- Football’s Secret Trade, Alex Duff and Tariq Panja
- How to Decide, Annie Duke
- Rosewater, Tade Thompson
- Tor!, Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger
Four completed in the shortest month, February, is nothing to sneeze at. Seven total for the year. Thoughts after the break.
Football’s Secret Trade is an interesting look at the international soccer transfer market. Lots of money flowing through an opaque system leads to lots of questions. Unfortunately, the book never quite found a coherent set of storylines or characters, although the Athletico Madrid angle almost became a good spine to hang everything off of.
How to Decide is definitely more of a workbook than a reading book, maybe designed to support Duke’s seminars. It doesn’t make particularly good reading via Amazon Kindle, but still very worthwhile. Love the three attributes of a proper tool for a job (paraphrasing):
- use that can be reliably repeated
- proper usage can be taught to someone else to consistently achieve the assigned task
- usage can be examined and assessed for correctness, both by the task executor and others
Many of the processes used to make decisions do not qualify as good tools.
Tor! is just a fun, opinionated history of German soccer. Unsusprisingly, there’s a lot of national angst even for a country that has regularly reached the pinnacle on the world stage. But at least I got schooled on how those odd looking club names were constructed.
I’ll assume the Nigerian influence in Rosewater is authentic, which makes this a quite interesting alien invasion tale. Have to say, every possible squeam inducing variation of fluid makes an appearance, but is in keeping with the title. I think this is what the author intended, but the lead character, Kaaro, is totally reprehensible, but at the same time fairly compelling.