The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden

This is a thoroughly entertaining book. It contains a wide variety of information from carpentry to crystals, science to soccer, grammar to girls, and magic to maps. There is little organization to the book, skipping from subject to subject without rhyme or reason. Of course, the lack of order is half the fun! As an example, the first five topics are Essential Gear, The Greatest Paper Airplane in the World, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, The Five Knots Every Boy Should Know, and Questions about the World. I found it hard to put down, even when reading the sections with which I was familiar!

Along with reams of interesting data (the descriptions of famous battles such as Thermopylae, the Alamo, and Hastings were fascinating) there is a fair amount of humor thrown in as well. Some of my favorite passages: “Astronomy is not astrology. Astrology is nonsense.” “As with most of the best games, [chess] is easy to play badly and hard to play well.” “Play a sport of some kind. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it replaces the corpse-like pallor of the computer programmer with a ruddy glow. Honestly, this is more important than you know.” Great stuff. If you have a boy, get him this book. If you ever were a boy, get it for yourself!

First Sentence:

In this age of video games and cell phones, there must still be a place for knots, tree houses, and stories of incredible courage.

Dreaming In Code, by Scott Rosenberg

This is the story of a typical software project: one that failed. Okay, failed is strong considering the Chandler project still exists, but with millions of dollars spent to build an email and calendaring tool that doesn’t appear to be as full-featured as Outlook or even Gmail it certainly doesn’t qualify as a success. Rosenberg doesn’t try and draw any conclusions, but simply presents a fascinating tale of how so many smart people can spend years working hard yet accomplishing little.

I’ve worked on many different software applications in my career, some successful and some not. There is a great quote from one of the Chandler developers Andy Hertzfeld (yes, that Andy Hertzfeld) about successful teams: “To make a great program, there’s got to be at least one person at the center who is breathing life into it. In a ferocious way.” Looking back at the groups with which I’ve been involved this statement really resonated. My favorite two employers (ObjectSpace and Evity) had this in spades. Less favorite places, didn’t. Does this mean the key to good software is passion? No, but a lack of it seems to be an indicator in at least my personal job happiness.

While I won’t say that this book gives a great insight into why projects fail, what it does do is show how many seemingly small decisions add up to a large miss. Chandler originally wanted to be a peer-to-peer application, but this turned out to be too hard so it was dropped. “No silos” was another credo, meaning that instead of having your email in one mode (silo), your calendar in another, and notes in a third, there would just be a single place for everything. Also very difficult, this morphed into something else that ended up not looking much like silos at all. These are just two examples of the many divergence points covered in this book showing how good ideas go bad. For anyone that doesn’t understand why software development is so difficult this is a must-read. For those that do “get” software, this is a familiar story but still worth reading. Highly recommended.

First Sentence:

Michael Toy places his palms on his cheeks, digs his chin into his wrists, squints into his PowerBook, and begins the litany.

Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

I’m not sure what to make of this story. It was absorbing to say the least, but I’m still not sure if I liked it or not. It was... different. The hero has an odd encounter with a girl from London Below, a parallel universe that exists in roughly the same space as ours but has only a tenuous connection. Beings in our world can interact with beings from the other, but it takes enough effort that such commingling is rare. London Below is a world where magic is real, rats are respected creatures, and names have a very literal meaning (black Friar monks live in Blackfriars and a mystical Earl holds court in Earl’s Court). This rich backdrop was both fascinating and compelling; I was continually excited to discover what was around the next corner. The plot was tenuous, though, with one-dimensional characters and predictable situations. With such a unique universe in which to play, I was disappointed that there wasn’t more of the denizens to do. An odd book from start to finish; if you are looking for something different then this is certainly it.

First Sentence:

She had been running for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels.

The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy

Set during the French Revolution, The Scarlet Pimpernel tells the tale of a band of Englishmen helping doomed French aristocrats escape the guillotine. The identity of the leader of the Englishmen is a mystery, known only by the pseudonym “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” The revolutionary leadership would give anything to capture the Pimpernel, and one agent thinks he finally has a lead...

I loved this novel! I remember watching the old Leslie Howard movie as a kid and being captivated. The book grabbed me in much the same way—once I started I couldn’t put it down! Clearly the forerunner to Zorro, James Bond, and Batman, this story has it all: disguises and secret identities, espionage and betrayals, romance and rescues, and heroic derring-do. With my love of comic books and adventure novels, I can’t believe I waited so long to read this. Orczy wrote at least ten sequels to her most famous novel; I’ll be looking for others soon!

First Sentence:

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and hate.