Rating: 8.4/10. The Business of Venture Capital: The Art of Raising a Fund, Structuring Investments, Portfolio Management, and Exits by Mahendra Ramsinghani A comprehensive guide to how the world of venture capital works and what it takes to be successful as a VC. The job of a VC is to take money from investors, identify…
All Book Reviews
Historical Atlas of Vancouver by Derek Hayes
Rating: 7.8/10. Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley by Derek Hayes Atlas containing about 350 maps of Vancouver and the surrounding regions from the first European settlements until about 2000. Vancouver is a relatively young city: it was still covered in dense forest as late as 1885 but rapidly grew into a…
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Rating: 7.6/10. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz Book by tech CEO and venture capitalist, founder of the Andreessen-Horowitz VC firm. The first part tells the story of his role as CEO of Loudcloud and Opsware. His company ran into trouble during the…
Real Estate Investing in Canada by Don R. Campbell
Rating: 6.9/10. Real Estate Investing in Canada: Creating Wealth with the ACRE System by Don R. Campbell Book about how to get rich investing in real estate and renting it out to others. By following a methodical strategy, you can achieve your “Personal Belize” — grow wealthy enough to retire in the Caribbean and do…
Assessing Vocabulary by John Read
Rating: 7.9/10. A classic book-length survey about vocabulary testing: the research literature, design considerations, and its usage in education. Many linguistic questions lie at the core of vocabulary testing and don’t have clear-cut answers, like what counts as a word family? (eg: socialize and socializing should probably as a single word, but socialism is quite…
The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris
Rating: 8.4/10. The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure, 2nd Edition by Randy Allen Harris Book about a period in the history of linguistics around the 1960s-1970s, when a “war” was being fought in theoretical syntax. Linguistics tries to study how form is linked to meaning, but there are many theories about…
21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph
Rating: 7.4/10. 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality by Bob Joseph A fairly short book (main text is 100 pages) recommended by my manager, about Canadian-Indigenous relations while focusing on the Indian Act. Indigenous topics have been popular in the news recently…
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rating: 7.7/10. A romance novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author. The story is set in a coastal town in Colombia in the late 19th century. The novel starts with elderly doctor Juvenal Urbino and his wife Fermina Daza attending a funeral; Urbino falls off a ladder while reaching for his parrot and dies; immediately…
Running Lean by Ash Maurya
Rating: 8.0/10. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya Guide on early stages of a startup, recommended by Hussein Fazal (CEO of Snaptravel). Many new founders assume building a startup is the same as building a product, but in reality, you are building a business model, with the…
Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition by VanPatten, Smith, Benati
Rating: 8.1/10. Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction by Bill VanPatten, Megan Smith, and Alessandro G. Benati Linguistics textbook about second language acquisition, covering key questions such as: Does L2 acquisition use the same processes as L1? Is input or output more important? Can L2 learners become nativelike or is there a critical…
The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
Rating: 7.8/10. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef A lot of psychological research has shown how we’re prone to cognitive biases, although less has been written about how to overcome them. Many of these biases result from deciding on some opinion and holding onto it, even…
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Rating: 8.3/10. One of the most influential philosophical essays by English philosopher John Stuart Mill, written in 1859 and espousing the values of individual freedom. It has since served as a foundational work for liberalism and many of its principles have been adopted into democratic societies. Mill argues that society tends to force the preferences…