Paul Grenyer

The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien ISBN: 978-0007523221 I read the Lord of the Rings when I was about 8, having loved the BBC radio play starring Michael Hordern as Gandalf. Of course I wanted to read the Silmarillion too, but was always told it was hard going, which put me off. Then I tried it in my early 20s and didn’t get past the first few pages. Today, at (nearly) 46 I finished it. The Silmarillion is hard going and, for the most part, unpleasant to read. It’s mostly the language used and that it reads more like a technical history than a story. It’s quite repetitive with battle after battle and no real progress for good or evil.  There are so many different names and places and this makes it difficult to follow. It gets better around Beren and Lúthien.  Where it really gets interesting, and more enjoyable, is when it reaches the Third Age and there’s more about the rings of power and the characters I’m more familiar with from the Lord of the Rings....

The New One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson  I rarely read a book more than once (unless it’s set in Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space Universe), but this is the third time I’ve read the New One Minute Manager, and It’s not just because it’s a quick and easy book to read, with clear, concise digestible advice. Many years ago, when I ran my own business, I was working with the conflicting practice of asking my employees to assume that everything was ok unless I said otherwise, and the desire for them to be happy in their work. This meant that most of the time feedback was sparse and, when it did come, it was predominantly negative - although I didn’t operate a blame culture. The New One Minute manager has quite a different approach. Now that I’m leading a team again, I read it through to remind myself of the approach. I’m currently experimenting with the One Minute Goals in a software engineering context. I use something similar to the One Minute Praisings ...