The Great Business Book List
Sep 13, 2009 Books, Social Media
I made fun of the Indigo sign, but I am a big fan of the book store. Any book store. But, I have a soft spot for Chapters-Indigo since I spend over three years working there while I went to university. It doesn’t hurt that I have an addiction to books. I love fiction (the type you can imagine the characters so vividly that even years later you can tell a friend about the novel); and the odd summer junk novel (usually crime / mystery novels like Kathy Reich), I have also been known to read a thoughtful history book or gripping book on pop culture. But, my biggest fixation is my collection of business books. I love books on marketing, social media, Internet culture, management….and I believe I own more than I have actually read. It is always my intention to read, but I also read about 200 blogs.
That said here are some of my recommendations for great business books (chances are I own them if you need a loaner)
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t – Jim Collins
- Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything – Don Tapscott
- Growing Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World – Don Tapscott
- Purple Cow: Transform you Business by Being Remarkable – Seth Godin
- Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends – Seth Godin
- A Whole New Mind – Daniel Pink
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions – Dan Ariely
- Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder – David Weinberger
- Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual – Locke, Weinberger,
- The Tipping Point: How Little things Can Make a Big Difference – Malcolm Gladwell
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell
- Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell
- First, Break all the Rules – Markus Buckingham
- The Long Tail – Chris Anderson
- Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky
- Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message – Ben Mcconnell
These are just a few of the ones I haven’t yet read but own:
- Tribes – Seth Godin
- Six Pixels of Separation – Mitch Joel
- Truth Agents – Chris Brogan & Julian Smith
- Meatball Sundae – Seth Godin
- Free: The Future of a Radical Price – Chris Anderson
- Twitterville – Shel Israel (getting this on Tuesday)
And, if you are looking for gift ideas these are books that I would like (and may buy on a whim while in a bookstore)
- Whuffie Factor – Tara Hunt
- New Rules of Marketing: Marketing on the Web – Tamar Weinberg
- Art of Community – Jano Bacon
- Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business – Erik Qualman
Now, perhaps time for a trip to my favorite book store…
Do you have any favorites I missed?
Popularity: 41% [?]
Tags: Books, leadership, new marketing, reading, social media, social networks
Top 100 Books
Mar 10, 2009 Books
A friend posted a list of the Top 100 Books on Facebook…I am supposed to see how many I have read and then post it on Facebook. Thought it might a fun post for my blog too! I love to read, although these days with two kids and so many blogs to read I don’t get around to reading actual book that often.
I am not sure how they determined which books should be on this list since reading tends to be a bit subjective and the list only includes Fiction. If done by all-time sales then those older books have a leg up, if done by survey I suspect we tend to remember books that we studied in school more than those we read for pleasure. Which would explain the Jane Austen at the top of the list. I have read all of Jane Austen’s books, and many of my well-read friends they are often shocked by my opinion of her novels which is: Jane Austen is the Danielle Steel of her time. She wrote incredibly witty romance novels, and they make great movies (especially ones with Colin Firth). But, none of her books would make the top 10 for me!
After you read this list – tell me do you have a favorite book? Do any of the ones on the list have a special memory for you? Have you re-read any book over and over again?
I have marked yes or no beside each one indicating if I have read the book! In some cases I may have written a note on the book
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – Yes (as above!)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – Yes. This book took me ages to get through, I was working for the publisher at the time the movies were hitting the theatres so I felt I HAD to read it. It was a brick – with so many different charactors and places I found it hard to plow through.
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – Yes.
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – Yes. I read the first three, after that I was bored of the writing style – so I took a break and never went back.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes
6 The Bible – No
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – Yes. Emily Bronte is leaps and bounds better than Jane Austen.
8 1984 – George Orwell – yes. If you haven’t read this- you must. One of my favourite, I have read twice and will definitely refresh on this one soon.
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – No
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Yes. Ugh. Almost as bad as Austen. Wordy and boring.
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – Yes
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – No
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – A lot of them…
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – Yes
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Yes, this was more enjoyable than Lord of the Rings. Read this for a Children’s Lit class in University. Was supposed to be a “Bird” course…but was actually a considerable amount of work (lots and lots of reading!)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks – Yes.
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – Yes, another one that would make my top 10
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – yes
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot- no
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – no
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes, also on my top 10!
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – No
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy -No
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Yes, Douglas Adams is laugh-out-loud funny. I remember reading them while working at a movie theatre box office laughing out loud by myself. Some folks said they didn’t want to disturb me – but could they buy a ticket.
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – No
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky -No
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – Yes
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – Yes
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – No
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – No
33 The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – Yes
34 Emma – Jane Austen – Yes
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – Yes
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes – isn’t this part of the Chronicles of Narnia at number 33?
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – Yes
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – Yes
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – Yes
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No, although I have started this book at least 10 times.
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – Yes, John Irving always surprises- his books are well worth reading.
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – Yes (I read the enitre series in Grade 2-3 I believe, same time I was racing through the Nancy Drew novels)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood -Yes, It is too bad her other novels never lived up to this one.
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Yes
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – Yes
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – Yes
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – No
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – No
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – Yes
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – Yes. On my top 10, such a great book.
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – No
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – Yes, like 1984 – worth reading over and over again.
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon – Yes
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – Yes
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – Yes, not as great as all the people said it was (but maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for this book at the time)
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – Yes
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – No
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – Yes, he defined a generation. Amazing novelist, what would be different had he lived longer?
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – Yes. Pride and Prejudice – this completes my point on Jane Austen being nothing more than a romance novelist!
