The Christmas Holiday Reading List
What are holidays for if not for reading...is the question I used to ask myself before I had twins. These days, I'm lucky to squeeze an hour in before bedtime. Here's what I spent Christmas reading and what I thought of them.
McMafia is an absolute delight to read. Its focus is how the four forces of globalization - the transfer of goods, capital, ideas and people - also favors the rise of the criminal underworld. Each chapter deals with a different part of the world and when you're done with the book, you'll frown upon anyone who uses the examples of the BRIC-countries or the rise of Dubai with rose-tinted glasses on.
Another delight was Clay Shirky's excellent Here Comes Everybody. The book is an
insightful celebration of mass-collaboration. Even though the argument isn't new, Shirky uses fresh, vivid examples well told to enrich the portrait of the web as a collaboration tool.
On to two Swedish books that aren't as of yet available in English. The first was Fredrik Härén's Vad som händer i världen och varför det är viktigt att förstå ("What's going on in the world and why is it so important to understand"). I have great respect for Härén as a speaker. He is witty, relevant and provocative. Especially when he talks about creativity. In this book, however, and in the past few years, he's aimed at becoming the Tom Friedman of Scandinavia by "teaching" us about what's going on "over there". The book is basically a collection of anecdotes where Härén travels across Asia and realizes that "Yikes, they're catching up fast" and so on. The writing style is quite dense and new names and characters are introduced only to be discarded in the next paragraph. I prefer Härén's Idea Books that are simpler in style and format as well as being a lot more useful.
The second Swedish oeuvre is Micael Dahléns Nextopia, a book on how thinking about the future is what makes us happy. Dahlén is an old teacher of mine and has really positioned himself as a marketing guru in the past few years. He's even started to pain his nails black (!). As a teacher and lecturer, he's wise, patient and always interesting to listen to. The book has caused quite a media stir in Sweden since the very idea that expectations exceed reality seems to be new to some people. I always like to quote my father who taught me that "if you don't take things out in advance, you may never be able to take them out". Nextopia is highly efficient at builidng a credible case. Dahlén
quotes studies and research and throws in some pop-culture references like Apple, Lost and Metallica for good measure. The overall effect left me cold, nonetheless. I lacked a personal perspective. What does Dahlén himself believe in? What is ihis experience of Nextopia? Instead, I got a myriad of academic studies that are fine for academic papers but impersonal in book form. Furthermore, the far superior Stumbling on Happiness did a better job at conveying the same idea with a lot more warmth, humour and spark. Read that instead.
Finally, the strangest piece of news in the past week was published in London's Sunday Times. It seems that superheroes are popping up all around America. In a strange case of life imitating art, people are donning masks and coming up with funky names to rid the world of crime and evil. Who needs imagination when there's reality?
