Four More Books

In mid-November, I completed my 2015 reading goal of 20 books. I've added four few more since then to close out my reading year. One thing I embraced this year was to let go of books that did not really interest me. I just leave them unfinished which I used to hate doing. Now I feel ok about it because I was able to divert my time towards more compelling choices.

How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery by Kevin Ashton

As a technology pioneer at MIT and as the leader of three successful start-ups, Kevin Ashton experienced firsthand the all-consuming challenge of creating something new. Now, in a tour-de-force narrative twenty years in the making, Ashton leads us on a journey through humanity’s greatest creations to uncover the surprising truth behind who creates and how they do it. Creators, he shows, apply in particular ways the everyday, ordinary thinking of which we are all capable, taking thousands of small steps and working in an endless loop of problem and solution. He examines why innovators meet resistance and how they overcome it, why most organizations stifle creative people, and how the most creative organizations work. Drawing on examples from art, science, business, and invention, from Mozart to the Muppets, Archimedes to Apple, Kandinsky to a can of Coke, How to Fly a Horse is a passionate and immensely rewarding exploration of how “new” comes to be. (From Goodreads)

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira

Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to the dead—to people like Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, Amelia Earhart, and Amy Winehouse—though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating the choppy waters of new friendships, learning to live with her splintering family, falling in love for the first time, and, most important, trying to grieve for May. But how do you mourn for someone you haven't forgiven? (From Goodreads)

Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She also lectures widely on autism—because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from the country of autism. Writing from the dual perspectives of a scientist and an autistic person, she tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges inThinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulf between her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of our common identity. (From Goodreads)

This book gave me a better understanding of how people with autism think differently and how they process sensory inputs differently. Eye-opening for sure.

Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs

This is the third and last book of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children. I read the first two a while back so it was a challenge getting into the story again. Once I started recalling and piecing together the details from the last book, it flowed better. I read this one primarily because I needed to know how things ended and I'm glad that it was a satisfying ending.