April 9, 2007
Last Dozen Books Read (II)
Remember that if I don’t like a book I don’t finish it, and if I don’t finish it it won’t be listed here. There are probably two to three dozen books started for every dozen finished.
Getting Things Done is non-fiction and I plan to post my notes from it sometime. It’s one of those books that has a few good ideas but has been padded and inflated (mainly with buzzwords and other crap) to ten times its ideal length.
- The Quick Red Fox, by John D. MacDonald
- Rumpole and the Age of Miracles, by John Mortimer
- The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, by Ross Thomas
- The Charm School, by Nelson DeMille
- The Shark-Infested Custard, by Charles Willeford
- Getting Things Done, by David Allen
- It’s a Slippery Slope, by Spalding Gray
- Playback, by Raymond Chandler
- He Who Hesitates, by Ed McBain
- Nightmare in Pink, by John D. MacDonald
- The Song Dog, by James McClure
- Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
Related: Last Dozen Books Read (I)
Cat: | Time: 8:39 pm (utc+8)
April 10th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Getting Things Done padded to ten times its ideal length? Now that’s irony.
April 10th, 2007 at 8:07 am
David: Yeah, isn’t it! With the right editor it would have made a great 25-page pamphlet, but you can’t sell those for $20 a pop, can you?
April 10th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Can we now expect a post about Orcutt’s first law and its applications in investing?
April 10th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Van: Who’s Orcutt? and what’s his first law?
April 10th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Is it not one of the key pieces of the plot in “The Fools in Town on Our Side”? I seem to remember it as something like, “Before things can get better, they must get much worse.”
April 11th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Van: Oh right, Victor Orcutt, and that was his creed (but I’m getting old and my memory needs a jog). I thought Fools was one of Thomas’s weaker books, though I did like the line, “Swankerton? That’s a horseshit town.” You could use that line for a lot of places.