Tyler and I read The Boy Who Would Be King together tonight. It is a good book, and the story and points are made well. The illustrations are also well done.

I recently shared a selfie from my office and a friend emailed me to ask what books I had on the book shelf behind me. I tend to keep multiple copies of a set of books in my office and I happily give them to anyone that wants a copy. The books that I keep in there change slowly over time, but this is what I’m stocking today and why. These are in no particular order. You can see all of these on my technology management section on Bookshop.org.

Measure What Matters by John Doerr
This is a great introduction to OKR’s. Wether you adopt OKR’s formally or informally, it is worth reading to understand the mechanics and how various organizations have used this framework.

An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
This is a thorough and complete writeup of many topics related to managing and leading technology teams. Well written and useful information. As an added bonus, it’s an incredibly well designed and produced book.

Inspired by Marty Cagan
Insightful book that covers on the critical aspects of creating great products. Covers all of the aspects, not just building the software.

Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Wonderful book that highlights the power of checklists. Highlights what makes a good checklist and why. Must read.

Getting Things Done by David Allen
I’ve been using the GTD method for over a decade and routinely recommend it to people as a way to manage not just their work, but their whole life.

Agile Software Development with Scrum by Schwaber and Beedle
I have probably bought over 100 copies of this book over the years. I still reference it for those that want to learn about Agile and Scrum. I don’t remember how I was introduced to this book, but I’m very thankful I read it early on.

The New Leaders 100 Day Action Plan by George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check, John A. Lawler
This book was recommended to me by a friend when I joined SPS Commerce. It served as a great roadmap and absolutely helped me be more successful as I started as a new leader. I give this book to every Director and up that we hire!

Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
The story of Bill Campbell who coached some of the biggest technology companies in the world. This book provides some great insight into the role of a coach in business. By reading it, I think you can be a better coach too.

Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
Great overview of how a modern technology organization should run and deliver value.

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
System thinking is one of the most critical things for growing and changing companies to keep in mind. As managers you are often designing systems that people and processes operate in and around. This is a good entry level discussion of the topic, and will make you a better designer of those systems.

Radical Candor by Kim Scott
I enjoyed this book for it’s approach to candid conversations in the workplace and how to approach them.

Leadership Pipeline by Stephen Drotter, Jim Noel, and Ram Charan
Good book on thinking about leadership development from entry level manager to functional leader and enterprise leader. I like how this book is structured and the critical questions it asks the reader to consider.

The Goal: A Business Graphic Novel based on The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt with Jeff Cox, adapted by Dwight Jon Zimmerman and Dean Motter
The Goal is a classic book, and the concepts in it are one that many technology leaders may not have front of mind. The graphic novel is a fun way to make it even more approachable.

The Change Monster by Jeanie Daniel Duck
This book is a simple way to think about organizational change, and how to lead your organizations through it. I found this book when I was doing a lot of mergers and it was helpful to think about the process and the emotions associated with it.

The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within by Edward R. Tufte
I share this with people who want more information on why I’m so suspect of bullet lists and “PowerPoint thinking.”

I’ve had “When Breath Becomes Air” sitting at our cabin for a while, but decided to pick it up and read it on winter break. The book is a memoir by Paul Kalanithi told in two parts. The first part is his path through medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon, being close to serious illnesses, and dealing with death as a Doctor. The second part is after his cancer diagnosis with stage IV lung cancer, which causes his death within 18 months.

There were two things that struck a chord in me while reading this.

I kept thinking back to Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I’m sure it was in part because Kalanithi, like Gawande, is a Doctor. The first part of the book had many references to the Doctor’s perspective when diagnosing a patient with a terminal illness. This book did too. Being Mortal is a very different book, and one that I highly recommend reading, but this touched on similar topics with a more personal perspective.

The other thing about this book was more personal. It reminded me in so many ways of the path of my friend David Hussman, who passed away earlier this year. He had the same diagnosis, stage IV lung cancer. I’m pretty sure he even had the same EGFR mutation and received similar treatments. Similar to Kalanithi, he did remarkably well for a long while after getting treatment. Enough that you could kind of forget a bit. But the cancer is just held back a bit. I was wishing I would have read this book when I got it, as it would have given me some deeper perspective when talking with David.

