one thing I disliked about this book was that the ending left a lot of questions unanswered. The books ends in a sexual harassment hearing where everyone testifies against our protagonist. After the scene though I was almost left with the impression that maybe we have only heard one side of the story, maybe the professor did use poor Angela. When I read other reviews of the book it’s either well loved or firmly hated. I think that what would have made it a bit more perfect would have been a better explanation of the motives of the other characters.

So even though this novel is deeply flawed and ultimately raises several unsatisfying questions, I couldn’t put it down until I finished it. That is ultimately how I tell whether or not a story is a success.

Do you ever eat your broccoli first? I usually do. Sometimes I’ll have a frozen bag of broccoli or cauliflower for a whole meal. That’s what reading the MLA handbook is like. I did something that was almost completely unpleasant because it was good for me. I had to learn how to write again in an academic setting and this book was exactly what I needed.

I learned a lot about grammar, voice, and punctuation. If you look at my older posts you’ll see that I used to put two spaces between the period and the next letter, an old habit left over from learning how to type on actual typewriters. Now that modern fonts are made with periods smashed up against the last word of the sentence, a writer doesn’t need to add the extra space.

I also learned a lot about citations. I knew the basics, and another great thing about the modern world is that word processing software will let you add your citations as you go along and print your bibliography or works cited list at the end of your article with the click of a menu bar. What I really learned was that you can cite anything, pictures and paintings, musical scores, interviews, pamphlets, comic books and an endless list of other forms of art that are not necessary written academic texts. It really opened my eyes to the number of things that a person can consider to be educational or worthy of referring to in a serious piece of writing.

So I would never recommend this book to anyone as a light summer read or as something to carry around with you as a break between appointments, but I would highly recommend it as an eye opener for academic writers.

In order to shorten the time that I have to spend going to classes, I am going to attempt to pass some CLEP tests. In order to get my degree in economics I have to take other social science credits, I guess I should be passingly familiar with psychology if I’m looking at behavior and probably should be somewhat familiar with sociology if I’m discussing gender pay gaps. For two dollars at the thrift story I got a copy of Society:The Basics and read it in lieu of taking a sociology course.

I do love sociology, I can see why students end up thousands of dollars in debt with a degree they can’t use to pursue an in depth knowledge of the subject. I thought that each of the chapters was fascinating. I liked learning about how we define gender roles, family structures and was completely engaged by the discussions of social conflict theory. It was good to take a look at all of the structure in my life that I take for granted and realize how much of it is just there by general agreement between me and the people around me. We know that is the case because other societies manage things differently.

As I was reading through the book, trips to the mall took on whole new levels of meaning. What does it mean when you see someone with a polo shirt, or a boyfriend that is shorter than her? Why are teenagers usually in large groups but adults rarely so? Why is that person dressed all in black? The style of clothes that go along with the black can create totally opposite meanings. At the beach I saw a huge pile of cigarette butts in front of a bench. 30 years ago when smoking was just a characteristic and not a sign of deviance, would smokers have littered as much?

That’s exactly what I love about education. I love it not for the questions it answers, but for the questions it makes you ask.