It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Hey there!  Welcome to It’s Monday, What Are You Reading!

I love being a part of this and I hope you do too!  As part of this weekly meme I love to encourage you all to go and visit the others participating in this meme. Fair warning… this meme tends to add to your reading list!

I just returned this afternoon from being gone all weekend for our College Sons graduation.  It was an excellent time but I am wiped out so I am hopefully going to keep this short and sweet 🙂  Here is what I posted this past week:

The Storied Life of A J Fikry – there is something about this story…

Blogger Recommend for May – are you signed up to receive this awesome monthly guide?

The Accidental Book Club by Jennifer Scott – it had me at “book club”

The Memory Garden by Mary Rickert – fantastic fantastical reading on the power of flowers

Straight Flush by Ben Mezrich –  great listen, the movie 21 was made form this true story

Bob Harper Skinny Meals – delicious recipes!

How Do You Receive Advanced books for review?

 

Not a bad week, thanks to a few reading times I did have a run on books and a couple more yet to review and a couple I should be finishing up in the next few days.  The plan for this week is:

For My Ears

 

From Ed Catmull, co-founder (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar Animation Studios, comes an incisive book about creativity in business—sure to appeal to readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath.

Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”

For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable.

As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the thirteen movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as:

• Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better.
• If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
• It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them.
• The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
• A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
• Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.

 

 

Twenty years ago, one man’s murderous rampage destroyed his own family . . . and devastated a community. Now the only survivor – his daughter – tells her story at last.

On April 14, 1989, for reasons still debated today, Mexican immigrant RamÓn Salcido went on a violent rampage in the idyllic Sonoma Valley wine country where he lived and worked. In the course of just two hours, he killed his wife, Angela, her two younger sisters, his mother-in-law, and the man with whom he suspected Angela was having an affair. He then slashed the throats of his three young daughters – four-year-old Sophia, three-year-old Carmina, and twenty-two-month-old Teresa – leaving them for dead in the county dump. A little more than a day later, the bodies of his daughters were discovered. Miraculously, tiny Carmina was still alive and able to tell her rescuers, “My daddy cut me.”

In Not Lost Forever, Carmina Salcido explores the events surrounding these headline-making murders with extraordinary clarity and composure. Reaching back to understand the events that traumatized her in childhood – and weaving them together with the recollections of detectives and witnesses – she reconstructs the story of her father’s crimes, and their aftermath, in sobering detail.

Yet Carmina’s story doesn’t end there. Those who remember her as the tiny victim of these murders will also be shocked by what followed: how she was adopted by a Catholic extremist family who tried to change her name and bury her past; how she tried to escape their sheltering influence by joining a Carmelite convent and then a ranch for troubled girls; and how the psychological trials she endured along the way nearly broke her spirit – until, at last, she found peace by turning to the one relative still alive to share her grief: her grandfather.

As a young woman, Carmina returned to California to share her experiences and discover the family that was brutally taken from her. The devout Catholic also returned to look into her father’s eyes on death row and confront the man who took away her entire family. With clear-eyed candor, courage, and grace, this brave young woman takes readers along on her miraculous journey of survival, discovery, and hope.

 

I dont think I will add any books, I still have last weeks to finish 🙂  What are you reading? Please add your Its Monday What Are You Reading post link below where it says click here.

 

 

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