Category: Book Reviews
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Building a Second Brain
I just finished reading Tiago Forte’s book “Building a Second Brain”. The title is intriguing but it is about a methodology for organising notes in such a way they are actionable and useful for sharing and creating things.
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2012 Reading Challenge – 25 books in 6 months
I track the books I read using the Goodreads web site. In January I signed up to the challenge of reading 50 books in 2012. This image shows the covers of books I have recently read. Follow this link to view the covers of all 25 books and access more information about the books and…
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Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Excerpts)
I have always been intrigued why Asian children dominate the selective schools system in Sydney, and why most talented musicians are Asian. The school orchestras at my daughter’s school had a disproportionate number of Asian students and the string section was nearly all Asian. I wanted to read Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger…
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100 Best Novels
I have always been fascinated by lists with names like The 100 Best Novels, or 100 Classic Books. I was browsing the Modern Library (American publishing company) list of the 100 Best Novels, and make a list of the novels I have read and those novels I would like to read. There are two lists,…
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The Dag’s Dictionary – Richard Glover
I recently read Richard Glover’s humorous book, The Dag’s Dictionary. This is a “book of words that should exist – but don’t”. To give you a flavour of the author’s humour, here is a selection of my favourites.
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Richard Branson – Losing my Virginity
A non-stop, fast-paced life of adventure as Richard Branson tries one new business after all. A school drop out whose headmaster said he would either go to jail for become a millionaire. He managed to achieve both, as the jail sentence was only a few days. Fascinating reading about the ballon trips, speed boating across…
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Favourite books of 2008
Fiction 1. World According to Garp – John Irving 2. The Book Thief – Marcus Zusak 3. Solaris – Stanislaw Lem. Now that I have read the book I watched the film version made in the early 1970s by Andrei Tarkovsky, then the recent version with George Clooney. A good film with a fantastic soundtrack.…
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The Story of the Trapp Family Singers
The Story of the Trapp Family Singers Maria Augusta Trapp First published in 1949 Maria was a novitiate in the Nonnberg convent in Salzburg, Austria when asked by the Mother Superior to be a teacher for the youngest daughter of Baron von Trapp, retired Captain in the Austrian Navy. This assignment was for one year…
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Loop – Koji Suzuki (final book of the Ring trilogy)
This is the third book in the Ring trilogy. In the first book, Ring, the videotape was the vendetta of Sadako, a tragic girl who could not be sated with simple revenge. In the sequel Spiral, a mutating virus displaced the tape and came to threaten the entire diversity of life. This third book is…
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Spiral – by Koji Suzuki
Spiral by Koji Suzuki. Originally published in Japan as Rasen in 1995. English translation copyright 2004. Spiral is the second part of the Ring trilogy of novels by Koji Suzuki. The story starts with Mitsuo Ando, a doctor who is performing an autopsy on the body of Professor Ryuji Takayama who had died of a…
The Blog of Charles 