This is a wonderful tonic for the malaise of being overwhelmed with the things in the world that require change. He gives you encouragement to believe that you can, should, and will take action. Without, your soul begins to fade, and most people don’t like it when that happens to them.

This has been on my bookshelf for about 10 years. I’ve been away from short-story fiction for a while and seeing this re-kindled my interest. And Stegner is such an artist, each story is like a small jewel.

This one had to grow on me, as I started out listening to it in a distracted state of mind, but it’s finally hooked me. The story itself is interesting – the interplay of people and cultures in British colonial India of the 1920’s – but the storytelling is masterful. In fact, this is one where listening to the book was hard, because the arrogant, snooty British attitude came across so strongly in the narrator that I almost gave up. Now I’m glad I didn’t.

We know books can affect us, so why not ask what books affected the writers of the books that affect us? And don’t just for any old “good” books they liked, but the ones that MOST affected them. It’s good to hear that such choices aren’t any easier for them than they might be for us, and the results are great reading.

This is a great book for historical and technical background on the blogging world. It seems to be trying to straddle two worlds – the technie and non-techie bloggers – and I’m not sure it does too well there, but being in the techie camp I could understand the tech talk (and learn from it) and enjoy the non-techie angle. For me, it was a way of broadening my horizon of blogging beyond the software minds I had followed when just getting into blogs.

This was the abridged book-on-tape version, and I wish I could have found the full length version. It seems a bit too pop science, and yet it carries a very interesting message that rings true. The whole weblog movement is probably a good case in point: personal websites aren’t anything that new, but once a couple of good tools arrived to lower the barrier to publishing, the floodgates were opened.

Classic Kidder, fly on the wall listening to everyone, and crafting a non-fiction piece like a novel. The range of people make for a fine mesh of characters that draws out an image of the town that’s surprisingly rich.

I’ve just picked this up, and it looks like a nice companion to “We Blog”; that one is heavier on the practical advice of construction and machinery, while this one focuses on the why, what for, and how of writing within a community.

I wish I had the time to immerse myself in this one, because the story draws me in whenever I start reading just a couple of pages. I need sleep, though, so I guess I’ll take it slowly.

It’s a unique book for Kidder in that he allows himself to be part of the story rather than the omnipresent narrator. Paul Farmer challenges him in many ways and at many levels, and Kidder lets us in on his own reactions.

Beyond being a story about one man, it’s a story of how anyone can make a difference.

This was a pulse accelerator. A marvelous telling of a story that had slipped somehow into obscurity. Listening to it on disc was perhaps a good way to keep me from racing ahead or reading it too fast.