The Gods are SMILING!!! Die Goetter lachen sich tot!

I'm a first reads winner! Unglaublich. Das Buch aber ist auf Deutsch. Das wird ja interessant, einen Rezension zu schreiben!

Update:

Ok. I admit it. I just couldn't plough through the really, really, really, really, really, really (even by German standards), really long non-verbal scenes.

But...the dialogue was just so apt! I used work at one of the largest City firms in London and believe me, lawyers, whether English or German, talk exactly like this.

So...the book received the usual treatment of first 3 chapters and last chapter and skimming everywhere else when I cannot summon sufficient concentration. I gave this book away to my father-in-law (he's a retired judge) as a Christmas present. Unfinished.

Verdict: my father-in-law really enjoyed his present (which is why it is sitting on my 'read' shelf and has three stars. He didn't mind the long-winded passages, and we both liked the plot).

Interview with Myke Bartlett: Part 1!

Oh! Just need to catch my breath. WOW. Btw, those are 10 stars, not five.

A book has to work very hard to counteract my ADHD. I know, I should make more of an effort to stop being a serial book-adulterer but that is...like asking me to stop breathing.

I stopped for this book.

What happened that a relatively unknown Melbourne-based Aussie writer of a young adult (it's suitable for upper middle grade, too) fantasy realism novel that's good enough to keep an (old) adult enthralled into the wee morning hours attracted my attention in the first place?

At the behest of every known person and what passes for their pet, I finally decided to broach the twitterverse. And amazingly enough, I like the chatty one-liners and the light-speed back-and-forth (yeah, you don't have to tell me, it's probably my ADHD!). Even more astonishing is the fact that people besides you-must-read-my-latest-incredible-outpouring-of-words-authors follow me.

Being a twitter neophyte also meant that I've learned some lessons the hard way. Such as if you follow someone it pays to at least check who they are first, because DUH! when you follow them back they can DM (I thought it was some new kind of kinky sex term at first - you know, shorthand for BDSM!) you with one of those you-must-read-me-NOW missives.

When Myke Bartlett followed me my first thought was 'Oh no, not again.' But being a stickler for my own rules, I read his tweet tagline and bingo. The man won THE TEXT PRIZE show more last year. In case that has no significance for you it is a MAJOR Australian publishing prize open to any Aussie/NZ resident, any age, published or unpublished, with a Children's or Young Adult manuscript.

Fast as a tweet I was on his webpage and looking up his book. And the man is a tease, I tell you. A total tease!

Three figures shot up from the harbour depths. They rose ten metres in the air, trailing saltwater, and then dropped onto the wharf. Their hair was knotted and foul and their faces warped and discoloured. They wore tight-fitting, tarnished armour: chain-mail vests stained with verdigris and heavy bracelets on bony wrists. Helmets masked their eyes and exaggerated their brows into curled horns. One carried a double-bladed axe, one had a sword strung from his rotting leather belt, and the last gripped a trident.

That was it. THAT WAS GODDAMN IT. And he used the word verdigris. Swoon.

Now let's just stop here for a minute and read that paragraph again. What a picture. What a pace. What lean-and-hungry prose.

That is why I DMed him (not the other way round) begging for a review copy. His publishers kindly obliged and within half an hour of never having heard of Mr Bartlett and his book, I was glued to my laptop and nothing short of nuclear war would have stopped me from reading.

The comparison of Sadie, the lead heroine, to that other famously-wooden-I-will-be-the-last-fashionably-dressed-mancontestant-standing aren't justified (and yes, Victorian State Library's blog says [b:Fire in the Sea|15713714|Fire in the Sea|Myke Bartlett|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1340168457s/15713714.jpg|21382112] is what would happen if Suzanne Collins and John Marsden co-wrote a fantasy novel) because Myke Bartlett just does it better.

Sadie is you or me, or your next-door-neighbour's daughter, who's lost her parents in a car crash and is living with her averagely nice grandparents, just trying to be a not-too-typical-and-not-too-different teenager in Perth. All Sadie really wants is to escape the need to 'soldier on', to leave Perth's middle-class suburbia behind her, and find a life somewhere else, much to the dismay of her best friend Tom, who's just at that awkward age where he wants Sadie to be more than best friend, but has no real clue as to how to change the status quo.

Enter old man Jacob who dies and leaves Sadie his house with the proviso she live in it for a year and guard its contents. Before she has a chance to commit, someone's already broken into the house, claiming to be the old man returned.

