Read 30 books in 2005

Be Our Guest: Perfecting the art of customer service by the Disney Institute

A great little book about customer service from the organizational perspective. I’ll use it to see if I can create a little magic in my new workplace.

Midlife Orphan: Facing Life’s Changes Now That Your Parents Are Gone by Jane Brooks

This was helpful. Lots of stories reminded me that I’m not the only person who ever experienced this. About half way through, I started skimming stories, looking for the ones that were most like me. Of course, I didn’t find any exactly like mine which is comforting in its own way, too. Every one has a unique experience and, therefore, unique responses. We all find our own paths.

The Everything Paganism Book by Selene Silverwind

I learned a lot reading this book—things I didn’t even know enough to ask questions. It was very helpful to me on a personal/spiritual level, too. I’m fascinated by the cycles of the moon and the seasons. I keep thinking maybe I would get something more from the various Celtic and Wiccan spiritualities that incorporate those cycles. With this great overview, I learned that is not the direction for me. I want to keep mining for ideas in those areas, but I can quit thinking that I’m missing something because I now know that the other aspects aren’t going to work for me.

The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger

This is a sequel to a website:
http://www.cluetrain.com/

Published in 2000, the technology is a bit dated, but the ideas about conversation, interaction, and human voice are even more relevant now that we have blogs, RSS, wikis, and sites like 43T!

Fish! by Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen

This is a quick read (a good thing if you’re trying to complete your 30 books…). It’s a kind of parable about improving the environments we work in. If you can manage to keep your cynicism at bay while reading this book (not an easy task for many of us), I think it really is useful. It’s a parable with four easy-to-remember, common sense, principles. Arguably, this approach is likely to be much more effective than a quality service initiative with dozens of measurable objectives, not to mention more fun.

Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone

This book was on the reading list for the “History of Books and Print” class that was offered in my library school last fall. I didn’t take that class, but put the book on my Christmas list last year and have finally got around to reading it. It’s a well-written historical piece that talks about the violence (both physical and intellectual) of the Reformation, the slow process of understanding the workings of the human body, and the strange story of a book related to both of these that disappeared from history and slowly came to the surface again.

This book inspired many more thoughts, more than I usually write here, so I wrote a longer entry on my blog

A Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg (author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe)

This story puts a wonderful cast of chracters, most with good hearts and special dreams, in a tiny town that makes an art of holiday celebrations, the kind of place that can make a few dreams come true.

Silver Bells by Luanne Rice

This is a charming holiday tale—perfect for the season. Especially a snowy day like we had yesterday in Missouri.

The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

I almost abandoned this book after the prologue when I realized it was about an affair. I was permanently scarred by Bridges of Madison County, a book that tried to convince me that a four-day affair was magic. Four-day affairs are easy. It’s the forty-year marriage that’s a real miracle. Anyway, I’m glad I kept going, because the affair is only one aspect of The Mermaid Chair. It’s really about a woman finding a way to belong to herself.

Naked in Death and Glory in Death by J.D. Robb
I’ve read a few of the later novels in this series about Lieutenant Eve Dallas solving crimes in the future, but I realized I was missing a lot by not starting at the beginning. So I started back at the beginning and learning a lot more about the major characters.