Exherbo

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David MarquetMy rating: 5 of 5 starsI rarely read this kind of “professional career guide” type of book. They’re all too often fairly dry, are strongly dependant on the ... [More] cultural and social environment they’re based upon (e. g. US/Europe) and, honestly, range from “difficult to apply” to “impossible to adapt”.Luckily, this book is completely different! David Marquet tells us in plain words how he metaphorically “turned the ship around” from one of the worst to one of the top performers. I would never have believed that the military of all organisations was actually able to apply a culture of “thinking out loud”, (constructively) questioning orders and, generally, turn a culture of classic “command & control” into something much more open and productive.Marquet doesn’t ever preach, though, but expertly demonstrates each of his already simple-to-grasp (but not necessarily easy-to-implement!) points by telling us about how he actually implemented them on a nuclear-powered attack submarine.Not only does he display good general insights…»You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only. The world’s greatest problems will be solved by passionate, unleashed “volunteers.”«… but turns those into useful ideas which he is able to communicate clearly:»My definition of leadership is this: Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.«He also does away with some well-meaning but annoying misconceptions by some leadership approaches like “empowerment programs”:»Additionally, it seemed inherently contradictory to have an empowerment program whereby I would empower my subordinates and my boss would empower me. I felt my power came from within, and attempts to empower me felt like manipulation.«There are a whole lot of inherently simple ideas that Marquet drives home clearly and in a very well-structured manner while not forgetting about us, his readers, who usually appreciate a well-presented big picture. He writes clearly without frills and yet engagingly. I actually found his writing strangely attractive and pulled in.To actually put some of the ideas presented to the test, I “sneakily” applied some of the easier ones at work and was pleasantly surprised how well that turned out.When all is said and done, this is a really well-done book on leadership which I highly recommend for any kind of leader!Five out of five stars.View all my reviews [Less]

Such a Fun Age by Kiley ReidMy rating: 3 of 5 starsWell, this was a light read, indeed. The pages flew by and I felt entertained but, sadly, on a very, very shallow level despite the topics of racism, privilege and “class” differences. After a ... [More] rushed ending, it feels like the author simply bit off too much for her debut novel.Emira, our black protagonist, came across as devoid of any ambition, drifting mostly with the flow. She works for white influencer Alix Chamberlain and her husband, Peter. Yes, she loves her charge, young Briar – Alix’ and Peter’s first child – but even with Briar, Emira mostly remains strangely indifferent.Alix’ and Emira’s girlfriends are also rather nebulous figures who seem to merely exist as inconsequential side-kicks of the respective protagonist. They could have taken clearer roles in this novel but as it is, they remain “filling” material and mostly merely reflect their friend.The self-deceiving schemer Alix is written to be annoyingly over-the-top: While her actions still remain this side of plausibility, her motivations and justifications are way beyond – her “ruined” senior year is sixteen years in the past.In Alix’ self-perception she would long have risen above Kelley Copeland: a career, a merry band of adoring and cheering girlfriends at her beck and call, a very white husband, two children (one of whom she likes…) – in Alix’ bubble that would allow her to just write a Kelley Copeland gracefully off.All in all, “Such a Fun Age” was an amusing read but it’s leaving a rather bland taste because from all the ambitious topics nothing is truly looked into and, thus, the real issues remain unresolved.Three out of five stars.View all my reviews [Less]

Oystercatcher by Martin WalkerMy rating: 1 of 5 starsThis completely forgettable shortstory has Bruno in it but he’s not even near his beloved Perigord. He’s out to catch oyster thieves and for some bizarre reason Isabelle actively engages in ... [More] this tiniest possible case as well.Just skip this. I only read it for completeness’ sake.One star because there are words in this.View all my reviews [Less]