Now if that happened to you or me, what would you do? Yup, that's right. Roll your eyes and look at hot, young Jake and say "You're like, seriously hallucinating, dude." Which naturally Sadie does.

But then Jacob/Jake's lawyer is murdered right in front of Sadie's eyes, and she can't keep ignoring what's going on. Tom is gored by a wild bull - except it's the Minotaur made into somebody's pet. And that somebody has some very nasty plans for Jake, and now Sadie and Tom.

If I go on any further, I'm going to be entering spoiler territory and this book is SOOOOO GOOD I'm going to stop right here.

If you love nicely drawn characters and finely hewn prose, if you like twisty turns of plot and beautifully rendered depictions of setting, read this book. NOW. YESTERDAY!

Disclaimer - I approached the author for a review copy, kindly provided by the publishing house Text Publishing. I received no remuneration or payment in kind for this review. And even if I had, I wouldn't stop telling you to READ THIS BOOK. show less

So if we can make money from shading gray, by association this one should be worth more than a shot in the dark....

Crusher...or The Sad State of Publishing...

Contrary to some of the negative reviews, I found Collin's methodology to be pretty consistent. He lines up a bunch of stock-market data over the long term (the quantitative), and then tries to find explanations for why some companies just keep getting better (the qualitative). He also tests which companies don't fit the hypothesis even though quantitatively fit.

The odd thing is that if you look at stock market investment strategies, what this book actually recommends is a strategy that looks pretty close to Warren Buffet's. Don't take my word for it; go look up some investment screens for choosing companies and apply Collin's principles, and see whose investment strategy the resulting screen most resembles.

Murder, mystery, metaphysics, psychology. A sci-fi re-take on Wagner's Ring Cycle. This series is long, dark, absorbing read. Better read together and in order than as individual books, as the many-threaded plot winds through the whole series.

I HATE this subject and anything quantitative. But if you, like me, are a complete klutz at regression analysis and can't tell a t-test from a t-shirt, this book will get you through the theory part of your exam. It saved my grade when I failed my practical.

This series stretched the imagination beyond its natural ability to suspend disbelief.

Do not read in public. People will wonder why you are giggling uncontrollably.

Schwierig, blutig, nicht was Ich mir fuer ein Weihnachtsgeschenk wuenschte.

*****Edit*****
I'm even more of a slack skimmer than I thought. If I'd read more of the download, I'd never have added it at all :(. See the first two thread comments (spoiler alert).

****Edit end****

This book sounded like a truly fascinating read. I downloaded the extract, read several pages, and thought, 'hmmmm - has piqued my interest. I like the sound of this'.

When I first heard of the book, I checked a few of the 4-5 star reviews, and most spoke well of it, particularly the ideas it contained. All well and good. Currently a friend is reading it and we agreed to pal-read (sorry Ala, I'm going to let the side down). So I checked over a few more friends' reviews, and marked it TR today.

Thank goodness. Ms Murphybylaw flagged the gruesome violence and ick factor. While I'm a great fan of the unusual, the play of ideas, history (fiction is my favourite, I'm pretty hopeless with the real thing - too many dates and places and people to remember) and sci-fi in general, blood and guts and violence leaves me gagging and ill (hey, I retired to bed with a migraine after the first chapter of The Hunger Games).

So, sadly, this book will not see the light of my eyes, and its wonderful sounding ideas will remain forever a locked secret. If you don't suffer the same sensibilities as I, please do read the first chapter and see what you think. It might just be your cup of herbal tea.

This will be Hazel's fault, if I read it and dislike it, and Hazel's honour if it lives up to my great expectations. Having hurtled through the first five pages of an Amazon click-inside extract, my first impression is that Dan Simmons has written Wilkie Collins as one of the most priggish, smug and patronising friends with which Dickens might possibly have been tormented....

I'm not much into being somebody's 'Dear Reader' either.

What can I say? I have to read this now, the author gave me the most mindblowingly AWESOME bad advice that his book would have to be an improvement.

Recently a Very Dear GR Friend (VDF for short) asked me the following question:

VDF: By the way, I'm very very curious. What I know of your views would not have made me think that you would have rated Atlas Shrugged so highly. What was it about the book that made you feel so highly about it?

This is an excerpt from my response. You'll need to understand my system of Ratings/Review as well. Which I'm now violating by writing this:

GNF: I read Ayn Rand about a decade or more ago and I remember going around in a daze for weeks afterward - it just appeals to the anarchist in me, you see, at the visceral level: DOWN WITH THE EBEL STATE! - as well as feeling totally dicked off with the love story garbage, because for me it got in the way of the REAL STUFF: ANARCHY!!!!

