Here are the books I read in January, 2018.

Non-Fiction

• Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh. I started this last year, got distracted, then came back to it. It’s an autobiography of the founder of LinkExchange and Zappos. His message is around maintaining laser focus on your customers. The book was nothing spectacular and a bit self-congratulatory. There are some lessons in there about Zappos culture and how it works, which might be useful to consult if I get to make changes of that nature in an organization.

• Data Science at the Command Line, by Jeroen Janssens. I had high hopes for this book. The author published the source of the book and all the examples to GitHub, so I cloned the repo and worked through it on a flight from DTW to SAN. Many of the examples were broken, and on a plane, I didn’t have internet access to look for help. Most of the book is on manipulating the data into the right format. That’s an important part of the data pipeline, and I’m glad to know there are more tools out there like csv2sql. But when it came to actual data science, the book dumps you into examples with no grounding in what the concepts you are. Since I haven’t read The Data Warehouse Toolkit yet, I had no idea what he was trying to get across. I might revisit the content in a few months if it’s been cleaned up.

Fiction

• Before Midnight, by Rex Stout. Nero and Archie take on a job to determine who stole the answers to a mail-in trivia contest. The catch is that the answers were taken from the dead body of the one person who knew the answers. Wolfe tries to figure out the thief without actually solving the murder, dancing around the police, the contestants, and the contest sponsors. Bonus: Someone dies in the office. Wolfe does not take it well.

• Tales from the Haunted Mansion: The Fearsome Foursome, by Amicus Arcane. Someone got this for me last year, knowing I love the Haunted Mansion. It wasn’t bad. The writing was largely tolerable, especially when compared with my attempt to read the first Kingdom Keepers book. Four kids who have a ghost story club find themselves trapped in the mansion, where a sinister librarian reads them stories about the circumstances of their demise. The book’s narrative is occasionally interrupted by an outside observer’s voice, and I couldn’t decide in my head whether he should sound like the Ghost Host or the Cryptkeeper. It was probably meant to be the former, but the latter seemed more suited to the material.