My Bookshelf

My name is Benjamin Hysell, and I’m proud to say I’m an artist.

I’m not sure I could have made that statement before reading Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin, but I am now proud to stand up and count myself as one of the many artist in the world.

Read my full review, http://benjaminhysell.com/archive/2010/01/linchpin/

I’ve tried to summarize this book for a couple of people, and have come up woefully short in every attempt.  A few of the key points that I did extract from Zen are:

• Where do ideas come from?
• What is Quality?  Is it subjective, objective, or something else?
• Does our system of education really teach people anything, or are people rewarded for actually not learning and regurgitating?

However, the one idea that I’ve run into a few different times, in a few different texts can best be summed up by a webcomic from xkcd:

I have thoroughly enjoyed every Vonnegut book I have picked up thus far, and Deadeye Dick did not disappoint.  I enjoy Vonnegut’s pacing, sense of humor, and overall style.  In true Vonnegut style, around 50 pages in he tells you how the book is going to end…I always may know the destination, but I never know how he is going to take me there.

If you are also working your way through Vonnegut’s collective works do not skip past Deadeye Dick.

Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai by Ben Mezrich

I have a thing with people named ‘Ben’…I’m sure its mostly me and not them, but I have a thing.

I have yet to met another person named ‘Ben’ that I liked.

It begs to be asked, if I ran into myself would I like me?

Think about the recursive loop that little meeting could spin into…

Or, or pickup Rigged by Ben Mezrich. This Ben might be one of the few I might enjoy if I were to ever meet him in real life.

You may or may not know Mezrich from his more widely known book 21: Bringing Down the House – Movie Tie-In: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions.

::…if you haven’t had the chance to enjoy Bringing Down the House, Mezrich’s first widely known outing, skip the movie they based off his book and grab yourself an excellent Vegas thriller.::

Mezrich brings his signature storytelling style to his latest outing. Mezrich starts with an Ivy league grad seeking direction in his life and places him in the middle of dark underground world full of colorful people and larger than life events.

When I pickup a Mezrich book by this point I know the formula, I just don’t know what he will plug in for characters, locations, and main ‘event’. In Rigged we start with a recent Harvard Business School graduate, graduating into one of the worst job market for MBAs, the fall 2002. Take said graduate and introduce him to a powerful person, head of the NYMEX, inject a little oil trading, and let the fun commence!

Its not a bad formula…I’ve grown to enjoy it.

Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Explains Cloning, Blouse Monsters, Voting Machines, Romance, Monkey Gods, How to Avoid Being Mistaken for a Rodent, and More by Scott Adams

I read Dilbert, wait, wait, shocking I know!

As I’ve written about in the past, http://benjaminhysell.com/archive/2009/01/dilbert-he-isnt-just-for-engineers-anymore/, Scott Adam’s writes an interesting blog on a daily basis covering all sorts of topics, from office life, to economics, to world politics Adam’s covers them all.

This book is a collection of his ‘greatest hits’ blog posts over the last several years.  Since I just started reading his blog in the last year or so this book as served as a great way for me to catch up, plus it saves me time by not having to weed through his less than stellar work to find blogging gold.

Adam’s ‘chapters’ are only a page or two at the most, providing a very accessible book that one can pick up and jump into and out of quickly.  Since the ‘chapters’ don’t depend on one another you can set it down for a few weeks and easily come back to it without having to start over.

A fun read for a vacation or right before going to bed.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

I saw this book in my travels around the web, and was lucky enough to receive it as a gift for this past Christmas.

How do you define happiness?

Is how I define happiness the same as how you would define as happiness? Should I skip the double cheeseburger at diner tonight so my future self can enjoy the cake for desert, and not feel bad about it? Or will my future self make fun of me for not eating the burger because desert is a slice of lemon cake, which my past self should have known I wouldn’t like?

The author Daniel Gilbert doesn’t promise my future self will be happy after reading his book, but my future self will at least understand why I mistakenly thought I might be happy at the end.

Gilbert’s writing style is funny, well thought out, and accessible…a throughly enjoyable book, well worth a read.

8 Minute Meditation: Quiet Your Mind. Change Your Life. by Victor Davich

For the past couple of years I wanted to try meditation, however I didn’t know where to start, this book was exactly what I was looking for. Victor Davich is a fantastic writer, mixing in humor and a conversational tone to his writing allowing me to understand and appreciate meditation. Its an interesting program…Davich has you meditate for 8 minutes a day for 8 weeks, each week trying out a new technique. At the end of the program you decide which technique or combination of techniques work for you, and Davich shows you ways to extend and enhance your mediation sessions by providing other mediation resources, and no they are not just links to other books he has written.

If meditation is something you have a remote interest in Davich’s book is an affordable, efficient method to give it a try and see if it is for you.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper

Buy this book, read it, learn it, love it…love the book! I talk about Alan Cooper in my blog post here. As it has been said, Alan is the father of the modern ‘persona’, a tool and technique I use in my day to day development. Read this book to get the ‘whys’ behind Alan’s style of development.

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cornin

If Inmates is the ‘why’, then About Face is the ‘how’. About Face is a manual on how to run a project using Alan’s methodologies. Inmates is for your boss, About Face is for you.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

::I worked for the computer services department in my high school, it was single handedly the best job I have ever had. I credit that job with getting me to where I am today.::

Of course I failed to acquire the book in high school. I ran into this book again in college, in my sophomore year when I was selling my engineering chemistry book back to the bookstore. Some poor freshman was trying to sell his copy of Godel back and they were only going to give him five dollars, I offered him ten. Sadly that book sat on my bookshelf until after college where I finally started to read it. A scant year and a half later I finally finished it…it is not a quick read. As my computer science teacher always said, ‘Everything is related to everything,’ this book sets out to prove it.