“Excellent book on why couples might not feel loved in a marriage. It discusses five ‘love languages,’ or methods of expressing love. Knowing them is valuable, but the larger point is that Person A might not experience love the same way as Person B. Person A might like ‘Words of Affirmation’ and…”
“My daughter read this for school and asked me to read it too. It’s essentially the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ for tweens. I enjoyed it. It was well-written and had a nice theme of redemption and the need to be good to other people. Much like the movie, the protagonists can’t continue their lives until…”
“I shouldn’t have finished this. The author’s writing style bugged me. I did like how the book is organized – a chapter for each different aspect of conversation, each with a set of ‘Rules’ – but she kills the momentum with her writing. She’ll never use a simple word where a complex one will do, and…”
“I heard about this book in a news article, but I don’t remember which one. The title intrigued me, because I like anything that tries to distill humanity down to patterns or rules. Then, I was in a Daunt Books in London, and I saw it at the checkout register, so picked it up. I started reading it,…”
“So, weird situation with this book – I don’t remember a lot about it. I had sitting on my chair table for a month or so. Turns out I read it, I just don’t remember it. So I paged through it, and I now remember why I don’t remember it – and that’s an interesting point in itself. The book is so…”
“This is just a lovely little book. If anything, it taught me that all the little rhetorical flourishes you see in memorable writing have names. There are patterns. These things are not random. Experienced writers know what these things are, and they use them purposefully. There are lots of short…”
“An absolutely lovely novel, which is – at its core – about the relationships we make, and specifically friendships that develop over extended periods of time. Alexander Rostov is an aristocrat who is convicted of subversion in the years following the Russian Revolution. Since he resides in the…”
“This book is kind of the benchmark, I think, for books on negotiating. It was written by three Harvard professors who collectively chair some foundation or think tank about negotiating. And not just business negotiating – many of their examples come from the United Nations, and represent nations…”
“I enjoy David Brooks. I thought The Second Mountain was amazing. This book is exactly what the title suggests: how do you really understand someone? Not just pay lip service to them, but how do you really get at the deeper layers of someone. The book is a good mix of theory and practice. Brooks…”
“ Didn’t love it. Was confused for most of it. Lots of characters and some of the summation at the end didn’t make sense. Additionally, a lot of political moralizing. ”
“This is a re-read for me. I first read this back in 2013 when it came out. I was on vacation in Turks and Caicos. I remember reading this in a hammock at one point. This is not a focused book. I’m not going to call it a ‘meditation,’ because it has good information, it’s just not self-help or…”
“A ‘novel of manners,’ much ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ It’s a long story of the coming of age of an American girl in Europe. Large scope, and gets tedious in the middle – I felt like there were about 100 pages in there when the plot just wasn’t moving at all. There’s a Big Secret towards the end that…”
“I enjoyed the book, but maybe it should mention that it’s fundamentally about fiction. I was hoping for something about storytelling in a business context, but this is about novels and films and such. In fact, there’s a long appendix will explores the structure of a novel that the author took from…”
“This title of this book should have made the narrow focus a bit more clear – this is not a book about general employee collaboration, but it’s rather specifically about professional services firms. This is about getting lawyers and accountants and consultants to play nice with each other. Some good…”
“ Astonishingly good book with a title that doesn’t do it justice. This is one of the most profound books I’ve read on human communication and self-perception. I will re-read this again, likely multiple times. ”
“This is a novel about crappy people. Or, specifically, one really crappy guy named Heathcliff, who is adopted by an Northern English family, treated poorly, and proceeds, over the course of generations, to extract his revenge on them in all sorts of different ways. Nothing acute and immediate, mind…”