What I Just Read

You are not a victim of the universe, but a part of it. --from Your Invisible Power, by Genevieve Behrend I've written before that Rhonda Byrne's The Secret left me somewhat disappointed with its derivative nature and overall superficiality, so I thought I'd attempt to go deeper into The Secret's subject matter by reading some of the primary texts Byrne used. I started with Your Invisible Power by Genevieve Behrend. Unfortunately, it was nearly incomprehensible. Not completely incomprehensible, mind you, but close. And while there's a lot of wisdom in this brief book, you'll need to wade through a fair amount of incoherent writing to get to it. It's a shame, because I think this book could be much better than it is--and if it were a better book, more people could get more value out of its pages. With that in mind, I'll try to help readers along by providing a brief roadmap of the best way to read Your Invisible Power. First, do not start at the beginn...

Chris Anderson is an excellent synthesizer of ideas. He's gifted at gathering and regurgitating information*, and he ties this information together with glib and highly readable prose. After finishing this book, however, I'm left with a dim view of Chris Anderson's thinking. He's an excellent writer, and he has a knack for capturing the latest and trendiest memes of the world of technology. The problem, however, is Free just isn't that insightful. Many elements of the book are nothing more than diversions from the book's central theme (typical examples: a three-page history of the number zero, a two-page summary of the widely-known story of Gillette and his razor/razor blade pricing model, unnecessary paragraph-long etymologies for everything from the word economics to the word zero , innumerable and laughably liberal quotations from Wikipedia, etc.). Yes, computing, processing, data storage and data transport costs are all in secular decline. Yes, that makes ...