Josh Shear

As I noted earlier, I've been reading a lot this month. Here's a peek at some of the books I've been going at (Amazon affiliate links).

Slights by Kaaron Warren. A fun horror tale about Stephanie (Steve), who wants to know what dying people see. And it's not a tunnel with a white light at the end – it has something to do with people the dying person has slighted throughout his or her life. A little slow getting into it, but enjoyable. 3/5 stars.

Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard. If you've never read Leonard, start. Everything he writes is a good old-fashioned mystery with cool characters, a double-cross or two, and a probably-predictable-but-getting-there-was-fun-anyway ending. 4.5/5 stars.

The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. Ferriss (known for the best-selling 4-Hour Workweek) is a self-experimenter you might call, oh, "crazy." He headed up a sports medicine company for a while, and got to know both athletes and scientists. He took to learning their secrets for himself, and figured out (sometimes odd, often supplemented) ways to drop body fat quickly, gain muscle quickly, and, well, other stuff. I'm in the midst of a weight loss competition, and decided to give some of it a go. [Officially I'm down 11.4 pounds in 2 weeks; third weigh-in hasn't happened yet, but I'll be down again.]

The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson. Sisson writes Mark's Daily Apple. He's a former Olympic-level athlete who totally over-trained and burned himself out, and he changed his lifestyle to include only foods that grow and breathe, and he changed his workouts and food schedule to try to mimic a hunter-gatherer lifestyle (which works well if you're retired and living in California; less so if you have a 9-5 desk job and live in a place where it's sunny and warm a third of the year).

Enterprise Social Technology by Eric Klososky. I received a review copy of this in the last few days. It claims to be crowdsourced from start to finish (everything from the writing to the publishing to the cover design to the marketing); I'm a little skeptical after having skimmed the afterword, but we'll see. The idea of the book is a model for businesses to use social communication to crowdsource their marketing and even product development.

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. This was a fun 1960s-era dystopic look at the 1990s. The U.S. has exhausted its resources and New York City is way over-crowded. Water is rationed to all but the very wealthy, food is scarce, shelter is tough to come by, and work is even tougher. With the benefit of hindsight, Harrison wasn't too far off on the numbers, but of course his future was exaggerated – though, also with the benefit of hindsight, we could be closer to that future than Harrison would have guessed.

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I'm re-reading this. It first came to me from a Twitter friend, and I fell in love with both the language (even in translation) and the story. It's a mystery about literature set in Spain, and I can't recommend it enough.

What are you reading?