March books ran the gamut from business books and ‘chick lit’, to self-help and a children’s book.
Harlem Shuffle — Harlem Shuffle is Coleson Whitehead’s latest offering. His two most recent books (Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad) were very dark and depressing subject matter, so it feels worth emphasizing that this one is much less so. It’s gangsters and heists in 1960s Harlem, and he evokes the characters and scenes so well. A great read!
BE 2.0 — The original Beyond Entrepreneurship was published in 1992, and this edition has been updated with additional viewpoints from the present day. Twenty years on, there’s nothing especially earth-shattering here, but there are some really clear frameworks and examples of vision, missions. values, etc., that I will refer to as templates in my work.
Delivery to the Lost City — The third in the Impossible Places trilogy, read aloud to a rapt five year-old. The characters and plot absolutely captured his imagination, and pretty good fun from an adult perspective too. I do regret doing different voices for the characters back in book one, because I could never remember which character had which voice, and I often came in for criticism that the baddies all talked with the same voice.
The Hole in the Middle — This was a light, breezy read about a woman about to turn 40 who feels very crunched between her busy job and being a mother to her two kids. I think the flaw with a lot of books along these lines is that the character ends up doing a lot of deeply ridiculous things to add drama to the time crunch. Like, it is very obviously a terrible idea to start putting up the Christmas tree 90 minutes before guests arrive for a dinner party, when you are still in the process of cooking said dinner. But the reality of parenting small children and working full-time is that you feel very crunched all the time, even when you are on top of your shit.
F*ck Feelings — I’m not sure how this book made its way on to my to-read list, and I’m really not sure why I kept reading it. I didn’t enjoy it. The concept is a psychiatrist and his daughter/co-author run through a long list of typical reasons for seeking therapy and address them, following a set structure. I think it could be useful as a reference, if you wanted to look up advice on a particular issue, but reading cover-to-cover was not to my taste. It might work better in small doses on a website than at book-length.
