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Category Archives: Books

Talking Books on the Human Business Way

by Kevin D. Hendricks

Back in February I talked books with Chris Brogan. He’s a social media/marketing/business guy who does the Human Business Way podcast. He titled the show “Kevin Hendricks is a Book Fiend,” which is pretty accurate. We spent about 20 minutes talking books, swapping titles and even get into Star Wars:

Chris: “This is the nerdiest podcast I’ve ever done and I’m blaming you.”

And I accept the credit.

Books to Read
It’s a fun little interview. A few of the great books mentioned include Ready Player One, The Fault in Our Stars, Feed, The Passage, Wool, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, For the Win, Tell Me a Story and The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

Since the podcast aired so long after we talked, Chris guessed about how many books I’d be up to now. He thought 50. I’ve actually read 65 so far this year. But #50 is worth mentioning: The Martian by Andy Weir (I blogged about it earlier). Unfortunately, it was picked up for major release next year, so it’s no longer available. Last time I checked Amazon had an audio version otherwise you need to find someone you can borrow it from or wait until next year. But it’s so full of sci-fi, nerdy goodness that it should have been mentioned in this podcast, right between Wool and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Star Wars
We also spent some time talking Star Wars and the question every parent faces of whether or not to admit the prequels exist. When we did the interview my kids had only seen the originals, but since then they’ve watched the prequels as well. Sadly, they both thought Jar Jar Binks was hilarious. But on the plus side, they like the originals best. Warms a father’s heart.

137 Books
If you want to know more about my crazed reading schedule, you can read my [short] book, 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading Again. I talk about how I read so many books and get into practical, nerdy stuff such as tracking what you read and making the most of the library.

2 Comments | Posted: June 4, 2013 | Filed Under: Books | Tags: , ,

137 Books at Ignite

by Kevin D. Hendricks

137 Books in One Year Presentation at Ignite / Photo by MNHeadhunterOn Wednesday night I spoke at the Ignite Minneapolis event, as I mentioned earlier, and I survived.

I talked about reading a lot of books and basically just geeked about reading. Good fun. I tried not to be too obnoxious plugging my own book, 137 Books in One Year.

In the end it was great fun. My talk went well, I got some laughs and heard from a lot of folks afterward. It started a lot of conversations about books, which is the whole goal. It’s fun hearing from people who are trying out my book recommendations and loving them.

The Pioneer Press covered the event and I was quoted. The headline, “Ignite Minneapolis gives shy people 5 minutes of fame” makes me feel a bit like the poster boy for the fear of public speaking. But I’ll take it:

“I am usually pretty terrified of public speaking,” said Kevin Hendricks of West St. Paul, who spoke about having read 137 books in a year and writing a book about that feat.

And, unlike other Ignite speakers who feel their fear dissipate when launching into their talks, Hendricks remained petrified throughout.

“My heart rate is up,” he said afterward. “I’m trying to catch my breath. It’s like I went running or something.”

But he said he “got a rush out of it. The timing worked out pretty well, and I had a couple of jokes I could stick in there. It was scary, but I survived.”

Any time you get quoted in the paper and don’t say something too stupid, that’s a win.

While I’m still not a fan of public speaking, I am finding that it’s survivable. I have Darrell Vesterfelt to thank for that. He encouraged me to share at the Speak Conference in 2011 and I grudgingly agreed. I’ve spoken on a few other occasions since then and I think I’m getting used to it. Still terrifies me, but I think it’s one of those things you just have to stare down and do.

Speaking of folks I owe a debt to, I’ve had so many people thank me for the talk or tell me they were watching online. That’s really encouraging. Thanks. My parents were even watching from Kansas and my wife came with me (usually I’m solo on these local business/networking deals). Thanks! I’ve got a lot of people supporting me and cheering me on, and that’s pretty incredible. So thank you.

Video from the event should be posted in a week or two, so if you want to catch my talk (or the other great 5-minute talks), you can.

0 Comments | Posted: May 31, 2013 | Filed Under: Books | Tags: , ,

Dangerous: More Books!

by Kevin D. Hendricks

Yesterday I released a new book, Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication. It’s a collaborative effort published by one of my clients in cooperation with another awesome organization, Creative Missions. I got to work with some great contributors and some great co-editors. You can read more about the basics of the book over at Church Marketing Sucks.

I’ve done enough last-minute marketing about the book. Rather than do that here, I’d rather just talk honestly about it. Four quick lessons from this project:

1. I didn’t want to do it.
When the idea was first pitched we had about three and a half weeks to pull it off. Honestly, I’d had the same idea months earlier but I kept it to myself. Why? I don’t know. It seemed like something we could do eventually. I knew it would come down to a rushed project and I dreaded that. I think deep down I wanted someone else to come up with the driving vision and make it happen. Let someone else take the responsibility. That’s about what happened. (Confession: I’m not a leader.)

