What’s the hardest part of reading? More often than not, it’s picking a good book. “L’embarras du choix,” as we say in French: Presented with infinite options, it becomes very hard to make a decision. That’s why recommendations are so helpful.
And who’s best placed to recommend books than people who, you know, write books? With this in mind, TechCrunch+ contacted a handful of authors whose work is closely tied to tech and startups. We asked them a simple question: “What book have you read this summer that you think others might enjoy?”
We heard back from:
- Adam DuVander, author of “Technical Content Strategy Decoded”
- Phil Rosen, author of “Life Between Moments: New York Stories”
- Adi Polak, author of “Scaling Machine Learning with Spark: Distributed ML with MLlib, TensorFlow, and PyTorch”
- Andrew Lee Miller, author of “The Startup Growth Book: 50+ Proven Ways to Scale Your Business Without a Marketing Budget”
- David Kadavy, author of “Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters”
- Sarah E. Brown, author of “Lead Upwards: How Startup Joiners Can Impact New Ventures, Build Amazing Careers, and Inspire Great Teams”
- Zeke Faux, author of “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall”
- David Spinks, author of “The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community Your Competitive Advantage”
- Purna Virji, author of “High-Impact Content Marketing: Strategies to Make Your Content Intentional, Engaging and Effective”
From fiction to practical guides, from very recent books to a century-old one, here are their picks.
The responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Adam DuVander
After a recent book explaining why generic marketing approaches don’t work on software developers, developer marketer Adam DuVander is now back with “Technical Content Strategy Decoded,” a more actionable follow-on explaining what companies should and shouldn’t do.
Book recommendation: “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles,” by Steven Pressfield
I re-read “The War of Art” this summer. Again. I return to this book because it describes the life of anyone creating anything — and that is most of us. Our greatest obstacle is not ourselves. Pressfield gives us a scapegoat in resistance and a game plan to transcend its grasp.
Phil Rosen
Phil Rosen is a journalist and the author of two books, “Everywhere But Home: Life Overseas as Told by a Travel Blogger” and “Life Between Moments: New York Stories,” a collection of 12 short stories about the Big Apple.
Book recommendation: “Forever: A Novel,” by Pete Hamill
This is a brilliant novel about an immigrant from Ireland who arrives to New York in the 1700s, and is quickly granted immortality under one condition: He can never leave Manhattan.
It’s a beautiful, tragic story that’s effectively a history of Manhattan through one man’s eyes, and it’s similar to “Forrest Gump” in that he’s always in the right place at the right time through historical events.
Originally published at techcrunch.com