For most people, Brave New World is required reading while in high school. I wasn’t one of them. But after reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, I decided it was time to pick-up Aldous Huxley’s classic, almost 30 years after my high school graduation. There were just too many references to it in Postman’s book to ignore.

I was a little concerned as I ventured in given what I heard others say, including my own kids. Still, it felt like the right thing to do, and it was. I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I was blown away by Aldous Huxley’s ability to foreshadow the homogenization of society due to the effects of mass media. It made enough of an impact, that I added Brave New World Revisited to my 2015 reading list. I wanted to get more insight into Huxley’s point of view and how it influenced the writings and concepts in Brave New World.

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Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manpiulator had a profound impact on how I view and consume modern media. It’s an eye-opening account, many times from a first person point of view, of how the general public can be manipulated, coerced and deceived through clever marketing tactics. It is a book that I regularly recommend to people who are interested in understanding modern marketing. One of the books which Holiday references for additional reading is Daniel J. Boorstein’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Given how much I liked Trust Me I’m Lying, I felt The Image would be worth reading.

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For months, my nemesis, the Amazon recommendation engine, kept recommending Off to Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer. Since I’m not a big fan of the fantasy genre, I resisted the urge to see what it was about. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and when I realized the book wasn’t a Harry Potter style book about sorcery, I figured it was worth adding to my reading list. It certainly didn’t hurt when it showed up on the Amazon Daily Deal list.

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Three of my primary criteria for putting books on my 2015 reading list were recommendations from trusted sources, sampling “classic” sci-fi authors, and avoiding book series. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow fit all of these. It was recommended by one of my favorite authors, William Hertling. It is by a renowned sci-fi author. And, although it is the first in a series, it reads perfectly fine as a stand-alone story. Needless to say, I was anxious to pick it up and was happy to see it at the top of my reading list.

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Through the course of my recent business readings, a recommendation appeared to read Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. I’m not sure which book it was, although I suspect it was one of the Lean Series books. Either way, the book was presented as a marketing classic that had a timeless appeal to it. Since I’m all about substance over style, it sounded like a book that would be right up my alley. Plus, being a marketer at heart, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to brush up a bit on my marketing skills.

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