Books Are Back, Baby

While there were always plenty of books in the house growing up, I was never a voracious reader. Then, somewhere after college, I got the reading bug. I devoured books — fiction, non-fiction, classics, contemporary — I read them all. I had so much lost ground to make up for. There was one year in my late twenties in which I read fifty books! While I have yet to exceed that high water mark of almost a book a week I continued to read extensively for years.

That is, until Internet came along. My pace of reading dropped to a trickle in the last few years. Between 2004 and 2008 I read less than three books per year, and one year I read only one book. Ouch!

I am proud to report that in 2009 I got my reading mojo back. I read a dozen books this year. I don’t think it is a coincidence that 2009 was also the year that I got a Kindle (even though only half of the books I read were available in Kindle format). In the age of gadgets and electronics, the Kindle has made reading fun again. After almost a decade of wandering aimlessly in the Internet wasteland of too many RSS subscriptions I have rediscovered the depth and quality of well-written books.

Here are the books I read in 2009:

• The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
• Flawless Consulting, Peter Block
• Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
• Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz
• Million Dollar Consulting, Alan Weiss
• Co-Active Coaching, Laura Whitworth, et. al.
• The Bigger Game, Rick Tamlyn, et. al.
• Paranoia, Joseph Finder
• Escape from Cubicle Nation, Pamela Slim
• The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown
• Back Sense, Siegel, Urgang, Johnson
• Leadership and Self-Deception, The Arbinger Institute

With the exception of The Lost Symbol, I would highly recommend each book on the list. If I had to pick a favorite, it would be Outliers. Wow! The the ideas in that book turned my head inside out. An excellent read.

I am already three-fourths of the way into two books and it is only January 04. If all goes well, 2010 promises to be a rich year for reading as well.