holiday reading wrap-up

this book did not fail to live up to any of my expectactions. i don’t follow baseball at all, and am only a baseball fan in the sense that i really enjoy bull durham. but i still got a lot out of this book, which details how the low-budget oakland a’s were able to field teams that got to the world series despite the bleatings of bud selig (and others) about the impossibility of doing so.

this was one of those cases where i judged a book by its cover, and decided to give it a shot. i think if my expectations hadn’t been raised quite as high by some cover blurbs comparing it to douglas adams, i would have been more impressed. don’t get me wrong: it’s a good book. just not douglas adams good.

actually, i’m not quite done with this one yet. not a lot of stunning insights, but at least a few, and an interesting look at the nature of innovation within companies.

this is apparently a novelization of tremors where the graboids and entertaining characters have been replaced by half-hearted nanotechnology handwaving. it served it’s purpose of giving me something to read on the plane, but just barely.