Staff Reads

Books We Recently Fell For

Jeff Kolesky: I meant to read Let My People Go Surfing about 10 years ago when I first learned that Yvon Chouinard had written a book about his experience founding and running Patagonia. Somehow I let a decade slip by as I read a series of other books by similarly-minded business owners like Paul Hawken and Gary Erickson, as well as more traditional business books. I’ve finally read it, and I found many of the lessons and much of the perspective had become conventional knowledge. I was pleased to read the stories unique to the founding of Patagonia and get a better understanding of Chouinard’s conceptual graduate degree: MBA — management by absence. My favorite part of the book is the word “yarak” — a falconry term that describes when a bird is hungry but alert, strong, and ready to hunt. Chouinard uses the concept toward applying just enough external stress to his team to make them achieve great goals. Which reminds me… I need to go eat.

Scott Forman: I finished reading Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation last week, and I loved it. It was very fast and very strange. The form — a long chain of fragments — is like no other novel I’ve ever read, and at first I was skeptical, maybe even a bit annoyed. But was soon entranced. There are vivid images, jumbles of song lyrics. There are dizzying shifts in point-of-view — it veers into the second person and then back to an impersonal third. The central character is known only as “the wife,” and even though it seems at first to be somehow impersonal — fragmentary, prismatic — there’s a narrative that sneaks up on you and you wind up caring about this character deeply.