I recently finished reading Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright and enjoyed it very much.

I appreciated how Wright connected ancient Buddhist concepts to modern psychology. His deconstruction of complex topics like essence and nothingness are well done and allow Western readers to connect to them easier. I would highly recommend this book if you are curious about meditation and the overall approach to mindfulness.

I’m trying something new, and sharing my highlighted passages from the book.

1. Taking the Red Pill

Page 8

Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

Page 12

To live mindfully is to pay attention to, to be “mindful of” what’s happening in the here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct way, unclouded by various mental obfuscations. Stop and smell the roses.

Page 14

Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.

2. Paradoxes of Meditation

Page 18

Technologies of distraction have made attention deficits more common. And there’s something about the modern environment — something technological or cultural or political or all of the above — that seems conducive to harsh judgment and ready rage.

Page 21

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

3. When Are Feelings Illusions?

Page 29

Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.

Page 33

This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

Page 40

cognitive-behavioral therapy is very much in the spirit of mindfulness meditation. Both in some sense question the validity of feelings. It’s just that with cognitive-behavioral therapy, the questioning is more literal.

4. Bliss, Ecstasy, and More Important Reasons to Meditate

Page 57

Noticing that your mind is wandering doesn’t seem like a very profound insight; and in fact it isn’t one, notwithstanding my teacher’s kind insistence on giving it a standing ovation. But it’s not without significance. What I was saying in that session with my teacher was that I — that is, my “self,” the thing I had thought was in control — don’t readily control the most fundamental aspect of my mental life: what I’m thinking about.

5. The Alleged Nonexistence of Your Self

Page 62

But, he notes, our bodies do lead to affliction, and we can’t magically change that by saying “May my form be thus.” So form — the stuff the human body is made of — isn’t really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies.

Page 63

So two of the properties commonly associated with a self—control and persistence through time — are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings.

Page 71

But once I followed that logic — quit seeing these things I couldn’t control as part of my self — I was liberated from them and, in a certain sense, back in control. Or maybe it would be better to put it this way: my lack of control over them ceased to be a problem.

7. The Mental Modules That Run Your Life

Page 96

Feelings aren’t just little parts of the thing you had thought of as the self; they are closer to its core; they are doing what you had thought “you” were doing: calling the shots.

Page 103

Feelings don’t just bring specific, fleeting illusions; they can usher in a whole mind-set and so alter for some time a range of perceptions and proclivities, for better or worse.

Page 104

If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life.

8. How Thoughts Think Themselves

Page 105

Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

Page 111

thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self.

Page 115

And I don’t mean just focus on whatever thought is distracting you — I mean see if you can detect some feeling that is linked to the thought that is distracting you.

9. “Self” Control

Page 135

The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you’ve exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it loosens enough, they’re no longer a part of you.

Page 135

RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment.

10. Encounters with the Formless

Page 143

As you ponder these words—formlessness and emptiness—two other words may come to mind: crazy and depressing.

Page 144

There is a pretty uncontroversial sense in which, when we apprehend the world out there, we’re not really apprehending the world out there but rather are “constructing” it.

11. The Upside of Emptiness

Page 166

But you could look at it the other way around. Given that our experience of a bottle of wine can be influenced by slapping a fake label on it, you might say that, actually, there is a superficiality to our pleasure, and that a deeper pleasure would come if we could somehow taste the wine itself, unencumbered by beliefs about it that may or may not be true. That is closer to the Buddhist view of the matter.

Page 169

And maybe this helps explain how Weber could say that “emptiness” is actually “full”: sometimes not seeing essence lets you get drawn into the richness of things.

12. A Weedless World

Page 176

For example, it’s common to think of criminals and clergy as being two fundamentally different kinds of people. But Ross and fellow psychologist Richard Nisbett have suggested that we rethink this intuition. As they put it: “Clerics and criminals rarely face an identical or equivalent set of situational challenges. Rather, they place themselves, and are placed by others, in situations that differ precisely in ways that induce clergy to look, act, feel, and think rather consistently like clergy and that induce criminals to look, act, feel, and think like criminals.”

