Foolish Reads: Friday 7-31-09
As usual, we’ve got more books on our nightstand than we can possibly finish. Here are a few we’re making a sincere effort to finish this week. (Click the titles to find the cheapest copies anywhere.)
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell continues to radically reinvent our understanding of the things we take for granted. Is success about hard work, timing, or some lucky combination of both? Quote from this Q & A with Gladwell:
6. What’s the most surprising pattern you uncovered in the book?
It’s probably the chapter nearly the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from—that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it’s something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years.
The Richest Man Who Ever Lived by Steven K. Scott
Scott went from a massive failure to a massive success, and he credits the change to King Solomon’s Proverbs. This book parses the underlying rules (the “laws of living”) that invisibly govern all aspects of life. It will be interesting to see how this book and Outliers speak to each other.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
This one I have yet to begin, but it’s supposed to be a fresh take on the gods of ancient mythology, a favorite subject of mine from long ago.
Your Haiku Entries by You
Today at midnight is the last time to submit your entries for the 2009 Hot Tomato Haiku Contest. Don’t miss out!
What are you reading?
The Mid-Week Link-Up (7-29-09)
Still trying to decide whether to make this a regular feature. What do you think? Here are some links we loved this week. (Each pops into a new tab.)
Books
- The Perfect Bookstore. A cheeky look at the future of books.
- Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business Part 1. (And PART 2). NYT looks at the future of book publishing.
Entrepreneurship
- When is it time to get that next puppy? When are you ready to expand into new lines of business?
- Meetings Considered Harmful. Why limiting meetings might be good for productivity.
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. How meetings can be harmful for makers and doers.
Technology
- Introducing Internet Garage Sale. eBay/Craigslist with people you know.
Just for Fun
- The Hot Tomato Haiku Contest 2009: This is the last week to enter. Spread the word!
- Foolish Ideas. We’re keeping it way Foolish over there. Submit your own here.
Come share your Foolish Ideas with us.
Hot Tomato Haiku Contest: 2008 Winner
This year’s Hot Tomato Haiku Contest is really heating up. We’d like to say a special thanks to our friends for helping spread the word on Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, and everywhere else.
We also just took delivery of the file containing last year’s entries and winners. Last year’s contest did not use the same categories, but there was one overall winner. Unfortunately, the file does not include the names of each entrant. We have no idea who submitted what. If you see your haiku in this list, would you email us so we can credit you?
Without further ado, we present some haiku from last year’s contest, including the overall winner.
The Entrants
frost in the forecast –
my neighbor’s tomato plants
wear grocery bags
seedy part of town
ripe with saucy folk in red –
East Nashville August
Indian summer –
tomatoes splitting their skins
on neglected vines
color has odor
just touch a tomato plant
you will smell fresh green
I hate tomatoes
I think they are very gross
It’s opposite day
summer lake picnic –
her children eat tomatoes
whole, one in each hand
Blossom rot you scourge
My Silvery Fir for naught,
O temp’rate dog days
The Winner
Salmonella suspect
The jalepeno’s scapegoat
Vindication now
Monday Morning Misc. 7-27-09
Hello fellow Nashvillians. That’s right, my family and I have finally, officially moved to Nashville. We now have all the Fools in one town. As we get settled in, I should be able to once again contribute the occasional long-form blog post about books, entrepreneurship, and everything else.
For this morning, a few notes and updates:
Humankind
Our friends at Humankind, a non-profit thrift shop dedicated to providing school uniforms for refugee children in the Nashville area, had a big benefit this weekend. You can still donate to support their mission. A full blog post on Humankind is coming soon.
Alexander Heard
Vanderbilt Chancellor Emeritus Alexander Heard died this weekend. Here’s one of his quotes from the University’s press release:
“The university’s obligation is not to protect students from ideas, but rather to expose them to ideas, and to help make them capable of handling and, hopefully, having ideas,” Heard had said in 1966.
Well said. Why do we have so much trouble with this even today?
Summer Buybacks
Our summer buybacks are fast-approaching and we’ll be sharing details about them soon. As an experiment, we’re hosting 3 buybacks in the Nashville area this summer. If they go well, we will roll out to other locations next summer.
We want our students to have the most opportunities to get the most money for their books. See you soon!
Lots More Happening
Of course, that’s just the tip of the Foolish iceberg. Development continues on Bookstore Beta (“The ugliest bookstore in the Southeast!”), and we Fools will be visiting our favorite independent used bookstores this week for inspiration.
We’re also looking at prints of our new T-shirts this week and are continuing our preparation for the Tomato Art Fest on Aug. 8th.
What are you up to this week?
Sneak Peek: Bookstore Beta
Remember that new warehouse space I mentioned in this post?
In that post (and in others) I hinted at a special, super-secret surprise. Well, loyal readers, here it is: BookFool.com is opening a used bookstore in our new space.
