Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Reasons to Stay Alive is a book by Matt Haig about depression. He talks about his own breakdown in his twenties and how he survived it.

It’s a short read. Not only is it a short book but Haig keeps the chapters very short too. He mixes up the content. Sometimes he talks about his personal story, sometimes offers a list up and sometimes presents it as a discussion across time with his younger self.

I did not learn anything, but I did identity with a lot of the content. As such, I think for someone coming into contact with depression and anxiety for the first time, it would be a valuable read.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich is a book by Tim Ferriss. It it he lays out his history of how we reduced his commitments and built a living from outsourcing everything to free up his time to live a fulfilling live.

He starts by laying out his vision for how everyone can do it. I was skeptical given how much of a classic self-help scam it sounded like it. I was full of promises about how great my life would be and case studies of people transforming their lives. I stuck with it because if nothing else, it was interesting.

Having finished it, I’m now sold though. This is a great book.

Ferriss makes some key points. Nobody really wants to be rich. What you want is a rich person’s lifestyle. Therefore having loads of money may not be required. Secondly, once you accept this, the aim is not to make loads of money. You just need to make enough money to cover what you want to do. Therefore the aim is to cover your costs with the minimum amount of time, thereby freeing up the maximum time for living.

He suggests doing this in a number of ways. Remote working for example. If you can get a remote working agreement, you can work anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. This is most of the world these days. Once you are out of the office you can focus on being productive and probably do your work in half the time (avoiding the half where you spend answering emails, sitting in pointless meetings and procrastinating).

Muse products are even better. These are small online retail businesses. You import a product in a tiny niche and sell it on for a large markup. You don’t compete on price because you are not bothered about building a huge business, you just want a revenue stream. Then you outsource everything – manufacturing, distribution, customer services. It then runs with very little input.

Finally, he talks about outsourcing your personal life. Get a virtual assistant, either in the UK or a cheaper one in India. Have them do your boring and repetitive tasks such as filtering emails, managing your diary, doing background research, paying bills and a million other small tasks.

He recommends not reading the news. I agree, and wrote about this last summer. He also advocates speed reading, which probably isn’t a thing. He reminds you of great strategies like reversal trials: it makes everything more palatable even though it is hardly ever switched back.

Of course just being able to think of a high-mark-up product in a forgotten niche is no easy thing. It reminds me a lot of the draw an owl meme:

The step is essentially “find the magic product” and that is never going to be easy. However, what impressed me about the book was its comprehensive advice as to how to do everything else. Want to know how to find suppliers, test the market with advertising then outsource distribution? It’s all in the book.

Ferriss gives details of all the companies, services and websites he uses. A bold thing to do in a world that moves so fast as your book will be out-of-date quickly. There are no abstract details here, it is all about exactly how he did it and practical strategies to implement.

How much of the stuff in this book I will actually be able to implement remains to be seen. Ferriss is clearly an intelligent guy with business smarts, and so replicating his success is a tough challenge. However, I was impressed and inspired by the message that it is possible to escape the 9-5. It is not the hollow book you might expect.

I am currently working on a printed version of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It has been a long time coming. Three years ago, when we launched the guide, I always wanted to do a print version. However, the logistics of doing so have been complicated. Multiple attempts have been made. This time though, I think we have the setup correct.

This proofs represent the first attempt. They have gone back with changes, so it depends on how that goes. However, it’s a good first step towards the end goal.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a book by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In it he talks about the challenges of producing real innovation to drive a start-up business.

He emphasises doing something new. You have to get a monopoly, with a broad scope. I could start a Finnish restaurant in Leeds for example but I wouldn’t have a monopoly. I would be the only Finnish restaurant in Leeds, but I would actually be competition with all the other restaurants in Leeds nonetheless.

In comparison the biggest tech start-ups typically have achieved near monopoly. Google handles more search traffic than all other search providers put together. The key is to start with a niche market that you can dominate and grow from there. Facebook started by only accepting students from Harvard for example. University by university it opened its doors one at a time and achieved domination. Similarly eBay started with only collectables, and PayPal started by online targeting eBay power sellers.

It also needs to be a business that can stick around. How sustainable is it in the long term? Decades from now? Zynga is a good example. The games company was worth a huge amount of money thanks to the success it had with FarmVille and Zynga Poker. At its peak, its shares were worth $10 a pop. Now they’re worth only a quarter of that because continuing to predict what social games will continue to captivate the world is an unreliable business model.