Page 185

There is a meditative technique specifically designed to blur this line. It is called loving-kindness meditation, or, to use the ancient Pali word for loving-kindness, metta meditation.

14. Nirvana in a Nutshell

Page 219

These two senses of liberation are reflected in the Buddhist idea that there are two kinds of nirvana. As soon as you are liberated in the here and now, you enter a nirvana you can enjoy for the rest of your life. Then, after death — which will be your final death, now that you’re liberated from the cycle of rebirth — a second kind of nirvana will apply.

15. Is Enlightenment Enlightening?

Page 232

The experience of emptiness, like the experience of not-self, defies and denies natural selection’s nonsensical assertion that each of us is more important than the rest of us.

Page 232

Emptiness, you may recall, is, roughly speaking, the idea that things don’t have essence. And the perception of essence seems to revolve, however subtly, around feelings; the essence of anything is shaped by the feeling it evokes. It is when things don’t evoke much in the way of feelings—when our normal affective reaction to things is subdued—that we see these things as “empty” or “formless.”

Page 236

What happens to essence when we let go of our particular perspective—the perspective that the feelings that shape the perceived essences of things were designed to serve?

I think the answer is that essence disappears.

Page 238

That’s the thing about feelings, a thing that is particularly true when we talk about their role in shaping essence: they can render judgment so subtly that we don’t realize that it’s the feelings that are rendering the judgment; we think the judgment is objective.

16. Meditation and the Unseen Order

Page 252

And here is an interesting feature of a calm mind: if some issue in my life bubbles up, I’m likely to conceive of it with uncharacteristic wisdom.

Page 254

It isn’t just that you feel a little more relaxed by the end of a meditation session; it’s that you observe your anxiety, or your fear, or your hatred, or whatever, so mindfully that for a moment you see it as not being part of you.

Page 264

In case all this sounds too abstractly philosophical, let me try to put it in more practical form, as the answer to this oft-asked question: Will meditation make me happier? And, if so, how much happier?

Well, in my case—and, as you will recall, I’m a particularly hard case—the answer is yes, it’s made me a little happier. That’s good, because I’m in favor of happiness, especially my own. At the same time, the argument I’d make to people about why they should meditate is less about the quantity of happiness than about the quality of the happiness. The happiness I now have involves, on balance, a truer view of the world than the happiness I had before. And a boost in happiness that rests on truth, I would argue, is better than a boost in happiness that doesn’t—not just because things that rest on truth have a more secure footing than things that don’t, but because, as it happens, acting in accordance with this truth means behaving better toward your fellow beings.

Page 264

This is a happiness that is based on a multifaceted clarity—on a truer view of the world, a truer view of other people, a truer view of yourself, and, I believe, a closer approximation to moral truth. It is this fortunate convergence of happiness, truth, and goodness that is embedded in the word dharma

Notable how many references there are to “reviewing calendar” and looking at where time is spent. This is used repeatedly as a tool to assess if someone is focusing on the right work.

Alignment triangle seems like a good concept for reviewing the health of your business and the organization.

Tyler got Finding Winnie for Christmas this year and it’s a really awesome book. If your kid has any affinity to Winnie-the-Pooh they will love this book. Even if they don’t, it’s still a great book. Really well done and one of the better books for a bedtime story. Recommended!

My friend Dennys Bisogno just self-published a photo book on a trip that he and my other friend Steve LeVahn took to Iceland. It’s a free book in iTunes. Download it and take a look! Wonderful photos and a great virtual trip to Iceland await you. The book is called “My Travels to Iceland”.

I hope to join them on a future trip to Iceland, hopefully with our other friend Layne Kennedy as well!

Last night Mazie and I finished reading Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. I really enjoyed reading each and every poem to Mazie, and she thought they were funny, goofy and good.

I distinctly remember reading Where the Sidewalk Ends when I was a kid. They were likely the first poems I read. I even remembered some of them. Mostly I remembered having the book and the cover of it.

We were reading the 30th Anniversary edition so I was at the youngest 9 when I read it. It was a real treat to read it to my daughter and hope that she has the same recollection when she reads it 30 years from now.

