First, if you’re planning on coming to WordCamp and you haven’t reserved your ticket yet, you should do so soon! It helps us with planning, catering, coffee, swag, and budgeting.
Second, I LOVE reading. While I try to alternate between business books and fun books, it’s summer and I do a lot of light, pool-side or airplane reading 🙂
The most recent business book I read was The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan.
But my favorite books this past six months have bee by Rick Riordian — yes, the kids books! My kids have been hooked on the books. They love them… and read a lot slower than I do, so I read all five books in the Percy Jackson series, follow by all five books in the Heroes of Olympus series. This way, we could talk about the books, the story lines, and the characters as the kids moved through them. Plus, they’re just really great, light stories that you can finish very quickly.
To get some new book ideas, I asked our speakers to share the last they read with us. Hopefully, you’ll find one or two that stand out for you too!
Here are our speakers’ book recommendations
- Matt Vanderpol: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.
- Carrie Forde: Crimes Against a Book Club by Kathy Cooperman — gotta love Kindle Unlimited.
- Adam Silver: The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin.
- Andrew Taylor: Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam M. Grant
- Amanda McCoy: I love graphic novels. At the moment I’m reading The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui and Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet. They are both really good.
- Justin Sainton: Profit First (second time through) by Mike Michalowicz.
- Bridget Willard: Rising Strong by Brené Brown.
- Ben Byrne: My dad just finished a first draft of a young adult novel; I’m reading it now to see if it’s any good!
- Sallie Goetsch: Just finished a string of Jamie Sedgwick steampunk novels and am reading a mystery series by Abigail Keam. I read almost entirely genre fiction, with a few professional books thrown in.
- Tessa Kriesel: Fargo — I was born in Moorhead so I figured I better see what the hype is all about. I don’t like it.
- Cat Scholz: You mean listening to? Because I don’t have time to read anything. The last book I read was My Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun.
- Ben Ilfeld: Death’s End by Cixin Liu.
- Margaret Andrews: The Mechanic’s Tale by Steve Matchett.
- Jason Cosper: Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.
- Heather Hogan: Logan’s Run by George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan
- Matt Cromwell: Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy Book One) by Jeff VanderMeer — but I just finished the first two books of Themis Files by a new novelist: Highly Recommended!
- Treighton Mauldin: Fullstack React: The Complete Book on ReactJS and Friends.
- Kim Shivler: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and listening to 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall.
- Cory Miller: The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation by David Robertson.
- Cameron Rhudy: Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories From Book History by J.P. Romney and Rebecca Romney.
- Chris Lema: What’s your Presentation Persona? by Scott Schwertly & Sunday Mancini.
- Terri Webster Schrandt: Me, Myself, and Lies: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Jennifer Rothschild. The Nuts and Bolts of MailChimp by Barb Drozdowich. Lei Crime Series by Toby Neil.
- Ivan Villa: Dune by Frank Herbert.
- Dorothy Kern: I’m in between but I love to read. My favorite author is Dean Koontz.
- Sarah Wefald: I just finished Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
- John Locke: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz.
- Jen Miller: Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.
- Bill Conrad: The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow.
- Amber Hewitt: Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk.
- Adam W. Warner: Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather.
- Mike Fitzpatrick: Art of Scalabilty by Martin L. Abbot and Michael T. Fisher.
- Leslie Staller: The Front Row Factor: Transform Your Life with the Art of Moment Making by Jon Vroman.
- Vasken Hauri: Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web by Wayne Lewis and Jeff Lowenfels