Meetings meetings meetings by Simon Ramo is one of the funniest books ever.
Ramo, one of the co-founders of TRW, member of many boards and inveterate and expert meeting-goer-toer, recounts how he came to write "Meetings meetings meetings" as a kind of cocktail party accident. Asked "and what do YOU do?" he somewhat flippantly said "I go to meetings. In fact, I'm a world expert on going to meetings." Upon reflection realizing that he had attended about 40,000 meetings of various kinds, he proceeded to set forth his accumulated wisdom of how to approach, prepare for, conduct, and comport onesself in meetings, what to do when people fall asleep (or if YOU are the one who falls asleep) in meetings, and many other fascinating and (if you attend meetings, which I do not) valuable topics. Worth reading for the dry wit alone. I can hardly wait to read Ramo's book on tennis, even though I rarely play.
I'm making record-setting progress on my 2009 New Year's resolution not to buy any more books until I finish the ones I'm currently reading. (My ingestion of "Meetings" took place over the course of several years.) In fact, so far this year, my only purchase from amazon.com has been the whistling teakettle last seen boiling water in this week's "Monday movie".
Indeed, I'm even getting rid of books at a steady pace, having just sent Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (about a private detective with Tourette's syndrome) and Carol Muskey-Dukes' "Channeling Mark Twain" (about a poet who teaches poetry to female inmates at New York City's Riker's Island jail) to a sick friend in hospital who hails from the New York area. I've often felt that a mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity with the region of a story adds immeasurably to its pleasure.
And that is why I must like "Mac OS X, The Missing Manual" so much: it has the perfect mix of familiarity and unfamiliarity! Let me tell you about my favorite 17 pages of this five-hundred-page book. It's the section on Spotlight, the built-in search facility that you bring up with the command-spacebar key combo. First I typed the phrase "kind:app" (excluding quotes) in to Spotlight, and scrolled through all the applications available, to get to know them by name. Then, I used spotlight as an application launcher, by typing in, for example "mail.app" and starting the mail program. I think that's the single tip I have used the most from that book, starting up Spotlight with the single command-spacebar combo.
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