The Four Winds by Kristin HannahMy rating: 5 of 5 starsI had finished a nice-enough book and was looking for the next good read. My wife chose from my list for me and picked this one. She chose well.»Books had always been her solace; novels gave ... [More] her the space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.«This book drew me in, chewed me up and spit me out.If a book really “speaks” to me, I step into it. I stop being a reader and become a silent, helpless bystander, a powerless observer.Give me a book that’s well-written, serious and empathetic and I’m in trouble.Elsa lives in Texas during the Great Depression. Cast out by her own parents for “dishonoring” them (by conceiving a child without being married), she is forced to marry her child’s father and live on his family’s farm.»Elsa had discovered within herself a nearly bottomless capacity for love.«Against everyone’s expectations – hers not the least – she not only settles in but learns to love her new life. Until the circumstances force her to flee – with now two children and without the father who has left the family – to an uncertain future in California.»I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.… The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT«We witness how Elsa, her parents-in-law (whom she comes to love more than her birth parents) and her children struggle. This book breathes life into history; almost a hundred years later it makes you see and feel how harsh life must have been.»A fifty-foot zigzagging crevasse opened in the yard. Dead roots stuck out from the crumbling dirt sides like skeletal hands.«In fact, the entire first quarter of the book was outright painful for me. Almost overwhelmingly so. “The Four Winds” is so carefully, almost tenderly written, that Elsa’s emotions, her pain, actually reached me. I felt those emotions and the experience was stunning. Especially when things turned from bleak to worse.I wanted to quit, to drop this book, to get away from all that and just before actually quitting things at least changed. No god, no fate, no destiny, not a light at the end of the tunnel but there is a certain turning point when things start growing instead of declining.That’s when I realised those horrifying 25 percent had actually been worth it. There is no simple happily-ever-after for anyone in this book. There’s simply no room for that but what we do get – in spite of a somewhat open ending – is closure.All the terror and horror we’ve witnessed; deep poverty, catastrophe, death, all kinds of loss, it’s all worth it in the end. Elsa lives life as well as she manages to and rises far beyond her own expectations. Having been an observer of that was very, very exhausting but I still feel deeply affected and grateful for the unique experience.Kristin Hannah whose “The Nightingale” I loved and whose “The Great Alone” was a great book has managed to write an instant classic. A unique masterpiece that lets you not only experience the Great Depression Era but allows you to draw your own conclusions with respect to even modern economic systems…And even if you – like me originally – don’t care about the Great Depression (it’s long gone, isn’t it?); this book is worth reading on many levels.»Courage is fear you ignore.«“The Four Winds” is easily 2021’s best book and has more than earned its place among my favourite books of all time.Thank you, Kristin Hannah, for being a literary force of nature.View all my reviews [Less]

The Coldest Case by Martin WalkerMy rating: 4 of 5 starsIt was with great hesitation that I started reading this fourteenth Bruno novel. Instalments twelve and thirteen weren’t very interesting to read – both books felt like Walker was trying to ... [More] press the most absurd political issues into a nice mystery series.Bruno also acted often pretty much out of character, making severe mistakes, mistreating people – it read like Bruno wasn’t being himself.The cooking Bruno has always done was completely over-represented – you could literally have used all those pages as a verbatim recipe.In “The Coldest Case”, though, this is all gone! Bruno has a pretty good idea on how to freshly approach the unsolved murder of an unidentified victim decades ago and, as in earlier books in the series, this evolves into a believable, plausible plot that properly thickens, is well-paced and encompasses everything (and everyone!) we love about Bruno, Chief of Police!The cooking, for example, is still there but it doesn’t fill tens of pages but fits naturally into the story. Gone is the overbearing, meticulous, pedantic description on how every little thing is done but we do get to know how Bruno prepares his first vegan dinner.Everyone – the Baron, Gilles, Fabiola, Pamela, Jack – they’re all in this book once more and play their individual role. Yes, Isabelle is back, too, but she only plays a minor role and the drama is gone. Both Bruno and she seem to have somewhat moved on with their lives even though they still are fond of each other…Walker had some very nice, original and amusing ideas and he’s back in full creative force. His writing feels rejuvenated and it features a lightness that was missing from the previous two books.If you like Bruno, go on and get this one and just pretend that 14 immediately succeeds 11. Fourteen literally trebuchets Bruno back into my good graces!Four out of five stars.View all my reviews [Less]

The Atlas of Middle-Earth by Karen Wynn FonstadMy rating: 5 of 5 starsDuring my recent re-read of “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again” I remembered that years ago I had bought this “atlas” in order to immerse myself even more fully into ... [More] Tolkien’s world and to provide my children with maps to the adventures I was reading to them at the time.In this atlas, you’ll find brilliant maps in two colours that are in all aspects very fitting to their source material. You’ll find the maps sorted by ages as well as regional maps, e. g. The Shire, as well as maps relating to the books and, last but not least, thematic maps, e. g. landforms, climate, vegetation and population.It shows that the author is an actual cartographer because Fonstad’s maps feel real – like they were made by observance and not by obviously extensive research.“The Atlas of Middle-Earth” is an amazing feat and every Tolkien enthusiast should own a copy!Five out of five stars.View all my reviews [Less]