Thiel argues that you should have a small a board as possible. Ideally three people; a maximum of five. Everyone at the company should be full time: no consultants, no part time workers, no remote working. A start-up is a family and people need to be together every day to bond. Founders and CEOs should pay themselves a little as possible. This sets an example to the company, but also helps keep themselves motivated.

If you are thinking about doing a tech startup, or actually starting one, this is probably a worthwhile book to read. It is not very hands-on, but contains a lot of theory that seems useful. Given it is quite short, it seems like a sensible investment.

The Everything Store is a biography of Amazon and Jeff Bezos. It is written by Brad Stone.

It discusses Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography and it is easy to make comparisons between the two. Both seem demanding people to work out. IN fact, Bezos more so. Life at Amazon is painted as relentless. Bezos speaks out against work-life balance and seems to work every employee into the ground. I think I have come away being put off by the idea of working for Amazon.

This is an interesting contrast to Netflix. They claim they don’t care how long employees are in he office for as long as they do good work. How true that is in practice I am not sure though it is true that they do not track the amount of holiday staff take (you can take as much as you want), which suggests they do have a relaxed policy. Netflix have of course been hugely successful as well.

It also makes me wonder whether you have to be a bad guy to succeed in business. Though successes such as Richard Branson would suggest there are alternatives.

Bezos is a man driven to build The Everything Store. He wants every product to be available immediately for customers. This is why Amazon sometimes drifts away from selling directly (Amazon auctions, Amazon marketplace) but often comes back to fulfilled by Amazon. They want to be able to control the whole customer experience, just like Apple.

Amazon itself appears in a mixed light. It is an innovative company. It did a great job of bringing together online retail. Look inside the book, search inside the book, super-saver delivery, prime, affiliates and recommendations were all developed or popularised by Amazon. It was the first to get e-books correct with the Kindle, and its purchase of Audible has helped audiobooks as well. KDP and CreateSpace allow you to publish directly onto Amazon. Not to mention Amazon Fire, Amazon Web Services (AWS), A9 and the many technology fronts Amazon has. In terms of market share, AWS is huge and probably under-appreciated on that list.

Amazon’s core retail business has always been about books. Bezos has a passion for books, which probably partly explains why they have been so successful. Compare this to music where Apple dominated. Stone correctly points out that Steve Jobs loved music, whereas Bezos had no interest in it. Even when you have a giant corporation behind you, it would seem you still need to do things with passion to succeed.

Bezos does embrace the same view as Jobs in disrupting your own company. I love the Jobs quote, if you don’t cannibalise your own company, somebody else will. This is exactly what Bezos wanted with the Kindle: he told his team to destroy Amazon’s core market of paper book sales. This had worked out as one of Amazon’s biggest successes.

They are also a relentless competitor. Like Walmart they are willing to stomach major loses to drive competitors out of business. They don’t treat their suppliers well either. Something I experienced first hand when publishing the Leeds Restaurant Guide. Amazon give me only around 30% of the sales price, whereas Apple give me 70%.

Getting an insight into Amazon’s logistics was fascinating. For example, super-saver delivery. I had lazily assumed it was that they used some kind of cheaper, slower delivery. Not necessarily so. The idea behind it is that they don’t even get it out of the warehouse until they have spare capacity. You might get lucky and they will have capacity straight away. Or you might not.

There is also the complexity of delivery. How often have you bought a USB stick and it turned up in box the size of a microwave? It’s amusing for the customer (ignoring the environmental effect, which we should not). However, for the business, putting the right products into the smallest possible packaging is actually an important part of cost-saving efficiency.

In some ways, Amazon could be seen as a bit of a mess. In the conclusion, Stone talks about how Amazon often has poor communication between departments and effort is also often duplicated. However, the company uses these things to their advantage. Different projects compete with each other on their own internal market, like their search routines did, with the best one surviving. Often companies are desperate to avoid duplication, but maybe it is not always that bad.

After we were both completely sick of curries, having eaten nothing but curry for about a month, Elina suggested pies might be a suitable next topic. Having enjoyed Paul Hollywood’s book on bread, his book on pies and puddings seemed like an excellent choice.

The first section of the book takes you through making pastry. I have tried most of them. Shortcrust and hot water crust are okay, but ruff puff is my favourite. I now substitute almost any pie pastry with ruff puff now because it is so tasty. I have not tried full puff, because I cannot be bothered to wait around eight hours for it to be ready.

