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My Reading Journey Backwards and Forwards

Category: Books (Page 2 of 5)

Beach Music
A Novel by Pat Conroy

Beach Music

March 29, 2025 / / 0 Comments

A Novel by Pat Conroy – from the back cover of the book

PAT CONROY, America’s preeminent storyteller, delivers a sweeping novel of lyric intensity and searing truth — the story of Jack McCall, an American expatriate in Rome, scarred by tragedy and betrayal.

His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart.

Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. It is another masterpiece in Pat Conroy’s legendary list of beloved novels.

Housekeeping

Copy right 1995

768 pages + Reader’s Guide

I started this book in early March – I haven’t finished it, but I love this book. Pat Conroy is one of my favorite fiction authors. I still haven’t been able to read The Great Santini, but I loved The Death of Santini.

My Rating – based strictly on how engaging I find the read

What Everyone Else Thinks

The Laws of Human Nature

The Laws of Human Nature

March 26, 2025 / / 0 Comments

By Robert Green

This link is the book summarized in 8 minutes by Robert Greene.

Reflections and Random Thoughts

Housekeeping

Mar 25, 2025

It looks like I purchased and started reading this book in July of 2021. It’s a 586-page book, and I read up to page 236 – now I’m deciding whether to start where I left off or start over.

March 26, 2025

I started over. I want to see if I recognize any changes I made as a result of what I’ve already read. Any new beliefs or behaviors?

April 9, 2025

I’ve re-read the first 100 pages or so and can safely say I remember practically nothing from my first read of this book.

Key Take-Aways

Chapter One

Chapter 1 is a discussion of our emotions and mostly irrational behavior –

Something Actionable

Review Title

What Everyone Else Thinks

Laws of Human Nature has over 16,000 ratings on Amazon and 131 reviews, 87% of which are five stars. Here is a link to the top 1-star and top 5-star reviews. The top 1-star review was well written, and the author is a Robert Greene fan, so there is that.

As usual, several of the critical reviews were complaints about the book’s physical condition when it arrived.

On Good Reads there are almost 26 thousand ratings and over 2000 reviews. The score is 4.36 and as of this writing there are over 17,000 people currently reading this book.

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Books, Non-fiction

Too Late - Colleen Hoover

Too Late

March 25, 2025 / / 0 Comments

By Colleen Hoover

Read over about two weeks in late February or early March 2025.

Review Title

What Everyone Else Thinks

With 108,000+ ratings on Amazon, 58% five stars, and over 400,00 on Good Reads with an overall rating of 4.3 – this is a solidly entertaining novel and an easy and engaging read. You’re not going to learn anything, but it’s fun.

I looked at the 1-star reviews, as is my habit. They weren’t as thoughtless as most of the 1-star reviews are – the criticisms were valid. It’s a little unrealistic (uh, it’s fiction) and not like her typical work; she addresses this somewhere; I can’t remember where I read it at the moment – but it was intentionally outside the scope of what she usually does.

It’s the first of her books that I’ve read, so I’m not attached to her previous style.

The Choice - Dr. Edith Eva Eger
The Choice - Dr. Edith Eva Eger

The Choice

March 25, 2025 / / 0 Comments

A memoir by Holocaust Survivor Dr. Edith Eva Eger

March 23, 2025

Housekeeping

This book was on Ryan Holiday’s 2025 Recommended Reading List – and I purchased it from his bookstore, The Painted Porch.

Reflections and Random Thoughts

Insights

Key Take-Aways

Something Actionable

Review Title (star rating)

What Everyone Else Thinks

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Books, Non-fiction

High Performance Habits

High Performance Habits

March 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Aug 3rd 2024 (This is when I bought it)

A book about improving performance by Brendon Burchard

Reflections and Random Thoughts

Insights

Key Take-Aways

Something Actionable

Review Title

What Everyone Else Thinks

Thinking In Systems

Thinking In Systems

March 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

March 3, 2025

A Book about systems thinking by Donella Meadows

Reflections and Random Thoughts

I’m afraid I didn’t take much of value from this read. Her political agenda was woven throughout, and I found it more distracting than enlightening.

Quotes from the Book

“In fact, we don’t talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about. Our perspectives on the world depend on the interaction of our nervous system and our language—both act as filters through which we perceive our world.”