The Hobbit by J.R.R. TolkienMy rating: 5 of 5 starsWhat’s left to be written about “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again”, one of the great masterpieces of classic fantasy, written by the “founding father” of high fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien?“The ... [More] Hobbit” was lauded by Tolkien’s friend and fellow author C. S. Lewis, by poet W. H. Auden, celebrated for its influence on the entire fantasy genre.To me, it was the metaphorical door to new worlds… I own both several physical copies as well as several ebook editions. I have read “The Hobbit” in both English and German.The one edition I value the most is a German paperback by “DTV” from November 1974 with the title (mis-)translated as “Der kleine Hobbit” (“The Little Hobbit”).It has a ridiculous cover featuring a squint-eyed Smaug with butterfly wings and a tiny spider in front of him.It’s probably the worst cover in “The Hobbit”’s publication history.This very book, though, is the one my mother read about 35 years ago while we were on holidays in the middle of nowhere in the Bavarian Forest. I asked her what she so concentratedly read and she showed me the cover – I was appalled! A children’s book, obviously!And she even recommended it to me! To me! Someone who had OBVIOUSLY outgrown childhood at my advanced age of… ten!I harrumphed and condescendingly told her I had more serious things to do – like beheading the advancing army of stinging nettles with my stick-sword or fighting the fly amanita invasion!Only after my mother likened the house of our relatives which we were visiting to Elrond’s home (which wasn’t too far off the mark!), after her telling me about the dark depths of Mirkwood, only after all of that did I take her up on her offer and read “The Hobbit” for the first time.This is how I opened the doors to (high) fantasy for myself and Tolkien was followed by Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, Joel Rosenberg and many many others. I taught myself reading with Sherlock Holmes but I really started reading with “The Hobbit”.Since then I’ve read it many times for myself and always felt at home. When my children were old enough, I read “The Hobbit” to them every night and, to make it more “real”, I gave them laminated map print-outs from Karen Wynn Fonstad’s wonderful “The Atlas of Middle-Earth” for every step of the journey. For easier collecting, all three got a binder.I read to them every night and when we were finished with “The Hobbit”, we moved on to “The Lord of the Rings”. (Plus printed maps again, of course!)Sometimes, I was throat-sore, sometimes I read way past their bedtime but we had a wonderful time. I kept reading to them for many years. (If you wonder: The magic didn’t “stick” fully – none of them are true readers but at least they still own their binders of maps…)Now my children are adults and I’m back to reading for myself. For me, it was time for a return to the magical world Tolkien created. It was time to return to the cherished memories of my late mother and those reading nights.For YOU, though, it is now time to pick up a copy of “The Hobbit” and create your own memories.Five out of five stars – and two asteroids to beat: 2991 Bilbo and 2675 TolkienView all my reviews [Less]

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily HenryMy rating: 5 of 5 stars»“Um.” I try to think of how to explain it. Years of undying love, occasional jealousy, missed opportunities, bad timing, other relationships, building sexual tension, a fight and ... [More] the silence afterward, and the pain of living life without him. “Our Airbnb’s air-conditioning broke.”«Now, this was interesting. I had deliberately aimed low – I’m on holidays; in, at and around my pool. It’s 31°C (roughly 88°F) and I wanted a nice fluffy romance and, yes, I got it. The quotation at the beginning (in which Poppy, our heroine, explains how the happily-ever-after began) pretty much perfectly sums up this nice little romance.»“Ready,” I confirm, and Alex Nilsen sweeps me up into his arms and carries me down a motherfucking mountain. No. I really could not have invented him.«If it had just been that, I’d have been satisfied: I smiled at the amusing banter, the interludes of Poppy’s and Alex’ ten years of holidays were nice – it was an allround feel-good book at this point. For the absence of any smut I’d have subtracted a star and that would have been the end of it.Emily Henry, whose oeuvre I first sampled last year, reading “Beach Read” (and having felt underwhelmed by it), surprised me, though, by writing a travel-romance that actually celebrates home.Not “home” as in our birthplace; not “home” as in the place we live in or some region we’re from (although all of those have their merits). Ferdinand von Schirach, a German lawyer (of all people!), wrote in his glorious “Kaffee und Zigaretten” »Heimat ist kein Ort, es ist unsere Erinnerung.« (“Home is not a place, it’s our memories.”).Henry basically builds upon this idea: Both Poppy and Alex have known each other for more than a decade, have gone on holidays together for ten years and made the corresponding memories of and with each other. These memories also feel plausible because they’re rarely the huge, momentous ones but mostly comprise the little things, e. g. a tipsy mistake like “too many wine”.They have fallen hard for each other during this time and are afraid of that, of the “what-ifs”. They found “home” in each other but shied away from it.I was once on a short visit to a Dutch woman. She invited me to her house and, well, I somehow felt like I had… arrived. I was at home.It’s now twenty-two years later and I’m still at home. With her. Our adult children are out partying (vaccinated and all around responsibly) and hopefully finding home (this time the one we live in!).So this book kind-of hit close-to-home (sorry, couldn’t resist!) and while light and fluffy, it has a slightly more nuanced undercurrent and I like it a lot for that.Emily Henry says it best in the “Behind the book” part at the end:»This is, ultimately, a book about home. […] I hope this book carries you somewhere magical. I hope it lets you feel ocean breezes in your hair and smell spilled beer on a karaoke bar’s floor. And then I hope it brings you back. That it brings you home, and fills you with ferocious gratitude for the people you love. Because, really, it’s less about the places we go than the people we meet along the way. But most of all, it’s about the ones who stay, who become home.«It did for me.Unexpected five out of five stars.View all my reviews [Less]

