Friday Night Lights, by H. G. Bissinger

Considering I love both football and reading, it is surprising I hadn’t gotten around to Friday Night Lights. I’ve never watched the TV show, but I liked the movie, so when I saw the book in the bargain bin I picked it up. Friday Night Lights follows the Odessa Permian high school football team through their 1988 season. Interspersed with the history of a racist-leaning Odessa we meet the coach and all the major players of the team. Boobie Miles is a highly recruited fullback that is star of the team until he blows out his knee; after that he is ostracized by the universities and vanishes into a depression. Brian Chavez is the Harvard-bound valedictorian; Don Billingsley is a troublemaker trying to live up to his father’s legend. Ivory Christian is a linebacker that doesn’t much care for football, and yet is the only player to receive a Division I football scholarship. Gary Gaines is the coach and by far the most interesting persona detailed: the pressure to win in this football-obsessed town is amazingly intense, and Bissinger does an excellent job at portraying the strain Gaines was constantly experiencing.

As interesting as the individual and team stories are, the emotion of small-town Texas is what makes the book stand out. “As the black wave of the Permian players moved out into the middle of the field, eight thousand other souls who had filled the home side rose to give a standing ovation. This moment, and not January first, was New Year’s day.” This passage more than any other captures the essence of how football is loved by Texans, including me. Great book; I’m sorry I waited so long to read it.

First Sentence:

In the beginning, on a dog-day Monday in the middle of August when the West Texas heat congealed in the sky, there were only the stirrings of dreams.

Crystal Clear, by Alistair Cockburn

Crystal Clear is another one of the many agile management styles out there today. It is geared specifically for small collocated teams not working on life-critical systems. The wildly different chapter formats I found odd, but Cockburn explains it well: “It is not my ambition that every reader should like every chapter and format. Rather, my hope is that through the use of different perspectives, each reader, coming from his particular background, can find some chapter format that conveys what is needed in order to understand Crystal Clear’s main ideas.” A lot of the methodology doesn’t apply to my current situation (Crystal Clear demands collocation but my team is scattered all over North America) but I still found some interesting ideas here. One I particularly liked was that Crystal allows for teams to choose less-than-optional ways of working; as long as the team is delivering software successfully all is well. This is much more forgiving than many methodologies which seem to require striving for perfection. Another concept I like is the approach to risk: “A safe methodology is one that increases the likelihood of the project succeeding.” Most risk discussions revolve around what can go wrong; this spin of increasing success factors rather than reducing avenues of failure I find to be much more positive. Because of the focus on small teams this isn’t directly applicable to all groups, but everyone should be able to glean something useful from this book.

First Sentence:

I distilled Crystal Clear by asking successful small teams what they would keep or change in the ways they worked.

The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks

Written with a deadly serious tone, this parody of a survival guide tells us both the history of zombies and how to protect ourselves against them. Zombie myths, attack and defense strategies, and how to make a life in a world overrun by the undead are all covered in humorous detail: “Unfortunately for our society but fortunately for a zombie siege, inner-city schools have taken on a fortress-like atmosphere.” Good stuff. The first two-thirds are a bit plodding at times, but it closes with a bang, giving a list of recorded zombie attacks through history; from 60,000 B.C. to current times, over 50 different incidents are detailed. A couple of my favorites show Hadrian’s Wall was created to prevent the spread of zombies from Scotland and Sir Walter Raleigh’s missing Roanoke Colony was actually eradicated by the living dead. Clearly this is a 250+ page advertisement for Brooks’ novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War but I still found it enjoyable.

First Sentence:

What is a zombie?

The Somnambulist, by Jonathan Barnes

The Somnambulist of the title is a giant, milk-chugging mute who is the partner of Edward Moon, a self-described conjurer. Together they embark on a murder investigation and encounter one strange person after another, including a genius asylum inmate and a man who experiences life backwards. The inventive plot matches the imaginative characters, and the setting of Victorian England only enhances the oddness. Entirely unpredictable, Barnes springs one surprise after another, culminating in the identity of the narrator. Rich with backstory, there are hints of many other stories to tell and I hope to meet these characters again in other books.

First Sentence:

Be warned.