My book club meeting tonight was just awesome. Highly recommend people read the book Money-Driven Medicine. Great discussion.

A while back at one of my book club meetings John Riedl mentioned the author Tracy Kidder. I expressed my ignorance and he was dumbfounded. “You haven’t read Kidder? Soul of a New Machine? You have to read it.” His conviction was strong enough that I figured I needed to read it and rectify this horrific literary gap. I finished it today, and really enjoyed the book.

To start with, Soul of a New Machine is not a technical book. You do not need to know anything about computers to read this book. Also, this book was originally published in 1981. This is a time when “super-minis” were just coming out and the computer industry was jumping to 32-bit architectures. This is four years before the introduction of the first Macintosh computer. I would recommend this book to my technical friends for the same reason I would recommend Steven Levy’s Hackers (1984), Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg (1990) or Out of the Inner Circle (1984). There is a great depth of history and culture in this book that is worthwhile and reminds us of the roots of our profession. We still see these roots playing out today in nearly all computer related industries. Thirty years ago it was displayed by wire-wrapping boards to make CPU’s, today it’s shown in mashups. The world of programming and computer engineering, despite what many might think, is filled with passion and creativity.

Soul of a New Machine chronicles the development of a new 32-bit computer from Data General called the Eagle (or the Data General Eclipse MV/8000). Kidder does an excellent job of telling a compelling story of how this machine comes to life and dives into the stories of the people that make it. He concludes that a computer isn’t just a machine, but represents the ideas and personalities of those that create it. He’s spot on.

Kidder illuminates the culture that has filled computer labs, computer science departments, technology, and now Internet startups for years. A born-desire to solve the unsolvable. The unstoppable desire to know how something works.

As I read Soul of a New Machine I could draw parallels to products that I had worked on in a variety of different roles. It was amusing to see that while almost all the tools have changed, so much of the “how” and the “why” has stayed the same.

I finished Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer this evening. It was enjoyable to both start and finish this book during our stay at Glacier National Park. Reading that much is just one of the joys of not having any television or Internet access in our cabin. I was excited to read this book after having watched the movie version of Into the Wild. My friend Kent lent me his copy of the book and it’s already been passed on to Tammy to read before returning to Kent.

First off, this is a really enjoyable book and just like the other Krakauer book I’ve read, Into Thin Air, this is a real page turner. Even a slow reader like myself can’t help but finish it quickly, picking it up at every opportunity to see what happens next.

For a full review of the book or to dive into it’s topics, check out the Amazon reviews or just read it yourself. I think most people will enjoy it.

The whole story of Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, really grabbed me. Kent and I talked about this at some length because he had the same reaction. His story is beyond interesting, and I find it impossible to think about his story without also reflecting on my own life. I think that there is something about the ferocity that Alex lived and dreamt that makes me, something.

That’s the thing about Alex’s story. On one hand, he’s incredibly selfish. His entire pursuit is so inwardly focused and causes a lot of pain for most anyone that got close to him. He goes completely off the deep end, and in the end loses his life foolishly. With some basic preparation and know how he probably would have survived his ordeal in the Alaskan Interior and nobody would have ever heard of Alexander Supertramp.

But even with those negatives, you feel a sense of admiration for the young man. A sense of pride. Or even a sense of shame for not having the courage or discipline to pursue something the way that he did, or even a fraction of the way that he did.

Have any of you read this book? I would be curious to know what you thought of it and what your reaction was. I think that Chris’ story is going to sit with me for a while.

I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s newest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. It is a well-written and well-researched book that dives into the Western diet and deconstructs it in three parts: The Age of Nutrionism, The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization, and Getting Over Nutritionism. I’ve heard this book referred to as the follow-on to his wildly popular The Omnivores Dilemma (which, in full disclosure I have not read, yet).

I found In Defense of Food particularly interesting in part because of my own view of food and how it has evolved. A decade ago I was completely clueless about food. If I was asked how many calories were in a cheeseburger I could have easily agreed with 100 or 4,000. I really had no idea. Then while focusing extensively on fitness and diet I started logging every bit of food that passed my lips. I was focused in a nearly obsessive manner (nearly? who am I kidding) on how many grams of various macronutrients I got and precisely how many calories I consumed. To put a point on it, I weighed my fruit on a gram scale before and after eating it to determine the precise intake. Yeah, that is obsessive.

