Archive for the ‘books’ tag
Best of Summer 2010
Everything here in Ukraine lets you know that the summer has passed. It’s the weather, which as if suddenly awoken from a deep dream realized that it’s lagging behind and is now trying to recuperate by raining and blowing cold wind. It’s the usual traffic jams of people, who have just returned from their vacations and are desperately trying to remember how to work.
But everything has its own time, so I thank the summer and excitedly greet the autumn, which I’m sure holds even more fun stuff for all of us.
During last three month tons of interesting and exciting things happened to me. To record the most pleasant experiences, achievements and discoveries I will award top prizes in several nominations “The Best … of Summer ‘10″. So, here we go.
Thomas Friedman — The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Working in outsourcing business I decided that I should definitely read one of the most popular books around this topic — “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Here are some words from positive review by Washington Post: “Showcases Friedman’s gift for lucid dissections of abstruse economic phenomena, his teacher’s head, his preacher’s heart, his genius for trend-spotting and his sometimes maddening inability to take himself out of the frame.”
After first successful purchase on Amazon I decided to make second one and buy this book. It took 2 weeks of waiting (this time choosing standard international shipping instead of expedited — works perfectly as well) and here it is.
I’ve just started reading, so review will come soon. I’ll update this post as soon as I’m ready to share my thoughts about this book.
Tim Ferriss — The 4-Hour Workweek
Two years ago or so, I decided that if I’m going to master English language in this life I have to eliminate all non-English reading. Since that time I haven’t read a book in any language except English. It was a kind of challenging decision to make, but now looking back I realize how fruitful it was.
Here in Ukraine we have problems with buying English-language literature. Of course, every big book store has foreign-languages-literature section but the range of books they have to offer is pretty poor. Nevertheless I managed to find several fiction and non-fiction books to read with pleasure. They include novels by Chuck Palahniuk and some English classics like Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and so on.
The book I’m going to talk about in this post was my first purchase from Amazon.com and I’ve bought it rather out of curiosity then of any real need or particular interest. Few weeks ago I accidentally found the blog of Tim Ferriss which fascinated me a lot. So when I saw this book featured on the main page of Amazon.com the decision was made right away.
Two weeks later I happily walked out of post office with my first international shipment delivered…