Ahem. I was more impressionable in those days. If you made me read her again, would I have exactly the same reaction? I love hard work. Independence. I'm the right reader for what I interpreted as being her political message, although I know that her politial message isn't necessarily what I interpreted.

......

Oh, and I just thought of Rand again. Because Atlas Shrugged is supposed to be a dystopia, right? When I read it, I never even thought about that. I just thought about the freedom to work and produce without institutional strangling. I didn't even get the dystopic stuff (ie America as the last bastion of a global economy crashing down (if that is even what it is!) - cue cultural blind spot - in fact, she pissed show more me off for bagging out Europe the whole time, since I think the EU is probably more compassionate at the community level than the US), because the Valley just sounded great - wow, I want to go there and work!!! And by working hard and being compassionate to others and giving people the opportunity to be productive in a way personally satisfying the Valley society will be like that. No deadwood government smothering the individual's drive to create. That's predominantly all I took away from it. Which is of course completely loopy if you take Ayn Rand's personal circumstances into account. In the interim, I've read briefly about her and I think she suffers a bit of intellectual/emotional dishonesty too. But I didn't know anything about Rand when I read her book, hence the emotional 'starred' response.

******

So there you have it. No analysis of the prose. Not even understanding of Rand's message - in fact, as you've guessed, most of it flew right over my head. I'd have to go back and read it to know whether what I took out of it reflects the prevailing view as to what her philosophy and politics were. And I would have to read the prevailing view. First.

Dedicated to my VDF. show less

Recently this Very Cool GR Friend (the kind of guy you want to have around you in a fight - as in ninja-fast-kapow cool!) and I were chatting. I'd like to share with you his thoughts:

VCF: ....another of my favorite authors, John Irving, has built his whole career on writing about characters who have gone through highly similar experiences to his own. Almost every one of his books has a relationship between the main character (usually a young man, either late teens to early twenties at the start of the book) and an older woman. He's recently talked in interviews about how this is a way that he has tried to deal with some personal issues, including a--gasp--relationship with an older woman when he was very young! Add to this the fact that many of his characters have been wrestlers (he was a wrestler in college), have some peripheral involvement in politics without it being the focus of the novel, and encounter sudden violence when the reader isn't expecting it. He carries a LOT of themes with him, and I suspect ALL of them come from his personal life.

But, for me as a reader, this has no effect on how I see the books. Perhaps it took a person with Irving's background to write [b:A Widow for One Year|4659|A Widow for One Year|John Irving|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165447937s/4659.jpg|3359767]. Regardless of what ingredients went into the pot, the meal that came out was damned tasty, in my opinion.

*****

Well. That spun the cogs in the old gear box. Wait a minute. I'd show more read Irving too. Just when was that?

When I was 15 and all hot under the collar about the person who had lent it to me and I was caught in that web which Irving weaves to so effortlessly wrap the reader. It was like being Garp at the same time as being a painful 15 year old. I'm sure I didn't understand half of what I was reading, in fact I hardly remember anything of the story. Just one tragedy involving a nurse.

I had no idea about Irving as a person when I read him. But the sense of the sheer emotional tumult I experienced reading the book still remains - hence 4 stars. Although 5 would be fine, too.

You've reminded me to take a look at his other books, VCF. And into the bargain, I've discovered a few other folks around here who are happy to discuss and share my thoughts on looking into Irving again. Thanks for the encouragement. I can't wait to start. show less

I woke up this morning with the most shiveringly awful sense of having committed GR harakiri 腹切り. It was a dream in which I metamorphosed into, horror of horrors, a cyber stalker

after having written this review - or at least, the review I will eventually write.

Two of my favourite GR people have decided to slum together in purgatory for their lukewarm readings of [b:A Wizard of Earthsea|979682|A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle, #1)|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1264794302s/979682.jpg|113603]. You can find Kat's review here, and Tatiana's review here. They're even considering downgrading their intellectual status for daring to disbelieve le Guin's power.

What's a poor old-timer to do? I spent all of one semester in my first year of high school cosied up with Ged and his cohorts and while memories dim with the onset of age, I'm sure I was enamoured of this book for more than the fact that I topped my English class.