Living the Rock ‘n Roll Dream, by Buzz Cason

I heard Buzz Cason play at the Palo Duro Records Unofficial SxSW Showcase last spring along with Tommy Alverson, Trent Summar, and Dallas Wayne—yeah, that was a great night! The four artists took turns playing songs and telling stories. During one of Buzz’s stints in the spotlight he played the oft-recorded “Everlasting Love” which as it turns out, he wrote (although I must admit, I had more fun hearing “Barbeque” off his latest album). The next day I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon in a group of musicians that included Cason and was thoroughly entertained by his stories. When I discovered he’d written a book about his career I jumped at the opportunity to read it, and found that he is as entertaining in prose as he is in person.

Cason’s music has been recorded by a huge variety of performers: Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Reed, Dolly Parton, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Derailers, Jan and Dean, Gloria Estefan, Pearl Jam, U2, and the Beatles to name just a few. He started writing and performing in the 1950’s, long before agents and promoters controlled the industry. Can you imagine Rascal Flatts cramming into a beat-up Ford and driving all night to make a show in the next town? This book is a unique first-hand look into a completely different world. Cason hung out with Elvis, signed Jimmy Buffett to his first contract, and founded the Creative Workshop. He tells stories about meeting Sinatra, Kris Kristofferson, Bo Diddley, and MLK. He has been a composer, a singer, a chipmunk, and now an author. He has a unique perspective on the history of American popular music and I enjoyed every page of this book.

First Sentence:

The first time I can recall anyone suggesting that I participate in singing any other kind of music other than church hymns was when my neighborhood friend, Lewis Dale told me about this thing they called “hillbilly music” that was so popular on radio WSM’s Grand Ole Opry.

The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, by Kinky Friedman

Kinky Friedman is a odd bird, but damn amusing. Part singer, part writer, and part smart-ass, he is thoroughly entertaining. He has a gift for insouciant and irreverent phrasing: doing something without thinking is done at the “sperm of the moment;” a drowning publishing magnate is given the last word, “Roseglub.” He consistently refers to telephones as “blowers,” defecating as “taking a Nixon,” and says “mucous garcias” instead of “thank you.” My favorite quote is, “She’d been married for ten years to Derrick Price and, as with most successful marriages these days, they lived in separate cities.” Friedman isn’t just a sarcastic wise guy, though; he throws in mentions of such diverse characters as MLK, Charles Dickens, Al Capone, and mass murderer John Wayne Gacy. The title is a parody on T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and a key clue is discovered while ruminating on the Sherlock Holmes story of the Red-Headed League. Toilet humor coupled with intellectual references makes for a very funny story.

First Sentence:

It was New Year’s Day.

Why Software Sucks... and What You Can Do About It, by David S. Platt

Great book—a solid discussion about why most software is hard to use, told with enough humor to be enjoyable as well as interesting. “Computers make people feel dumb. In a society where nothing is ever the fault of person doing it, where people sue a restaurant when they spill their own coffee, getting users to blame themselves for anything is a magnificent accomplishment.” It reminded me a lot of Cooper’s excellent The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, especially when Platt was discussing UI design: “You should never see a confirmation dialog anywhere, under any circumstances.”

I did find it a bit repetitive; I suspect that this was originally a series of articles stitched together into a book. One anecdote about how Vanguard’s website is attacked 100 times per second is told multiple times, and the time frames jump around a bit with IE6 sometimes in beta and sometimes released. The overall theme of “programmers make complex things possible instead of simple things simple” remains consistent though.

Platt does an amusing job of sneaking his politics into his various stories. The quote in the opening paragraph is one example, getting snarky about the McDonald’s coffee case. He goes on a privacy rant at one point, upset about how the Patriot Act allows the FBI to look at your library records without consent. (Why people think privacy should be attached to the public library—itself a government agency—is beyond me, though.) He also seems to hold a grudge against market forces; he hates self-checkout lanes at grocery stores while at the same time being puzzled that Peapod.com hasn’t swept the nation. While the usability of the latter is clearly better than the former, consumers are clearly making the former more popular. He is probably upset that VHS beat out Beta, too.

Those nitpicks aside, this was a very good book, both entertaining and enlightening. I’d recommend it to anyone involved in the creation of software.

First Sentence:

“That’ll never sell,” I sneered at the title in the bookstore.