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – No
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – No
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – Yes
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – No
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath – Yes
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – No
78 Germinal – Emile Zola – No
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – No
80 Possession – AS Byatt- Yes
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – No
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – Yes
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – Yes
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – No
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – Yes
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – Yes
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – Yes
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – Yes, wish I hadn’t wasted my time!
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – Yes (isn’t this covered under the complete works?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – Yes
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – No
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – Yes. This book took me ages to get through, I was working for the publisher at the time the movies were hitting the theatres so I felt I HAD to read it. It was a brick – with so many different charactors and places I found it hard to plow through.
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – Yes.
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – Yes. I read the first three, after that I was bored of the writing style – so I took a break and never went back.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes
6 The Bible – No
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – Yes. Emily Bronte is leaps and bounds better than Jane Austen.
8 1984 – George Orwell – yes. If you haven’t read this- you must. One of my favourite, I have read twice and will definitely refresh on this one soon.
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – No
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Yes. Ugh. Almost as bad as Austen. Wordy and boring.
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – Yes
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – No
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – A lot of them…
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – Yes
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Yes, this was more enjoyable than Lord of the Rings. Read this for a Children’s Lit class in University. Was supposed to be a “Bird” course…but was actually a considerable amount of work (lots and lots of reading!)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks – Yes.
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – Yes, another one that would make my top 10
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – yes
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot- no
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – no
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes, also on my top 10!
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – No
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy -No
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Yes, Douglas Adams is laugh-out-loud funny. I remember reading them while working at a movie theatre box office laughing out loud by myself. Some folks said they didn’t want to disturb me – but could they buy a ticket.
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – No
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky -No
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – Yes
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – Yes
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – No
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – No
33 The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – Yes
34 Emma – Jane Austen – Yes
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – Yes
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes – isn’t this part of the Chronicles of Narnia at number 33?
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – Yes
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – Yes
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – Yes
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No, although I have started this book at least 10 times.
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – Yes, John Irving always surprises- his books are well worth reading.
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – Yes (I read the enitre series in Grade 2-3 I believe, same time I was racing through the Nancy Drew novels)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood -Yes, It is too bad her other novels never lived up to this one.
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Yes
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – Yes
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – Yes
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – No
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – No
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – Yes
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – Yes. On my top 10, such a great book.
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – No
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – Yes, like 1984 – worth reading over and over again.
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon – Yes
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – Yes
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – Yes, not as great as all the people said it was (but maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for this book at the time)
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – Yes
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – No
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – Yes, he defined a generation. Amazing novelist, what would be different had he lived longer?
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – Yes. Pride and Prejudice – this completes my point on Jane Austen being nothing more than a romance novelist!
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – No
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – No
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – Yes
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – No
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath – Yes
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – No
78 Germinal – Emile Zola – No
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – No
80 Possession – AS Byatt- Yes
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – No
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – Yes
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – Yes
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – No
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – Yes
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – Yes
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – Yes
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – Yes, wish I hadn’t wasted my time!
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – Yes (isn’t this covered under the complete works?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – Yes
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – No
Looks like 60/100 not too shabby.
So, how about you? A few of my other fiction favorites: Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, The Chrysalids, John Wyndham, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, The Known World by Edward P Jones.
Popularity: 45% [?]
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Tags: Books, great books, literature, reading
blogs to get your teeth into
Feb 24, 2009 Digital Marketing & Metrics, Marketing & Communication
About a month ago I asked for suggestions on blogs to read since I have been able to keep my Google Reader pretty low on the unread items since my big reorganization.
Here are some of the suggestions I received:
Remarkablogger : Blog Consulting, Blog SEO, Blog Tools. Essentially all about Blogging. Looking forward to checking out his blog and learning more about essential blog tips and tricks.
Corporate Dollar: “Social Media for small non-profits” with lots of good stuff for bloggers.
MintBlogger: Blogging know-how from domain help to web tools.
Janet Fouts: Tools, tips, and thoughts on social media
hubbub: Some really interesting thoughts on advertising (then and now). In fact there is a very cool list of brands and their “character” - how many do you remember?
Socialized: Social media and PR. A thought provoking article on the demise of the newspaper and the implications for freedom and diversity of opinion and news
F.A.D.S. (Fight Against Destructive Spin) – PR and media.
Don’t Drink the Koolaid: Branding, social media, advertising…a little bit of everything. I have read some interesting posts here, looking forward to more.
Blogcampaigning: I was getting this blog via a PR blog aggregator, but I stopped getting that feed after my reorganization – opting instead to subscribe to individual blogs instead. Needless to say I subscribed to this one where they talk about everything from gaming to social media.
I have also added a new page to my blog: Reading List where I list a few of my long time favourites.
Popularity: 23% [?]
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Tags: Advertising, Blogs, great blogs, marketing & communication, reading
Looking for Reading Material: Suggest Blogs Here
Jan 6, 2009 Blogs, Digital Marketing & Metrics, Social Media
Well, not sure if it is because people weren’t writing as many blog posts in December, or that my super organization skills with Google Reader are working but my blog aggregator has ZERO unread items.
So dear faithful readers…can you suggest some good blogs to subscribe to? Perhaps reading 107 blogs is just not enough.
So, suggest your blog…suggest your friends, or suggest a blog you just love. If I get more than one suggestion I will post the list for others to read.
I am not particular…I like blogs on just about anything but my favourites are about politics, marketing, digital and social media, parenting and mom blogs…and shopping. However, I am always interested in expanding my horizon.
So, let me know your favourites. Ask a friend their favourite. E-mail me or just add in the comment section.
Popularity: 9% [?]
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