This is not behavior that you can model forever and when I stopped doing it I learned that I hadn’t really learned how to eat, but instead had become a discipline of nutritionism. Nutritionism is not Pollan’s term, it was coined by Gyorgy Scrinis. The behavior and mindset that it describes though is the antithesis of the most basic suggestion on how to eat.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Those are the first seven words in Pollan’s book and admittedly you could stop reading there. The remaining 200 pages dive into the details of the Western diet and the issues with it. Pollan’s writing is interesting throughout and even the deeper dives into the roots of nutritionism are immensely interesting. He does a great job of highlighting for the reader just how much our food system has changed, and in most ways for the worse, in the last 70 years. This paragraph really hit me hard. I expected corn and high-fructose corn syrup to be the evil doer in this book, but the bases of nutritionism predates that trend.

Of all the changes to our food system that go under the heading “The Western Diet,” the shift from a food chain with green plants at it’s base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all. Nutritional scientists focus on different nutrients – whether the problem with modern diets is too many refined carbohydrates, not enough good fats, too many bad fats, or a deficiency of any number of micronutrients or too many total calories. But at the root of all these biochemical changes is a single ecological change. For the shift from leaves to seeds affects much more than the levels of omega-3 and omega-6 in the body. It also helps account for the flood of refined carbohydrates in the modern diet and the drought of so many micronutrients and the surfeit of total calories. From leaves to seeds: It’s almost, if not quite, a Theory of Everything.

Throughout the book Pollan deals with the challenge of arguing nutritionism while not falling into the logic arguments it naturally suggests. I was happy to see him recognize this later in the book, and I thought it appropriate. After all, to have a book that suggests that you have to stop looking at food as grams of chemicals, and then just suggests that you start gardening would be incomplete and unhelpful.

The undertow of nutritionism is powerful, and more than once over the past few pages I’ve felt myself being dragged back under. You’ve no doubt noticed that much of the nutrition science I’ve presented here qualifies as reductionist science, focusing as it does on individual nutrients (such as certain fats or carbohydrates or antioxidants) rather than on whole foods or dietary patterns. Guilty. But using this sort of science to try to figure out what’s wrong with the Western diet is probably unavoidable. However imperfect, it’s the sharpest experiemental and explanatory tool we have. It also satisfies our hunger for a simple, one-nutrient explanation. Yet it’s one thing to entertain such explanations and quite another to mistake them for the whole truth or to let any one of them dictate the way you eat.

This is the heart of Pollan’s message. Stop thinking of food as a collection of micro- and macro-nutrients and instead think of it in the whole. This obsessive push to the one thing that will save us is destroying us.

Pollan doesn’t spare the establishment in his analysis. Early in the book he outlines legislation passed in 1938 under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that required the word “immitation” appear on any food that was fake. I love the definition of this “…there are certain traditional foods that everyone knows, such as bread, milk and cheese, and that when consumers buy these foods, they shoudl get the foods they are expecting…” The sad thing is that nearly everything in the modern grocery store would have to be labeled immitation. The requirement was repealed shortly after enacted after protests from the food industry. Nobody apparently wanted to buy immitation spaghetti.

When corn oil and chips and sugary breakfast cereals can all boast being good for your heart, health claims have become hopelessly corrupt. The American Heart Association currently bestows (for a fee) its heart-healthy seal of approval on Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, and Trix cereals, Yoo-hoo lite chocolate drink, and Healthy Choice’s Premium Caramel Swirl Ice Cream Sandwich – this at a time when scientists are coming to recognize that dietary sugar probably plays a more important role in heart disease than dietary fat. Meanwhile, the genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute. But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

Pollan doesn’t leave it at just the food either, but the way in which we consume it. I was surprised by one of the statistics cited in the book, that 60% of McDonald’s revenue is made at the drive-through. A healthy meal is not consumed in your car. It may seem unachievable, but having a real family meal is a critical part of a healthy diet.

