I used to love reading for fun and escapism only. Then I started a masters programme…
Review: The End of Competitive Advantage
Chances are the strategies that worked well for you, even a few years ago, no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now.
In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea – that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognised strategy expert, Rita Gunther McGrath, argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage.
4/5* Read!
Books I’m Reading During My Masters
If I thought I was busy before, I guess I better buckle up for the ride!
I’m taking this as an opportunity to bring you guys with me, so here is (part of) my reading list for the first module of my Masters programme!
6 Recommended Coffee Table Books
In this online book-loving community there is a place for fiction and non-fiction. We share the love for YA, NA, and even erotica, and we critique and review literary master-pieces, as well as self-penned autobiographies.
But there is one category of books that is often over-looked, and that is the joy of the coffee table book.
So today, I’m bring you 6 coffee table book recommendations!
14 Recommendations for Non-Fiction November
Today’s post is a list of 14 Non-Fiction Recommendations. So, if you’re a sometimes-nonfiction-reader, or someone who doesn’t tend to gravitate towards nonfiction, why not branch out this November and give these books a try?
Review: The Life and Loves of a He Devil
Who wouldn’t want a friend like Graham Norton? A little bit naughty, full of frank advice, bursting with gossip about the world’s biggest stars – but most of all with an emphatic love of life and all its joys, big and small.
Join him – glass of wine in hand, faithful doggy friend by your side – and delve in as he shares the loves of his life.
4* Read!
Review: Dreams From My Father
The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father’s life and reconcile his divided inheritance.
Written at the age of thirty-three, Dreams From My Father is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama’s journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.
3.5* Read!
Review: The Opposite of Loneliness
Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.
As her family, friends and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, ‘The Opposite of Loneliness’, went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina’s essays and stories that articulates the universal struggle we all face as we work out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.
4* Read!
Review: Don’t Pee On My Leg And Tell Me It’s Raining
“Can we get some reality in here?” asks Judy Sheindlin, former supervising judge for Manhattan Family Court. For twenty-four years she has laid down the law as she understands it. If you want to eat, you have to work. If you have children, you’d better support them. If you break the law, you have to pay. If you tap the public purse, you’d better be accountable. Now she abandons all judicial restraint in a scathing critique of the system – filled with realistic hard-nosed alternatives to our bloated welfare bureaucracy and our soft-on-crime laws.
3.5* Read!
Review: Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops, Books 1 & 2
A John Cleese Twitter question [‘What is your pet peeve?’], first sparked the ‘Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops’ blog, which grew over three years into one bookseller’s collection of ridiculous conversations on the shop floor. From ‘Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?’ to the hunt for a paperback which could forecast the next year’s weather; and from ‘I’ve forgotten my glasses, please read me the first chapter’ to’Excuse me… is this book edible?’
3.5* Read!
Review: Hot Feminist
Polly Vernon, Grazia columnist, Times feature writer (hair-flicker, Brazilian-waxer, jeans obsessive, outrageous flirt) presents a brave new perspective on feminism.
Drawing on her dedicated, life-long pursuit of hotness – having dismissed many of the rules on ‘good’ feminism at some point in the early 90s – she’ll teach you everything you ever wanted to know about being a feminist when you care about how you look. Hot Feminist is based on a principle of non-judgement (because there’s enough already), honesty about how often we mess this up, and empowerment through looks. Part memoir, part road map, it’s a rolling, raucous rejection of all those things we’re convinced we shouldn’t think/wear/feel/say/buy/want – and a celebration of all the things we can. It is modern feminism, with style, without judgement.
4* Read!
Review: Not That Kind Of Girl
These are stories about getting your butt touched by your boss, about friendship and dieting (kind of), and having two existential crises before the age of 20. Stories about travel, both successful and less so, and about having the kind of sex where you feel like keeping your sneakers on in case you have to run away during the act.
1.5* Read!
Review: The Good Psychopath’s Guide To Success
What is a good psychopath? And how can thinking like one help you to be the best that you can be?
Dr Kevin Dutton has spent a lifetime studying psychopaths. He first met former SAS hero Andy McNab during a research project. What he found surprised him. McNab is a diagnosed psychopath but he is a GOOD psychopath, able to dial up or down qualities such as ruthlessness, fearlessness, conscience and empathy to get the very best out of himself – and others. Drawing on the combination of McNab’s wild and various experiences and Dr Dutton’s expertise, together they have explored the ways in which a good psychopath thinks differently and what that could mean for you. What do you really want from life, and how can you develop and use qualities such as charm, coolness under pressure, self-confidence and courage to get it?
4* Read!
Review: Dumped – Stories of Women Unfriending Women
Being dumped by a woman-friend is excruciating: you expect romantic relationships to break up eventually but you don’t expect it from your friendships. And when it happens, you feel as though there should be an Adele song for you but there isn’t. Dumped: Women Unfriending Women fills that void, exploring the universal experience of being discarded by those from whom you expected more. The essays in Dumped aren’t stories of friendship dying a mutually agreed upon death, or of falling out of touch and reconnecting years later to find you haven’t missed a beat. These are stories by established and emerging authors who, like you, may have found themselves erased, without context. These, like your own, are stories that stay with you, maybe for a lifetime.
4* Read!
Review: Bad Feminist
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.
4.5* Read!
Confessions of a Book Geek 