This next quote, according to Amazon, was highlighted by over 15,000 Kindle readers;

“Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”

Key Take-Aways

Something Actionable

My Rating

What Everyone Else Thinks

4.6 out of 5 Stars on Amazon.

A Top 5 Star Review

There are a few books that encapsulate a way of thinking so simply, so clearly and so compellingly that I find myself giving little kisses of delight to the cover. I read this on a Kindle, so this resulted in quite a lot of smudging. (this was a long review so you can read the rest here if you are interested)

A Top 1 Star Review

I got this book because we develop systems for patient compliance, the reviews were high, and I was eager to learn from such an expert of high acclaim. In fact, the book is a superficial collection of high-level ideas with little to no added value or insight. The book is a spectacular example of what Feynman called “cargo science”. Do meaningful, not just quantifiable. Indeed. The book is also heavily influenced by the author’s environmental agenda, which should be disturbing to anyone with an engineering or physics education used to system analysis. Read Bellman’s classic “Adaptive Control Processes – A guided tour” for real thought and insights on systems.

262 people found this helpful

Post Progress

55%

The Death of Santini

The Death of Santini

February 23, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The Story of a Father & His Son by Pat Conroy

Worth the Read?

Reflections and Random Thoughts

Key Take-Aways

Redemption and forgiveness are possible even in the most difficult of circumstances.

Something Actionable

What Everyone Else Thinks

This book holds a 4.3 rating on Amazon, with only 60% of reviewers giving it five stars. On Goodreads, the rating dips even lower to 3.9 from over 9,000 reviews.

I was surprised! I loved this book and got teary reading it more than once – half a dozen times, really. I am in awe of his mastery of the English language and his ability to write with such candor and grace about such a difficult topic.

I turned, as I often do, to the 1 and 2 start reviews to see what other people didn’t like. It seems some folks find him a bit tedious and whiny.

I find that kind of review somewhat tedious and whiny. At least Pat Conroy had something to whine about –

Who Not How

Who Not How

December 22, 2024 / / 0 Comments

A book about accomplishing more through delegation by Dan Sullivan

My rating of this book is based not on the quality of its writing or content but on how practical and valuable it has been in my life or business.

Worth the Read?

“There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

Ronald Reagan


Reflections and Random Thoughts

I lowered my star rating to a four because while this book offers valuable insights, the entire book is a sales pitch for Strategic Coach.

Their eight-hour workshop, already sold out for 2025, comes with a hefty price tag of $13,500 as of late 2024. A one-day workshop for $13k isn’t practical for me, thus the lowered rating.

Insights

Key Take-Aways

Something Actionable

What Everyone Else Thinks

The Secret Pulse of Time

The Secret Pulse of Time

December 11, 2024 / / 0 Comments

A Book about Life’s Scarcest Commodity By Klein Stefan

Reflections and Random Thoughts

When does now end?

“How long does the present last?”

I started this book in February 2024 and finished it in December 2024. I’m not sure it lives up to its name, but it was worth reading. It seems like it was mainly about the relativity of time when it goes slow and when it goes fast. He also talked about time and memory.

While reading it, I paid more attention to how I was spending my time; it got harder to enjoy playing my game – I tried considering what value the hour I had just lived had to me. What did I remember of it?

Insights

Key Take-Aways

As I read this book, I find myself paying more attention to how I spend my time – considering more seriously if I’m willing to give my life to the activity I’m engaged in.

Everyone says that time is money, but it isn’t.

Recollections vs Memory

According to this book, children acquire their first conscious recollections at about 18 months.

A recollection is not the same as a memory; I looked this up because I thought they were the same and replaced the word recollection in the sentence above with memory, rendering it inaccurate.

Recollection is the active process of retrieving specific memories, while memory is the system or ability to remember something, which begins to develop in humans at birth. A baby can recognize its mother’s face within 2 hours.

Something Actionable

This is a stop doing. Stop spending so much time playing my phone game.

Especially during times, I could be doing something I can see later.

What Everyone Else Thinks

This book only has 82 reviews on Amazon, 3% 1 star and 62% 5 star. On Good Reads, it has 23 ratings, an average of 4.17, and only three reviews.

Looking at the 1-star review on Amazon, I see that it’s a complaint about formatting with no discussion of content.

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