Do you use passive voice, jargon, and weasel words in your writing? If your answer is yes, Bernoff’s practical guide will help you stop wasting the reader’s time and cut to the chase. A good reference for business writing.
Michael Ian Black and Marc Rosenthal have written and illustrated an essential book on Trump. Just in case you’re from another planet, here’s a brief description:
The beasty is called an American Trump.
Its skin is bright orange, its figure is plump.
Its fur so complex you might get enveloped.
Its hands though are, sadly, underdeveloped.
If you are curious about the 45th President of the United States, this book is all you need. I promised myself not to read any book on Trump, but I made this exception. It’s an enjoyable five-minute read.
The author of The History of Jazz invites us inside his head and show us his own process of how he listens to jazz. It’s a fascinating read if you want to get inside the music. Reading this book reinvigorates my love for classic jazz. It’s time to load those good old Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Clifford Brown into my iPhone.
Valenti’s moving memoir, which chronicles her experiences of being groped, raped, exposed to, and jerked on, helps me understand better about sexism that women have to deal with everyday. As she confessed, “Doing the right thing has never come easy to me. I cheated on almost all of my boyfriends with regularity and without remorse,” Valenti’s goal is to be honest rather than motivational.
This book is long overdue, but the wait is worthwhile. Rutter has delivered what he had promised: an informing, engaging, and practical guide to web typography. With clear illustrations, easy-to-understand CSS techniques, and well-written explanations, Rutter has gathered a comprehensive resource that has everything you need to know for setting beautiful, readable, and responsive type on the web. An essential read for web designers.
A heart-rending collection of essays, part spiritual narrative, part memoir. Chaplain Kerry Egan reveals deeply personal accounts from her dying patients as well as her own. From shame to secret, love to regret, anger to humor, On Living is as touching as it is uplifting. I love every word.
A thorough guide to make mobile experiences fast and secure. With many useful tips and experiences, Firtman’s book is a good reference for developing progressive web apps.
Novelist Lamott offers writing advice based on her own experience. Her process is just write or, as her father would say, “just take it bird by bird.” If you want to step up your fiction writing, this book is an excellent read.
Nancy Stock-Allen’s profile focuses on Carol Twombly’s career in type design. It’s a concise read with insights from Twombly herself on research and design process for her notable typefaces including Adobe Caslon, Chaparral, Myriad, and Trajan. The book itself is beautifully designed by Stock-Allen and elegantly set in Adobe Caslon.
Schwalbe not just loves reading books, he draws lessons for living from them. In the 26 books, I have not read a single one, and yet I still find each book to be fascinating through his brief, honest, and easygoing analysis. I probably won’t read every book mentioned in his essays, but the ones on my reading list will include Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, and George Orwell’s 1984.
Throughout the book Schwalbe makes a convincing case for reading. In the introduction, he writes (p.15):
The technology of a book is genius: the order of the words is fixed, whether on the page or on-screen, but the speed at which you read them is entirely up to you. Sure, this allows you to skip ahead and jump around. But it also allows you to slow down, savor, and ponder.
To Schwalbe, reading is not just a pleasure, but a right. He argues (p.275):
The right to read whatever you want whenever you want is one of the fundamental rights that helps preserve all other rights. It’s a right we need to guard with unwavering diligence. But it’s also a right we can guard with pleasure. Reading isn’t just a strike against narrowness, mind control, and domination: It’s one of the world’s great joys.
A love letter to readers everywhere.