The second section of the book looks at pies. This typically calls for you to make a pastry from part one, prepare a filling and combine the two. The Thai chicken pie is our favourite so far. My raised game pie worked well too, though it was heavily waited to the game I could get down the market. I don’t even know where to buy buffalo from, so I did the buffalo and ale pie with beef and it worked fine.

The puddings section has been less well used but I did make a concerted effort to give at least half a dozen of them a go. They tasted fine but often looked less than brilliant. For example, here are the fruit pies I made for New Year’s Eve. This was my third attempt.

For posts about the recipes I tried from this book, see my attempt at short bread whiskey dodgers and my selection of pies. Looking back, none of them look that neat. Thankfully, they all tasted good.

In River Cottage Light & Easy Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall presents recipes that are healthier than his normal stuff. Everything is wheat-free and dairy-free and comes with icons to mark recipes as suitable for vegans and 20 minutes or less. A welcome sight for a series of books that often involves long and drawn-out recipes.

The book is divided into breakfast, baking, soup, salad, fish, meat, veg, fruit and treats. It follows the standard River Cottage book format of having a page for the recipe and a full page photo opposite. This, perhaps more than anything else, is why I like the series.

This book has inspired me less than Veg Every Day and River Cottage Every Day. Some recipes have been popular though. Soups in particular: the fragrant Asian broth is wonderful for a light meal and the swede and bacon soup proves that you can actually make swede enjoyable in certain situations.

Fish was the other section that managed to catch my interest. Th fish and tomato curry was simple enough to make, as was the mackerel, spinach and spuds. In fact, most of the dishes are simple and true to the title “easy”. Beef and bashed beans and minted lamb with green beans spring to mind.

Whether it will stand the test of time as a cookbook that I reach for often remains to be seen. Perhaps the real test will be when summer returns, and we’re looking for lighter meals. It has provided us with some nice dishes already.

I have tried a selection of the bread recipes in River Cottage Every Day, usually with success. This inspired me to take it to the next step with Paul Hollywood’s book on bread. I have had the book for ages but never got round to writing it up.

It covers a wide range: starting off with classic breads like bloomers, then moving through to soda breads, flatbreads, continental breads, sourdough and enriched breads.

For each type of bread, he first gives the recipe for the bread itself, then gives a recipe for using the bread in a meal. He claims he wants to put bread back in the centre of the table. A nice thought, though I must confess that it has had little effect on me. I just make the bread, and rarely use the bread-related recipe.

The bloomer has found the most regular rotation in our kitchen. I can probably do it without the recipe now, which is rare even for dishes I do regularly. The naans and maneesh have also become popular. I haven’t been sold on the soda breads or different kinds of grains though. I made them, but they are not to my taste.

Some of the continental breads I have had to skip. Hollywood says it is incredibly difficult to do by hand, so you really need a mixer. Hence why every combination I have had with my friends over the last month has invariably drifted to whether I should buy a stand mixer and which one to get.

I tried the sourdough starter too, but with little success. It did not produce tasty bread and ultimately went mouldy.

For individual posts about the breads I have baked from this book see rye and ale and the bottom half of this selection.

The Curry Bible is a cookbook on curry and curry-related food, surprisingly. That seems like a clumsy way to subscribe it but I am not sure what the best way is. It is not just Indian as it covers curries from other cultures as well, and goes beyond curries with a selection of other good, kebab for example. I can’t say Far East though, because that might suggest things like sushi or Chinese. Anyway…

It’s pretty good. Ironically, I found the curry recipes the least helpful. They are difficult to get right. It often tells you to reduce them, and sometimes gives a time, say an hour. In my experience this does not work though: you still come out with a very runny curry. The most success we have had with them is doing them in the slow cooker all day.

The non-curry recipes have been more successful though. The Vietnamese pork has found itself onto regular rotation in our kitchen, and a few other dishes repeatedly pop up too.

The section on sauces is also very useful. If you want to make a Thai red curry sauce rather than using a jar for example, the book will gives you instructions on how to do it.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is a novel by Douglas Adams. It is the second book in his Dirk Gently series.

I tried reading the novel a few decades ago and never got very far, so it was nice to make a fresh (and successful attempt). In between a saw the BBC TV series, which was fairly entertaining.

I was so-so on the novel. The humour and wordplay was very good. I found myself laughing at several points. However, I was not as much of a fan of the story line. Why are gods suddenly wandering around? It seemed an odd combination of fantasy, detective and humour. It was okay, but no h2g2.