It’s called Bookstore Beta and it will probably be the ugliest bookstore in the Southeast. The whole project is a wild experiment in location, branding, and whether East Nashville will support a used bookstore. Hence the name Beta, which denotes an experimental product released to the public before it’s completely finished.
As you can see from this old newsletter (scroll down to Book Fool Looks to Retool), opening a bookstore has long been a dream for Kris. Bookstore Beta will be a space where we can experiment with that dream and see if it has legs. All for a few hundred bucks. We already have the space, the books, and the workers. Why not throw in a couch and some shelves and see what happens?
It ain't much, but it's home!
I put up a quick site using Yola over at BookstoreBeta.com. As you’ll see, we’ve decided to keep it Foolish and be totally honest about this store’s assets and limitations. The location isn’t great, so we’re guessing that only the adventurous will find us. We’re ok with that.
We’re also aware that Bookstore Beta will not represent a premium experience in book buying. We have free coffee brewing, but we have no formal coffee shop. The shelves will be either particle board or homemade. We may not even categorize our inventory!
A used bookstore that’s rough around the edges won’t appeal to everyone, but it appeals to us. Oh, did I mention our incredible prices? Because we have no regular employees, no janitorial staff, and no coffee shop, we don’t have to mark up our inventory to cover those expenses. So we got that goin’ for us, which is nice.
We’ll also buy your used books for a fair price, lend you most any book for a few weeks, and let you hang out all day on our garage sale couches. And for students, if we have a textbook in stock, you can borrow it for use in the store.
Bookstore Beta opens officially in August. More updates to come before then.
2009 Hot Tomato Haiku Contest
How is it possible I haven’t blogged about this yet? Too busy promoting it, I guess!
BookFool.com is now hosting the Hot Tomato Haiku Contest, a part of the burgeoning Tomato Art Fest in East Nashville. This is the second year of the contest, begun in 2008 by Melissa Duke Mooney, who passed away earlier this year. Her husband Neil says her original idea was to bind tomato-related haiku into a tomato-shaped book. When life got busy, however, the project morphed into a haiku contest, which drew hundreds of entries.
We’re thrilled to be sponsoring the contest in Melissa’s honor this year. It’s the perfect mix of Foolishness, literary aspiration, food obsession, and local pride. Oh, and did I mention the grand prize is an iPod Touch? Five category winners will receive gift certificates to local shops, and we’re considering a 6th category for haiku submitted during the festival.
Much more info is available at the Contest page here. This year’s deadline is July 31st. Enter today!
PSST!
Would you do me a huge favor and tell your people about this contest? Post it to Facebook, email it to friends, and/or print the flyer and hang a few up at your work. Anything you can do to get the word out would be most appreciated.
Foolery from Jeanne: Life’s Too Short to Play by ALL the Rules
At the bottom of our About Us page, you’ll notice I put out a call for your Foolish stories. Jeanne of the lost garden of senua blog has taken me up on the offer:
My favorite foolery is a small toy my boyfriend bought for me. It turns off TVs at a distance within 5-52 seconds. The toy absolutely ROCKS. When i go in for chemo (I have inoperable colon cancer), i turn off the TVs in the adjoining rooms. And i routinely turn the TV off while my children are watching a movie. Because i haven’t told them about the toy; they think there’s something very wrong with the TV.
I’ve got one of those devices as well. MUCH fun and highly useful in noisy restaurants that insist on playing a dozen TVs on every channel.
My second favorite tomfoolery is our bell. You know, the type that you ding to get the attention of the desk clerk who is paying no attention to you while talking to a friend on her cell while you wait patiently to check into a hotel. We take one with us everywhere we go. That way we have one when there isn’t one. Clerks and people behind counters everywhere are baffled by the bell. They didn’t put it there; it wasn’t there when they waited on the LAST person. Periodically we leave the bell if we think it is needed and buy a new one.
Let’s all start carrying a bell around. My favorite line, though, is in her sign-off:
We do other things too because life is too short to play by ALL the rules.
I think we just found our next T-shirt slogan. Thanks for sharing, Jeanne! Keep it Foolish.
Tweak the Message: BookFool.com Bookmarks
Once again, we need your help. Our readers have been so helpful in deciding on shirt designs and truck names, we would like you to take a crack at a slogan for a bookmark we’re printing.
This bookmark will be distributed to students at the beginning of the Fall semester to encourage them to go online and use our handy book search to find the cheapest textbooks anywhere. It will have our logo and web address on it already; we just need to decide what language to put under the logo.
Would you go simple and straightforward? “Click for the best book deals anywhere.”
Or perhaps hit them with a question: “Looking for the best deals on books?”
Or even subversive: “Stick it to the bookstore at bookfool.com”
If you could write your own, what would it say? What would you say to encourage a student to give BookFool.com a try?
Please reply in the comments. Your help is greatly appreciated.
Fools on Motorbikes
We have the wildest warehouse workers.
They embody the spirit of Foolishness. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.