Now that’s it’s over, I’m glad we did it. We’ll see what the results are, but I think it was a smart move. It’s well-timed to be a good resource.

2. Fast is good.
This project happened fast. Like, 20 days fast. That’s a little crazy. But sometimes I think we need that. Too often we over-think ideas and turn them into these big huge things that can’t stand up on their own and collapse under all our expectations. Sometimes it works better to shut up and crank something out.

3. Help is good.
We had a lot of great people helping on this project. We had a team of three people giving editorial direction. We had more than a dozen contributors. We had someone do the layout. Someone else did the design. Someone else got the ebook working (long story). Collaboration is an amazing thing. Sometimes I wish we had more. (Marketing plan? Oh yeah, I guess we could use one of those.)

4. Scared.
I’ve published several books now. I’ve got a once-a-year streak going that’s kind of fun. You think I’d be used to this by now. But to be honest, I’m scared. I’m a little panicked about how people are going to respond to this book. Are they going to hate it? Did I forget something? How many horrible, ridiculous typos are there? Did I make some huge mistake and I should be embarrassed to call myself an editor? Will they be mad because it’s too short? Will they be annoyed that the content is available elsewhere? Will it be worth all the effort? So many doubts. So many fears.

I think that’s part of being a writer. I think that’s part of being creative and putting yourself out there. It’s scary.

0 Comments | Posted: May 14, 2013 | Filed Under: Books | Tags: , , , , , ,

Book #50 of 2013: The Martian

by Kevin D. Hendricks

Last night I finished my 50th book of 2013. I read a lot, yeah, yeah, yeah, wrote a book about it. Book #50 was awesome. It was The Martian by Andy Weir and it’s a contender for my favorite book of the year.

It’s a Robinson Crusoe type story where an astronaut is abandoned on Mars. But he’s a mechanical engineer and botanist who puts his know-how to work to stay alive and wait for rescue (which will take years). He has to use spare parts, his own excrement and controlled explosions to create water, grow food and keep himself going. It’s an incredible work of seat-of-your-pants engineering, and yes, duct tape plays a role.

The main character, Mark Whatley, has a self-effacing, sarcastic style and records his experience in a journal. We also get glimpses of Mission Control back on Earth trying to sort things out and the crew that abandoned him. Much of the story is Mark figuring out how to do things, like create more water from the chemicals on hand so he can grow food. Just when the explanation starts to get too scientific, he cracks a joke and moves on. I have no idea if all the science know-how would actually work, but it sounds totally believable to a non-scientist like me. Andy Weir did some incredible research. Even if he’s wrong, he does a great job faking it.

While cataloging how much air, water and food he has and thinking through how to grow a garden on the harsh environment of Mars could potentially be boring, it’s not. It’s gripping, has plenty of ups and downs and is funny enough that it’s not at all a story about a loner on Mars trying not to go crazy.

It’s a pretty sci-fi heavy book (uh, Mars, hello!), so I’m not sure what kind of mainstream appeal it would have, but the sci-fi folks are going to love it.

And you better act now to get it. The book was picked up for major publication, which means the digital version is going to disappear soon. Soon as in April 30. You’ve got less than a week to grab the digital version, otherwise you have to wait until the print version comes out in February 2014. As if you need any further prodding, the digital version is only 99 cents right now. That’s an absolute steal. But get it now (even if you won’t read it for months), cuz it’ll be gone April 30.

Yay for awesome books that got their start and attention through self publishing.

0 Comments | Posted: April 25, 2013 | Filed Under: Books | Tags: , , ,

Genre Shame is a Waste of Time

by Kevin D. Hendricks

I made a comment in 137 Books in One Year that genre shame is a waste of time. It’s something I learned through my reading, but I found the sentiment most eloquently expressed by Veronica Roth in her post Shame: The Ultimate Time Vampire. Roth is the author of the young adult dystopian thriller Divergent, which she wrote while studying creative writing at Northwestern University.

Writing that kind of a genre-specific book in that kind of a literary-focused environment, you learn a thing or two about genre shame. Much of Roth’s post talks about the writing end of genre shame.

But she also starts with the fact that genre shame kept her from enjoying reading for years:

The last time (excluding the past three months) that I remember loving to read was eighth grade. That’s right: eight years ago. What happened, you ask? People told me I was too smart to read what I liked to read. They said I should be reading “college-level books.” I started to feel ashamed of what I wanted to read, and I tried to read what I was “supposed” to be reading. But the problem was that I didn’t enjoy those books, and I couldn’t force myself to enjoy them, and I hated feeling like I was stupid for not liking them, so I stopped reading altogether.

