Tacoma Reads Together Author here on Sunday!
William Kamkwamba, author of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, will be in Tacoma Sunday at 2:00 at the downtown Tacoma library to speak about his story. More information here at the Tacoma Reads Together page. If you haven't read it yet, don't worry! You can still listen to the author, then read it, then participate in one of the other many events taking place over the next month.
Some interesting happenings in the self-publishing world
These last couple weeks, there have been two things that have really caught the attention of publishers and author. 1) Amanda Hocking. She's 26, and she's self-published 9 novels to the Kindle. As of this month, she's sold more than 1 million books that way. Even at $2.99 or less per book, which is what she's charging, the general assumption is that no publisher could offer her a better deal than what she's getting from Amazon. 2) Barry Eisler. He's a New York Times bestselling author, who writes spy thrillers. He turned down a $500,000 advance from a publisher in Read more…
Looking for something to read?
This is the Tacoma Reads book! I was looking back and I can't believe I haven't mentioned it here. It's a non-fiction book by William Kamkwamba, a teenager in Malawi. After a devastating famine, he taught himself electrical theory from a library book, and built a windmill on his family farm. It powered a lightbulb, then two lightbulbs, and eventually a water pump, that allowed extra growing seasons, ending a cycle of poverty. The author of the book will be here on April 10 to share his story. It's a great read! More here at the Library's website.
Wednesday too
Big day! Lots to do, so a short morning post. I recently read Seth Godin's new book Poke the Box, which is about the importance of tinkering, poking, and playing with ideas. But even more than that, it's about the importance of starting. Initiating. When I spoke in front of the Entrepreneur class at UWT in January, that was my message to them as well. People think the job of an entrepreneur is to come up with ideas. It's not. It's to start things. Poke the Box was a good reminder to myself of the same thing I'd told the Read more…
About Jenga
I’ve recently gotten very interested in game design. If you want a fascinating 28 minutes, Jesse Schell presents at a DICE conference about the implications of games invading real life. There are many examples, but one of them would be the recent trend toward states allowing banks to give lotto-like benefits for savings. It’s something I’ve been paying a lot of attention to, and I’m glad. Because if it hadn’t been for that, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the book About Jenga by Leslie Scott. Nearly forty years ago, Scott created Jenga. She created it and, crucially, named it. I really enjoyed Read more…
James Monroe | The White House
via whitehouse.gov James Monroe was the last of the Virginian Presidents who were 4 out of first 5 presidents. He was also the last President to have fought in the Revolutionary War. Mostly, we remember Monroe now for the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted that no other power could interfere in the American hemisphere, and for dying on the 4th of July. But the biggest thing that happened during his tenure as president was the Missouri Compromise. (Historical and very short background: Missouri wanted to be a slave state, but free states were worried about the expanding influence they had in Read more…
We are a world of readers … McSweeney’s on global literacy
At the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, nearly 60 percent of about 3 million American adults could read1 but in the following 19th and 20th centuries, literacy rates in America grew rapidly. In 1870, almost 80 percent of 38.5 million Americans were literate and by 1940, almost 95 percent of 131 million citizens could read. Now, nearly 294 million Americans of about 300 million are literate and most children can read by the time they’re six or seven. According to the Census Bureau, 25-34 year-olds are now the best educated group of Americans: nearly 58 percent have some Read more…
A writing update
As I said before, The Marinara Murders is simmering in a drawer, waiting for me to pull it out and edit it. If all goes as planned, that will be next Saturday, where I try to read the book all in one sitting. I'm very excited to re-read it and see how I did, but in order to know that, I need some distance from it (which is why I've waiting more than 7 weeks since I finished it. But I've also decided that the best way to get a little distance from the book is to start the next Read more…
The Hunger Games Trilogy
After a bunch of recommendations, I read The Hunger Games trilogy. These are Young Adult books, and they are violent, bloody, disturbing … and also impossible to put down. The books really are pretty brutal. They make the deaths in Harry Potter look light by comparison, and the Hunger Games heroine Katniss makes Twilight's Bella Swan look pretty weak too. But it's framed in such a way that it pulls you in rather than drives you away, which is an impressive feat considering the subject matter. And the author lets her characters wrestle with the morality surrounding the violence. I don't Read more…
Looking Ahead to Twenty Eleven
These past few days I've been in Madison WI and St. Louis for some New Years cheer with Mary's family. I haven't posted much here because I've been finishing off a lot of thinking and a lot of reading. The reading and thinking has primarily been around 3 main topics: technology, creativity, and innovation. In pursuit of those topics, I've been reading a bunch of books, watching a bunch of TED talks, and then thinking about what it means for my own life and work. I have come to realize that I really really like creating things. These "things" could Read more…
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