(Side note - guess what my mother pulled out of the old garden shed a couple of days ago, demanding that I relieve her of my childhood debris? Yup. You guessed it - not only my old school reports but ALL, each and every one, of my Written Expression (as it was termed in those days) exercise books. And no, these are not for general consumption - unless we are talking incinerators).

Which leads me to the inevitable conundrum - do I remain with the bliss of childhood nostalgia intact, and waggle my finger in virtual disdain at Kat and show more Tat? Or do I threaten that innocence by re-visiting Earthsea and discover that *gulp, swallow, swear*, not only was the magic all one-sided, but I've now lost that sweet reminiscence and have nothing but the cold, hard logic of my fellow ousted reviewers as company?

You can see how one might be inclined to turn into a rampaging:


So you decide - do I re-read or not? show less

Although Mowgli's adventures are the most well-known of the stories comprising The Jungle Book, Kipling's tales of Kotick the seal, Rikki Tikki Tavi and Toomai of the Elephants are just as enchanting. Owning this hardcover edition, with Kipling's original, lyrical prose and matching illustrations by Robert Ingpen, is to feel as if a rare talisman from the 19th Century (with all its now politically incorrect facades in plain view) sits upon your bookshelf.

Fairly meticulously researched. What is refreshing in this madness is that Tolan tells the story through the eyes of real people and lets the reader decide what to think - of course the subjectivity is present in Tolan's choice of which stories to tell, but he makes a very brave and thorough attempt to be as unbiased as possible.

Worth reading unless you cannot put aside your own prejudices about this topic.

Sometimes a little slow going. But you just can't go past all those lovely plots. Such a pity technology these days renders most of Doyle's twists and turns obsolete.

Recommended by Katya.

Sometime before my tenth birthday I read this book for the first time. I hated it. And I read it again. And again. I still hate it. And the Disney version is even worse.

A parrot made me do it.

This series defied the imagination to suspend disbelief. I reached the last page by dint of strenuous effort and a supply of air-sickness bags, fully utilised.

If you've noticed the tags I've chosen for this book, you're probably wondering if I've made a mistake about the book I think I'm reviewing. A book which should be in its early stages of causing a tsunami in its effects on the way we view sentience. Let those tags be your guide.

A full-disclosure clause, because although I don't know the author, I'm the person about whom she is writing. That's how I feel every day of my life, in my mind, in my reality, as another sentient entity.

To explain the last sentence would mean I have to 'spoiler' my review. So I won't do it except by saying that, in further full-disclosure, I'm not going to read the entirety of this book. Because the reality that Ms Hope describes is what I experience every day, in my mind, when I observe my other fellow sentients, from whom I feel hopelessly, ineluctably estranged. It is a suffering too harsh to bear in the written word as well as in my daily existence.

You'll have to read the book for yourself to understand why Ms Hope has so brilliantly captured what it feels like to be a sentient entity unrecognised.

This is not a high energy book!

You'll have a much better time watching the movie The Social Network (I did, on the plane, from Munich to Singapore), you might even come away with a sense of who was nasty and who was nice, but reading the book is like eating white toast bread. Tasteless. And disappointing. Being a firm believe of the old cliche that the book is better than the film, I was expecting to come away with some tangible insights. I didn't.

It's nothing to do with Mezrich's skill as a writer. He remains dutifully even-handed from the first to the last page. It's simply because (oh no, I'm doing it again, placing the author in his social context, slap my wrist!) Mezrich belongs to the same set of people about whom he is writing, and while he's keen to tell a story, he's also minding his "p"s and "q"s.

You aren't going to get the real low-down on who did with what and stabbed whom how hard and for how much reading this book. You'll find out quite some background (and if you like that, I recommend the book), and you might be left with equal quantities of sympathy for all the players (insofar as they are depicted as being deserving of sympathy, which is an entirely subjective view-point). But if actions speak louder than words, watch the film. Zuckerberg has reinstated Savarin as co-founder publically, and Saverin has received an undisclosed pay-out sum, the WV twins are now arguing that the 2008 valuation of Face-book has left them short-changed, and meanwhile Sean show more Parker still smiling.

And while you're watching the film, keep in the back of your mind that Goodreads is a social network site. If there are privacy and potential misuse issues surrounding your use of Facebook, be sure the same issues are only a few profile pages away here. I know. One of my friends was just hauled off the site for being too close to the industry. show less

I lost myself in Margaret Mitchell's world of southern belles and forsaken love.

This is a review that I’ve had to force myself to write and I’ve tossed out just as many opening lines to the review as there are issues with Stormdancer.

