Spolier alert – if you haven’t read Nexus, or are in the middle of it, be aware that there are a few mild spoilers in this review of Crux. In case you’re wondering, the short summary is that I didn’t enjoy it as much as Nexus, and it didn’t make my must read list.

While browsing my lengthy Amazon wish list recently, I noticed that Crux, the sequel to Nexus by Ramez Naam, was available. I thoroughly enjoyed Nexus, so I figured Crux would be worth a read. I was curious to see where Naam was going to take the story and the technology.

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Over the summer, a friend of mine (Andrew Schmitt) told me about The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. Since I’m running a software development shop these days, he thought I’d find it interesting, especially since it was written in the same format as The Goal and Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. For anyone not familiar with Goldratt’s work, this means the book is a fictional novel that contains relevant concepts, teachings and lessons that can be applied to business. In the case of The Phoenix Project, the story is about the IT division of an auto parts company . The business concepts are about how to more efficiently develop and release software projects.

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Since my last two reads, Dust and The Last Firewall, were books from a series I was very familiar with (and liked a lot), I decided it was time to start something new. Forging Zero by Sara King had been on my wish list for a while, so I figured it was worth a shot.

The premise of the story is built around Earth falling under alien control. The aliens draft the planet’s children into their army by kidnapping them. The children they choose are all under the age of 10, except for a few older “recruits” in the early teens who are chosen as a means to demonstrate to the younger ones what happens if you step out of line. Only one of these older recruits survives, a fourteen year old named Joe Dobbs. When the children are numbered by the aliens for tracking, he is given the number zero, which becomes his nickname.

From there, the story focuses on their trek from Earth to the alien planet that serves as their training ground. Throughout the training, King expands on the characters as they are hardened into soldiers. The book is an interesting study of human motives, our drive to survive, our need to be rewarded, and our desire to be accepted by our peers. Eventually, a series of events that are foreshadowed throughout the story (and that I won’t spoil) take place forcing Joe to step forward and develop into the leader that he is destined to become. His nickname Zero, combined with the events of the story, make the name of the book, Forging Zero, a great choice.

The development of the environment and the characters are the strong suits of this book. King spends a lot of time creating an alien world that can be taken forward into future stories, which she has through the series The Legend of Zero. She also spends a lot of time describing the characters to help you develop an emotional attachment to them. As I found out in the afterword, It turns out to be the goal of the publisher, Parasite Publications. As they put it:

…we want to produce memorable, sympathetic characters that reader will still be thinking about years after finishing our books.

Overall, Forging Zero is well written and a good story, but I wouldn’t put it in my must read category. The story drags a bit, and it takes a while to learn the slang, euphemisms, alien types, and technical terms that King uses throughout the book. Many times, I found myself unsure of a term or phrase, but I didn’t want to go back and try to find it to understand the meaning. Eventually, by the second half of the book, I was comfortable with the environment that King created, but it made the beginning of the book hard to get through. In fact, it was one of the few times that I considered putting a book aside and starting something new. I’m glad I didn’t, because it was worth finishing.

Bottom line, if you’re looking for an interesting sci-fi book that is focused more on the characters than the technology, then Forging Zero would be a good book to pick up. Since I like a more balanced approach that engages my imagination through the technology, I’m planning to move onto to a different series and away from The Legend of Zero.

It had been a while since I last read a business book (The Wide Lens by Ron Adner). I was looking to find a little inspiration to get me through to the end of the year, so I decided to pick up The Startup Playbook by David Kidder. To be fair, I wouldn’t consider The Startup Playbook a book. It’s a collection of interviews that Kidder has with successful entrepreneurs in which he lets them offer up their best advice for startups. At the end, Kidder provides “The Best Advice”. It’s a collection of excerpts from interviews in the book divided into “The Best Advice” categories such as Boards, Business Operations, Culture, Leadership, Marketing, Raising Capital, Sales and more.

Kidder interviews over 40 people for the book. Some of the notables included are Steve Blank, Matt Blumberg, Jeff Bussgang, Steve Case, Chris Dixon, Reid Hoffman, Ben Horowitz, Tony Hseih, and Elon Musk. Overall, I found the quality of the interviews and advice varied widely. Some were hard to get through, while others left me wanting more. Of the 40+ interviews, a couple that stood out to me were the interviews with Elon Musk and Chip Conley.

Musk’s story stood out due to what drives him. As he puts it in his interview:

I’ve always treid to be involved in things that will impact the future of humanity and have a good effect on the world. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about whether my ideas were the best way to make money.

I also found he had one of the best pieces of advice in the book:

I’m always surprised when people think they can make a great company without having a great product. The most important thing an entrepreneur can do is focus on making a great product or service.

I found the interview with Musk to be inspiring and only wish that it could have gone a few more pages. It also gave me a whole new respect for ventures he is involved in and his desire to truly make a difference in the world.

The reason I enjoyed Conley’s interview can be summarized in one word – passion. It’s obvious that Conley’s passion is to “create joy”, as he puts it. He has taken an idea that the industry downplayed, the boutique hotel business, and transformed it with Joie de Vivre Hospitality. As with Musk’s interview, I found it inspirational as it spoke to the passion that I recognize one has to have to build a successful business.

The other thing that I got out of The Startup Playbook were pointers to further reading and resources. A few new books made it to my ever expanding Amazon Wish List which I hope I will be able to get to at some point in 2014.

I like reading stories and lessons learned from other entrepreneurs, particularly if it can help me to learn and understand what it takes to succeed or how to avoid making the same mistakes others have made.  However, as I mentioned earlier, I found The Startup Playbook to be of mixed quality and wouldn’t put it into my must read category of books.

If you’re interested like I am in reading entrepreneur stories and about lessons learned, I recommend that you pick up Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston first, and then The Startup Playbook. The overall quality of Founders At Work is better, and the interviews are more focused on the entrepreneurs and their stories. I also liked that Livingston focused on both successful and unsuccessful ventures as well as those of varying sizes.