Liar’s Poker deals with the author’s experience at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980s.  It’s interesting to see the many parallels between those crises and the ones that have happened recently.  While the text does get a bit dry at points, it focuses largely on the personalities and the feeling of the business.  To sum it up in a few words, there was gross mis-management and a poor set of incentives which generally hurt everyone associated.

Lewis doesn’t describe all the financial systems with quite enough detail, though the broad strokes are there.  It’s worth a read, though if you’re going to read one book on these topics then I’d suggest another one in its place.

On the whole, it’s a brilliant move.  One book a month isn’t all that much, which is good for content providers, and good for consumers.  There’s no expiration date, too, so if you want to hang onto a book for a while you won’t be too poorly off.

Browsing for books which satisfy this agreement is currently a bit tricky.  There’s no search capability from the website, from what I can currently find, but going into the Kindle Store on your device, there’s a section in Browse -> See all.. -> Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.  I already found a few that I’d like to read, and hopefully they’ll add some more to the collection in the near future.

In all, the Merlin cycle already has a different feel from the first five books, though I do like it.  Where the Corwin cycle was more a fantasy that dabbled in Earth in a somewhat 60s style and then some Middle Ages lore.  Merlin is a younger character in a newer Earth, with references to computers and even the Apple corporation, while still retaining the previously established other worlds.

If you are going to dive in, I would recommend starting at the first book, the Nine Princes of Amber.  It’s all rather easy reading, and the Amber world is developed very slowly over the course of all the books.

It’s an amazing device, though for whatever reason the v3.2 of the firmware did not allow me to connect to my Apple Airport Extreme.  I have it set up as a private SSID, w/ a WPA2 password, and no matter what I tried the Kindle just was not happy.  Thankfully, v3.3 solved this bug, and I’m able to connect without issue.  My Kindle is offline 99% of the time anyway, though it is certainly speedier and more convenient this way.

v3.3 also adds Whispersync and archiving for personal documents.  I don’t know that I’ll use this that much, either, but the fact that it’s there is very convenient.  It also points towards an increase in Amazon’s storage for each account, which is a positive trend.

Still, Rework contains a bunch of good ideas and keen insight to the current world of software development.  The basic premise is to be lean, flexible, and unencumbered by old-world business practice and etiquette.  Where everything is moving so quickly, it’s hard not to do all of these things and still succeed.  Check it out at your local library; it’s cheaper that way, which will help with your budgeting.

One overriding impression from the book is that Islam and Christianity are really not all that far apart.  Some of the culture may differ, but in the end a lot of what Jesus and other religious leaders converge into similar messages: consideration for your fellow humans, peace, and a connection to a single supreme being, named either by Allah or by God.  I wish more people could have access to some of these articles, because it would do well towards pushing out both ignorance and hate.

At close to 400 pages, it’s not a super quick read, though I got through it in a few days since I had a hard time putting it down.  Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have their own pieces.  Abdulalim Abdullah Shabazz has an essay titled, “Math = Jihad” which I really enjoyed, describing the importance of math in every day life.  Indeed, the word “jihad” does not have anything to do with terror or evil; but instead best translates as “struggle”, a concept to which we all can relate, both in mathematics and in life.

Most of the pages to the book are in sort of a funny format: it’s a story of a hypothetical company with set characters, and catalogs their interactions and progress.  It seems a bit hokey at the outset, though the format works and it allows for the theory to seep in rather than getting hit by a brick of heavy structure.  At the end of the book, there’s then a more concise analysis of the underlying theories.

Read it, hand it to your boss and to your coworkers.  It’ll save everyone a lot of grief and make the world a happier place.  Seriously.

The checkout process is surprisingly easy.  Click a button and you’re sent to Amazon, where you can click another button to send the book to your Kindle.  You can also download the book to transfer via USB, but otherwise it’ll come through via WiFi.

Amazon will back up all your notes and highlights for a book, so if you check the book out again they’ll come back as if the book never left your device.  Perhaps more interesting is that there’s a very quick “buy” link for all the books that you borrowed, which is sure to drive sales.

Five chapters follow five different struggles: Diego Garcia, the Israel/Palestinian conflict, India, Apartheid, and Afghanistan. It’s important that we all know more about each of these areas, and Pilger dives deeply into the situations and the people involved.

There are a number of segments from interviews interwoven into the text, and in each case it makes me proud that he asked the questions that he did.  There’s also a lot of gruesome detail about a number of nightmarish situations, all the more terrifying with the understanding that they all happened to fellow human beings.

Pilger is in a constant fight for people’s rights, and for making public the stories of those who have suffered at the hands of others. He’s fearless, and his work is gut-wrenching and illuminating.  We all need to look to his writing, and to creating better lives for all the people of this world.

I can understand why people like Blood Meridian. There’s a certain amount of beauty in the way that the author seems to constantly be looking off into the horizon, beautiful dusty and dirty landscapes ahead of the main characters.  There’s a lot of earth and mud and structure to an otherwise bland stretch of Texas landscape.  With that said, it’s also a truly brutal tale with an unbelievable amount of violence, brought forth with the same effort as its descriptions of nature.

In certain ways the relationship between this book and Gibson’s writing is apparent: there’s a distance and a certain amount of space around each character, each environment, and each paragraph.  With McCarthy, the easiest way to picture it, in my mind, is the static, killer expression on Javier Bardem‘s face in No Country for Old Men.

If you can deal with blood and murder and long sentences with strange, arcane words, it’s a hell of a trip.

Sigil won’t work on DRM-protected EPUB files, which is the only drag.  It’s not a problem with Sigil, but rather the Adobe DRM mechanism which infects just about any book that you buy from Kobo or similar EPUB stores.  Sans that, download the app and give it a whirl!