Insert gif - see it? - of someone famous doing something that looks vaguely like what-the-fuck.

What’s worse is that not two days ago I indulged in a review swoonfest with [a:Myke Bartlett|1048145|Myke Bartlett|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1341096158p2/1048145.jpg]'s young adult book [bc:Fire in the Sea|15713714|Fire in the Sea|Myke Bartlett|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1340168457s/15713714.jpg|21382112].

Myke also happens to be a Melbourne-based Aussie writer guy from Perth who won a MAJOR Australian literary award for [b:Fire in the Sea|15713714|Fire in the Sea|Myke Bartlett|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1340168457s/15713714.jpg|21382112]. Have you heard of him? No, I guessed not. He isn’t friended with half of the known GR and Twitter universes, isn’t repped by a big US agency, and isn’t published by one of the Big Six (aka Tor UK and St Martin’s Press for MacMillan) with massive distribution reach.

Myke’s book [b:Fire in the Sea|15713714|Fire in the Sea|Myke Bartlett|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1340168457s/15713714.jpg|21382112] is the reason I read and review. So I can shout (presently) from the summits of Singapore skyscrapers that not only should you read [b:Fire in the Sea|15713714|Fire in the Sea|Myke Bartlett|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1340168457s/15713714.jpg|21382112] but show more you should BUY IT as well. And just before you ask - yes, I friended Myke and asked for his book to review - four days ago when I discovered it.

Otherwise I tend to hide my pathetic-balls-lacking self behind an unfinished shelf to avoid details about what isn’t working for me in a book. Or if I’m feeling particularly brave, I’ll mask my vitriol behind a terribly overblown analysis of a book I did like by comparing it to the one I think falls down. I'm reasonably assured that only my most die-hard friends are going to bother reading an I’m-not-in-literary-nirvana review. Not starring it used to work, but I think that cover has been blown. That review had gifs, by the way. Someone told me it was best use of gifs they’d ever seen on GR.

Which brings me back to the dismal task at hand. No matter which way I cut this, it’s going to work out badly. That corner of the known GR universe which thinks Stormdancer is the best thing since sushi also happens to include a bunch of my GR buddies. Mates who’ve not just been supportive of me but who also shred a book faster than a kunai-wielding ninja on steroids when the author messes up with sexism, back-story overload, and a face-palming mangle of the culture and language that is supposed to serve as the story back-drop and world-building.

This book is being billed JAPANESE. Not Asian. Not amalgam, not anything other than full-on, purist, in-your-face-people-asked-me-if-I-had-a degree-in-Japanese-studies JAPANESE. Except that pandas belong in China and the lotus has more iconic symbolism for India. I would have understood and applauded the choice of gobo (burdock root) since it’s eaten primarily in Japan. I happen to enjoy the flavour of shōyu, sesame and mirin used to cook it into something palatable, too.

It is NOT a good thing to go public and state the research sources are Akira and Wikipedia as a means of self-deprecation (or anything else), and it damn well is a bloody crying shame that those were the main, if not only, sources. Because some of the readers of this book will have spent more than a 3-month-stint in Japan gaining a little language and culture flavour as high-school exchange students. Some of the readers of this book are even going to be Japanese. Even if the slog of research only ever informs the writing and doesn’t constitute it, pop culture sources don’t make the research grade.

And this is all in light of the recent spate of paid-for reviews and author-sock-puppetry condemnation which is staining the industry a blood-letting red and destroying credibility faster than a badly-behaving-author screen-shooting some hapless reviewer’s review and whipping his/her minions into trolling fury on the hapless reviewer’s review thread.

At this point we need a break in review tension - insert attempt-at-humour gif of your choice here.

I want to state right off the cricket bat (this is a review for an Aussie by an Aussie, remember?) that most if not all my GR friends who are friends with the author of this book have fully disclosed on their reviews (and if they haven’t they will, they’re like that) that they ARE friends of the author, that they think he is the most amazing awesomeness to grace facebook pages, that they desperately want to see him succeed (let’s face it, who doesn’t) and he really is a towering genre-fiction giant (literary is a tad overkill).

And although he’s keeping out of GR threads of this-book-disappoints reviews, he’s risking a loss of some of that awesomeness during his recent blog-hopping interviews by equating the reviewers who’ve given him positive reviews as being people who like chocolate ice-cream, and those who have given him 'bad' (read - had a problem with it) reviews are the (implied) weirdos on the planet who either can’t recognise chocolate ice-cream when they taste it, or simply don’t have good taste. This is perilously close to alienating people who sit on the fence and judge whether to buy a book by just how well the author is behaving in the face of I-had-problems-with-this-book-because reviews. The only rages I've seen on reviews about this book are about the let-down.

