Book review: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

March 18

Much has been said, written, blogged, posted, tweeted, bitched, and heralded about Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, and it’s all happened in about a week. If you’re interested in exploring every inch of the positive and negative debate, turn to your old friend Google: it will not disappoint.

Because the issue of women in executive and leadership roles in still an incredibly incendiary topic, many decades after women started speaking up about being treated equally in the work place. That Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, not only brings this issue to light but calls us out as a country for even still having this issue – “The blunt truth is that men still run the world” – is only reason number one why this was a truly important read.

This is one instance where I’m going to very plain about my opinion: I loved this book. It spoke to me as both a woman and a professional. It addressed topics that have bothered me deeply in recent years, some of them more quietly than others, but all of which have had real and lasting impact on my daily life, my livelihood, my self-confidence, my ability to do my work, and my capacity for leading others.

Not everyone will love this book, I know that absolutely, but maybe it’s not about loving it, but hearing – really hearing – the message it contains. As Sandberg writes, “We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.”

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on my own copy of this book.

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Book review: Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

January 16

There’s no other way to say it: I geeked out hard on Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson. (Like many other periods in my life, an inadvertent theme emerges in my reading: this one seems to be centered on all things technology, and I am enjoying it to the nth degree.)

The perfect mixture of adventure, politics, magical realism, and fantasy, to call this novel a thriller isn’t quite right – but only because the word seems too small to convey the myriad threads of its plot and the equally complex tapestry of its themes. Our hero is the title character, Alif, a hacker for hire whose great talent is the moral flexibility to help anyone online who seeks to protect their anonymity under the tremendously forceful cyber-surveillance of an oppressive (and unnamed) Middle Eastern regime.

Add in a rare ancient text, a parallel world of magical beings, a love story, some torture, a time-sensitive race to see who can create the world’s first quantum computer, and more escape scenes than you can count, and you have yourself a fabulously entertaining action movie folded between the covers of this book.

And yet, this is also a novel that tackles the ever-complex ideas of religion, freedom, technology, information, belief, art – everything that makes us civilized and everything that threatens the very meaning of civilization at the same time. Wilson’s gift is her ability to make us care deeply about these things, and treating us to one hell of an adventure along the way.

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on a copy of the book that I borrowed from the public library.


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Book review: The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 2

January 2

“Yes, we’re sinking. But can you hear that wondrous sound?”

Like its predecessor, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 2 by hitRECord, Joseph Gordon Levitt and wirrow is a strange little creation: part found journal, part children’s book, part poetry. But unlike Volume 1, this edition’s editors  – or more accurately, its creators, since a surprising number of the Lilliputian stories here were written or co-written by wirrow, and yes this person’s name is spelled with a lowercase “w” – seemed to have developed better taste.

Or maybe the submissions were better this time around. Maybe word got out about this unique collaborative art project and more people wanted to participate. I’ll probably never know, but I can live with that, because these stories are at once beautiful and strange, with less sadness and more joy, complemented by charming illustrations.

“There are some things you should know. I don’t know what they are, but they’re out there.”

Isn’t that lovely? These tiny stories asked me to suspend my disbelief for the brief time it took to read, but I was a willing traveler on the road to these little fictions, these little truths and dreams.

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on a copy of the book that I received from the publisher.

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