Non-technical books read during my last vacation
One of the funny problems software people experience IRL is that it’s kind of complicated to explain to other people what are the majority of books you’re constantly reading about (at this point any other representative of any other profession can scream "It's not only the software people, it's us too!") ;-) Here’s the sample conversation from the real life (I’m in the process of reading the John Robbins’s debugging book):
...
She: What are you reading?
I: Some sample code.
She (puzzled): What kind of code?
I: It’s mainly C++ and Win32 API.
She (still puzzled): What's this code about?
I: It teaches you how to implement your own debugger.
She (more puzzled): What's the debugger?
...
Unless your other side does professionally what you do then it’s kind of hard to have meaningful conversations about the books you’re currently reading. The example above could of course be reversed and I could be asking questions like "How this MMPI test thingy works?" etc. So, during my last vacation I decided it’s time to read something related to my girlfriend’s areas of expertise and after that have a discussion about this. I ended up with the following three books:
- "Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance" by Jonas Ridderstrale, Kjell Nordström, Kjell Nordstrom. Here’s their main web site. One of the coolest and funniest business books I’ve ever read (I haven’t read many, so don’t take my opinion too seriously ;-)).
- "Girl, Interrupted" by Susanna Kaysen. If you have seen the movie (I actually had to rent the movie after reading the book to satisfy my curiosity) then I would strongly recommend reading the book also.
- "Man's Search For Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl. Quote from Amazon.com: "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl is among the most influential works of psychiatric literature since Freud.
Next level will be the stage when we both will drop stuff related to our profession and start reading something neutral ;-)