Introducing Book Reviews
A new category of post on TDNBW
In the comments on the reader survey from last year, one of the suggestions for album of the week was “Would love to see a weekly book recommendation.” I am fully onboard with this, with one caveat: with two toddlers and a century-old home, my free time is mostly ruining my knees and lower back playing trains and trucks on the floor or hurting my shoulders and wrists fixing something in my house that should be a lot easier than it is.
That said, I’m not sure even in my heyday of reading when I worked at Penguin Group (RIP) I was pulling a book a week. Before this current stage of life I was at maybe 30 books a year, which was low compared to my peers who did it for a living (I was on the business side of the house at the storied publisher.) But I’m back to reading more as my kids’ evening schedule gets slightly more predictable and I’ve run out of shows for the moment to disassociate with at the end of the day.
The TDNBW Method
Those who know me well might use a variety of words to describe me when it comes to processes. Those who like me would say neurotic. Those who have the (mis)fortune of working with me would call me pedantic. Those who don’t enjoy my presence would call it anal-retentive. In any event, I’m detail-oriented and when I find something that works or that I like, I stick to it.
Reading is no different. There are two things I always have at my side when I read: a notecard that doubles as a bookmark and a pencil. The pencil is for underlining critical quotes from the book (which are found on dog-eared pages for later perusal) and for writing down interesting facts or things to browse on Wikipedia later on the notecard/bookmark that are then saved as Wikipedia reading lists, catalogued by book. So yes, maybe my enemies are onto something.
All of this to say, the reviews will include the notecard annotation and the underlined quotes that this newsletter found interesting. It may not make sense in a vacuum, but this newsletter was begun as a way to scream into the void for its author, so it could just serve as a digital record of these minutiae.
Genre Bias
Like the bias this newsletter has for hip hop, R&B, and classic rock in the albums of the week, it also has a bias for book genres. Overwhelmingly on my shelves you will find history and biography, with few novels sprinkled in. It’s not that I don’t like novels - in fact, some of my favorite books are in the fiction category - but I am always drawn to the past because I think there’s an incredible amount to learn from our ancestors (not that we tend to listen.)
If you like authors like David Grann, Erik Larson, Patrick Radden Keefe, Jon Krakauer, and Sebastian Junger this will all feel very familiar for you. This newsletter, given its theme, will try to dive into books that focus on business or self-improvement (I loathe the term “self-help”), because we can all work on ourselves and our presence at work. Think folks like Adam Grant, Susan Cain, or Rishad Tobaccowala. We’ll start there and if readers like the feature, we’ll branch out.
Finally, What to Expect
Outside of the notecard system, I do not have a plan for the book reviews. If you were lucky enough to attend Omnicom University, you might remember the Yellow Pages for books. These were really good summaries with key points that were meant to be, if not heavily supplemental to the book, almost a quick replacement of it. That’s not the goal here.
We might find ourselves in that mindset for some of the books, but there are going to be places the newsletter will want to dig in or zoom out and contextualize. Besides, one of the differentiators of this publication is its non-formulaic approach to writing and borderline stream-of-consciousness posts on topics that catch this author’s fancy. Not as bad as James Joyce, mind you, but I’m sure some posts have rambled a bit (see - I read fiction!)
In the vein of a non-formulaic approach - I have no plan on cadence or anything like that. They will be sprinkled throughout based on my reading schedule (highly erratic) and what moves me that week to write about (or, more crucially, a lack thereof.) I will be tagging every book review post with “Book Review,” so feel free to set inbox rules to delete these as they come your way if it’s not your thing. We’ll start next week (I think.)
Happy reading!