My August Reading List

The last few weeks have been great for getting some serious reading done. I’ve been on vacation, a business trip and ‘home-alone’ while my wife and kids visited family in the north of Scotland.

So its only right that I share what I’ve been reading or listening to book-wise. Here goes:

Democrat to Deplorable by Jack Murphy

I’ve known Jack Murphy for almost as long as I’ve been blogging at This Dad Does. We started our blogs at around the same time and have both definitely grown a lot in that time.

I’ve linked before to Jack’s well written and well thought out blog posts (this is a highlight)

This book is an account of Jack’s struggles of male identity, ideology and political mindset in an environment that has challenged everything he’s held dear. It’s not a political treatise – more of an attempt to reconcile the anachronisms that he feels having been a die-hard Obama voter who ‘switched sides’ in 2016 – along with an estimated 9 million others who did the same.

Murphy has faced real pressure and persecution for his stance and beliefs, much of which is documented in this book but even since then, he’s been ‘SWATTED’.

Democrat to Deplorable is a heartfelt, well written book by someone who has sought answers and often failed to find them.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

This book had sat on my Amazon wishlist for a while but with a few Audible credits to spend, it was time to become fully committed.

Kelly goes through a number of technological advances and forces and explains how they have and will change our future. Sometimes it’s a bit scary, especially when he describes a near future that feels like it’s here already.

These include:

• Virtual reality
• Artifical intelligence
• The Internet of Things
• The On Demand Economy

The section on ‘On Demand’ is one of the most fascinating. Our kids will never know what the video rental store was or know what it was like to cycle the 15 minutes to get there, choose your quota of VHS tapes (I think three was my limit) and cycle back the 15 minutes to home. Once I walked in snowdrifts when the buses were off. Now they just click the remote and BAM! – more movies than you could watch in a lifetime.

On Demand book publishing has transformed writing for people like me. A few years ago I could never have had a self published book without shelling out thousands – now you can do it for a few pounds or dollars.

One disadvantage with a topic like this is that the book feels dated already having been released in 2016. It predates the Crypto boom of 2017 and a few other technologies that have advanced quickly in that time. That said, it’s truly worth buying, even if our children will laugh at the outdated technologies identified as ‘futuristic’ in a few years time.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

“How was your book?” my wife asked, as I put my bookmark down and closed the cover – the eternal sign of a finished volume.

“I can safely say that is the weirdest book I’ve ever read.” I said, staring into space.

I wasn’t joking either. Snow Crash is like an acid trip into a future that may already be here – although it would have felt a long way off in 1992 when it was written.

Some of Stephenson’s writing seems to have uncannily predicted the future of technology to the extent that I suspect the cult following of the book has inspired some of the tech and terminology we’re now familiar including:

• Google Earth (developers admitted Snow Crash was an inspiration for developing this).
• The use of Avatars as an online presence.
• Crypto currencies.

Other less easy to explain apparent ‘predictions’ include the European refugee/migrant crisis among others.

I don’t read a lot of fiction, and it might be a while before I read something like this again, but I came to this book from a good recommendation and with an open mind and I wasn’t disappointed.

And if you like books, have you bought my book A Father’s Mission? It’s available in both eBook and paperback formats.