There’s another point to keep in mind. When you read a book, you are reading what the author wrote according to his/her ideas AND what beta-readers and an agent and any number of editors have suggested in the long haul to producing the book that makes everyone either rant or rave. Authors always catch the crap if the book generates raging vents of spleen; conversely editors rarely receive any kudos (except via their grateful author’s website/blog) for improving on a manuscript. What the author might have omitted eg blatant, clumsily inserted sexism, doesn’t necessarily have to have originated with him or her. Nope. If you look at the elements of what sells, it’s just as likely that someone in that chain of book-shapers looked at the raw manuscript and insisted on sexing up or westernising the characters. (Kudos to the jacket designer for avoiding a Caucasian - or even a Caucasian-styled Asian - girl on the cover).

Time for another gif interlude - Stormdancer’s cover.

It’s just bad luck that in this instance the author is male, so it’s all too easy and unfair to accuse him of being a chauvinistic, sexualising pervert. Judging from the number of female fans he’s acquired, either they are all deluded Bella-wannabes, or the author is as nice as he comes across and it’s just an unfortunate incident which won’t occur in subsequent works. Unless he wants to be criticised for more of the same. The point of writing a review like this is to give an author a chance to rectify what irritated readers, because we do want him to succeed. We do want to be writing glowing reviews and singing his praises from the rooftops. It’s called sharing our author-love.

Also worth remembering that categorised as young adult literature, this book is no worse, and certainly in many instances better than what is currently being published, irrespective of its faults. As an adult category entrant, other reviewers might not be so lenient in their appraisal of the author’s execution of what started out a truly reader-inspiring premise.

If you don’t have any problems with randomly splattered Japanese words and you like the idea of steampunk set in a feudal elements-of-Japan-and-China-and-India society with a die-trying heroine (that isn’t so cliched, you know - Harry Potter had to die trying, too) and a Griffin that passes for the author’s voice (and yes, he has some bees in his beak that are worth your attention - more that can be said for others of the young adult/new adult ilk), then buy this book because it’s something you'll probably enjoy reading, along with eating chocolate ice-cream. show less

I'm about to review a modern techno-thriller and while researching the author something jogged my 14 year old self's memory of Alistair McLean.

I gobbled his books in high school - I remember when The Eagle Has Landed was all the big rage and I read it, sure, like everyone else, but Alistair had me hooked and I ploughed through his entire oeuvre (or at least as much as our high school library budget allowed) during one year.

Then I forgot all about him until two days ago. I suppose that will be another author that my adult self will have to ignore if I want to keep my five star memories intact.

I've always wondered just how much difference there is between Arthur in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Alice in Alice in Wonderland.

Why? Well, the thread has some potential answers...or maybe some questions. As usual, it was Manny that started it.

David Maister addresses the psychology behind professional services firms, explaining what makes partners tick, the business model that generates the most profit, how to effectively and efficiently manage labour resources, and what are the necessary ingredients for long-term, repeat-business relationships. This is a must-read for anyone working for or consulting to professional services partnerships.

Aaaahhhh!

How could I have forgotten this gem?

This is what arises when one reads old letters intended for friends that have remained unsent, a kind of temporal journal of misplaced memories in which startling revelations unfold: did I do that? Oh....yes, I remember - that's what happened...ooooh, that wasn't very clever, was it?

So...this book. I have no idea why it was so impressive so many years ago. It just was. Here's what I had to say about it in this long-lost-recently-resurfaced piece of correspondence:

I have started reading another book The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, by Louis de Bernieres. I am alternatively amused at the irony, impressed with the use of language, and appalled at the viciousness of certain of the scenes described. I am envious that I cannot put pen to paper to create a fictitious (or actual) world in which to delineate and resolve my own philosophical conundrums or describe my journeys in time and space. Surely, if people are reading and appreciating these writers, I should find too an audience not threatened or bored by this tumultuous cascade of thoughts and ideas that yearns to find coherent expression through either the written word or the medium of film. Dear ???, do you find my letters entertaining, provoking, or simply eternally desultory spirals predominantly (and preponderantly) concerned with “I”?

As you can see, the piece of correspondence probably had no point in surfacing other than to remind me of the existence of the show more Don's nether parts. show less