Piranesi by Susanna ClarkeMy rating: 1 of 5 starsReading “Piranesi”, I mostly felt unbelievably bored: Piranesi lives in a house with infinite halls; some of them submerged, in some there is an ocean and all feature statues depicting people of ... [More] all kinds. Piranesi has developed a kind of faith based upon the house and how he feels it cares for him; even going as far as considering himself the child of the house.We witness Piranesi as he wanders the halls of the house; fishing, talking to birds, the statues and the skeletons of the other thirteen people Piranesi believes to have lived in the house and, consequently, in the entire world because to Piranesi the house is the world.There is one other living person in Piranesi’s little house – the Other! The Other is – like Piranesi – some kind of (pseudo-)scientist who devises occult rituals to find “Great and Secret Knowledge” and for years, Piranesi has almost religiously and unquestioningly followed the Other’s instructions, believed what the Other believes and catered to the Other’s whims.This is where my issues with the book start: Piranesi is extremely naive and only very late in the “story” starts questioning what he’s being told. He thinks of himself as a scientist but instead of actually applying scientific methods, Piranesi shys away from looking too closely at the facts as he comes across them.Piranesi is the archetypical “noble savage”; a wild human, uncorrupted by modern civilization, innocent and, thus, prone to deception. His house which he reveres as a deity – “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” – “gives him life” and Piranesi believes himself to be in actual communication with the house itself.This kind of glorification of one lifestyle which is perceived by a modern author as pure and unadulterated is something I absolutely abhor. Combined with the pseudo-religious elements and the absence of an actual story (I refuse to accept the poor excuse of “transgressive thinking” as one) this makes for the second-worst reading experience for me in 2021.One out of five stars.View all my reviews [Less]

by Daniel Jones Modern Love, Revised and Updated: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption by Daniel JonesMy rating: 5 of 5 stars»Because real love, once blossomed, never disappears. It may get lost with a piece of paper, or transform into ... [More] art, books, or children, or trigger another couple’s union while failing to cement your own.But it’s always there, lying in wait for a ray of sun, pushing through thawing soil, insisting upon its rightful existence in our hearts and on earth.«I recently watched the series “Modern Love” and – quite aptly – loved it. Since it was based on the New York Times column of the same name, I had high hopes there might be a collection of this column and that’s how I found this book which comprises about 40 of the most memorable essays from the column.I laughed, I cried and sometimes I did both at the same time. Some of the stories hit close to home, others deeply impressed me. Even right now while writing this and recalling some of the stories I’m a sniffling mess.The one defining quality of this collection of essays is its unapologetic honesty and truthfulness to its subject – love in all its forms.Whether you’re young or old, no matter the gender or sexual preference: Waste no time, get this book and read it.Five out of five stars and a place among my favourite books of all time.P.S.: To C., »He wasn’t really a texter anyway, so his lack of response didn’t necessarily reflect the weirdness of my text. It was probably normal for non-texters to see a text and not reply to it. They saw it, found it charming (or not), but didn’t think it required a response. Totally standard.« View all my reviews [Less]