That one should feel the need to mount a defense of “the meal” is sad, but then I never would have thought “food” needed defending, either. Most readers will recall the benefits of eating meals without much prompting from me. It is at the dinner table that we socialize and civilize our children, teaching them manners and the art of conversation. At the dinner table parents can determine portion sizes, model eating and drinking behavior, and enforce social norms about greed and gluttony and waste. Shared meals are about much more than fueling bodies; they are uniquely human institutions where our species developed language and this thing we call culture. Do I need to go on?

Indeed he does not. In Defense of Food is a great read. If you question your approach to what you put on the table (or don’t put on the table), this is a good perspective on that challenge.

I just finished reading Moneyball. This book was recommended to me by a friend who really likes baseball and feels that it’s very odd that I don’t like baseball. You see, I love numbers. I love patterns. I love graphs. And according to Moneyball, baseball is all about numbers.

Moneyball was a really enjoyable book, and it succeeded in making me appreciate baseball a lot more and I will definitely enjoy the games even more. However, after reading it the main thing I was left with was how backwards the baseball establishment has been for so long. You mean that statistical analysis may help you determine how a player will perform? Wow. Stunning stuff.

The way Lewis writes this book makes it sound like there is a strict set of two camps. One that plays by look and feel, the other that plays by spreadsheets. I’m sure it’s not that simple, but it makes for a wonderful story and is very well written.

If you like numbers, and have much of any interest in baseball, you should take a read through Moneyball.

I recently decided that I needed to re-read this book as well. Similar to A Walk in the Woods, I’d been reminiscing about what a great book this was when I read it a few years ago, and then found myself reading all the Harry Middleton books that there were. His style of writing is unique, and has a pace that some would find frustrating, but I found relaxing and broadly enjoyable. In many ways he reminds me of Norman MacLean, and that is a pretty big compliment.

Earth is Enough is a book about living life simply. It is the recounting of Middleton’s boyhood years living with his uncles in the mountains. It brings out the beauty in the simple, and the wonderment of the basic qualities of life. The cast of characters in the book are larger than life, and all have a lessen to tell.

This is a truly wonderful read, as are the other books in the series (Bright Country, On the Spine of Time). I think this is one that you get more out of every time you read it. And please remember to slow down and enjoy it.

I think it was three years ago that I caught the Harry Potter bug. In a matter of a couple of months I had read the four books that were available and loved every page. Yes, it’s a kids book. But the story is just great.

I was very excited when the fifth book, the Order of the Phoenix, came out. I had pre-ordered it at least a year in advance on Amazon.com and it seemed like forever to wait. When I got the nearly 900 page tome I started reading it right away.

But then something happened. For the first time ever I wasn’t all that excited to read it and it sat on my nightstand for months. I finally picked it back up and got infected with the Potter frenzy again.

The book was a great read. Very enjoyable (even with a 6 month pause in the middle). Clearly the story is evolving to even bigger and bigger levels. Now the wait begins for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince!

My friend Phil recommended The Metablic Plan by Stephen Cherniske to me recently and I just finished reading it. After reading the first 50 pages I had to give him some grief for recommending this “overzealous” book on anti-aging however I recommend you do as I did and continue reading on. This book has some very good insight into the process of aging, what happens in your body and how you can fight off the negative (catabolic) effects of aging not with the intent of living forever but instead with the intent of enjoying your later years to the maximum of benefit.

I found the explanation of the aging process to be interesting and enlightening. I hadn’t taken into account the aspects of aging thinking not about me as an individual but the human race as a species and how we are programmed. This book would probably be lost on people in their 20s (you’ll live forever after all, right?) but for those in there 30s and with an eye on maximizing possibilities it is a good read. It’s also a good read for those in their 40s, 50s or 60s as much of the information can improve your quality of life at any time.

The author is a strong proponent of supplementing DHEA. I always get worried when someone is so vocally supportive of a supplement, however, he properly warns about dosage and when and for what purpose it should be used. Unfortunately, there will always be some fool that takes 300mg instead of the 25mg recommended and has some bad reactions.

Some links to information from the book (mostly for my benefit to refer to later!):

• American Board of Holistic Medicine
• Unigen Pharmaceuticals
• Abundant Earth
• Oasis Wellness Network
• Brain.com