That’s complete and total crap.

A book has to be snooty enough to be worth your time? Please. We should read because we enjoy it, not because we have to. Not because it’s good for us. Not because it’s labeled a classic. There are so many classics that have ruined reading for people because they were forced through an awful book. If I had to read Tess of the D’Ubervilles again I probably would give up on reading.

I can’t finish a Hemingway novel.

I hated Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

I have zero interest in Charlotte Bronte.

But you know what? That’s OK. Read what you love. It’s OK to read that smut novel. Or yet another vampire story. Or more space marines. Whatever floats your boat.

Go ahead, it’s OK.

Don’t waste your time being ashamed of your favorite genres. Don’t feel like you have to read the classics because they’re the classics. Whatever. Find your own classics (I’ve started my own list).

I love reading young adult fiction with teen characters struggling to find out who they are (13 Reasons Why).

I love reading realistic space sci-fi, light on the aliens, heavy on the application of big ideas (Old Man’s War).

I even have a soft spot for a good zombie novel (Zone One).

And I’ve mentioned my love for post-apocalyptic sci-fi too many times (Wool).

If you like the classics, great. But don’t force them on the rest of us. Read what you love, and don’t be ashamed.

0 Comments | Posted: March 20, 2013 | Filed Under: Books | Tags: , ,

Ownership vs. Subscription Economy

by Kevin D. Hendricks

I’ve realized lately the entertainment industry is undergoing a pretty radical shift.

Duh.

OK, so this isn’t ground-breaking territory. But I’m seeing the implications in my daily life much more than I have before.

So there are a few ways to get entertainment content, which vary slightly depending on medium:

  • Experience – You go somewhere and you experience your entertainment. This happens primarily with music and movies. You go somewhere and either watch a movie or see a concert. You’re paying for a one-time experience. I suppose this method has pre-dated all technology.
  • Broadcast – The entertainment is free, but you have to watch ads. This is the commercial-supported model of TV and radio. Again, you’re only getting a one-time experience.
  • Ownership – As media has become cheaper and smaller, ownership has become a relatively recent option. You can purchase your entertainment in your preferred medium and enjoy it as long as you like.
  • Subscription – This is the newest model championed by Netflix and Hulu Plus for movies/TV and Spotify for music, among others. You pay a monthly fee and get access to a nearly endless archive of on-demand music, TV and movies.

… Read more

4 Comments | Posted: March 12, 2013 | Filed Under: Books, Movies, Music, Technology, TV | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Some of My Favorite Books

by Kevin D. Hendricks

While writing my recent book, 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading, I tried to reflect on some of my favorite books of all time, and especially what makes them my favorite books.

These kinds of lists are always hard and weirdly defined and vary greatly from one person to the next. So you’ll have to bear with me. I stuck to fiction and a sense of longevity, which I’ll try to explain next.

It seems that some of my favorites are books I keep coming back to. Either I remember the plot even decades later or the ideas the stories brought up just keep coming back to my mind. To be a real favorite it needed to have that kind of longevity. There are books I loved, but years later I couldn’t tell you what happened. Those are still good books, but they didn’t quite make my vaguely defined cut.

So here are some of my favorite fiction books from throughout my reading life:

Ask me tomorrow and I’d probably come up with a different list, but there you go. Oddly enough, few of my favorite authors ended up in the list (such as Anne Lamott, Barbara Kingsolver, Madeleine L’Engle, etc.), perhaps because while I love their writing, often their stories either don’t stand out or blur together because I’ve read so many of them. I couldn’t tell you plot points in Crooked Little Heart or Prodigal Summer, but I did love those books when I read them. For whatever reason, they just didn’t stick with me (perhaps candidates for a re-read?).

So what are some of your favorite books (regardless of how you define ‘favorite’)?

0 Comments | Posted: March 7, 2013 | Filed Under: Books | Tags: , ,

Stories Can Heal

by Kevin D. Hendricks

Classic LesOne of my favorite memories from my grandpa’s funeral is sitting around his kitchen with my cousins telling stories and jokes. That little kitchen filled up with people and laughter again, which my grandpa would have enjoyed. My grandpa was old and it was his time to go, but that act of storytelling helped to heal the wound of losing him.

I finished reading Tell Me a Story by Scott McClellan this week. It’s good stuff (you can read my review for more). Something Scott talks about in the book that I resonate with is the idea that telling stories can be healing.

I’m not a particularly good storyteller—that’s probably why I’m a writer. I like to edit and rework and figure out how best to tell a story. I work better in the written word than the spoken word. But I think part of what draws me to the word is telling stories. It’s self-indulgent, but one of the things I like to write is simply telling stories about my life. In some ways, I think that’s because there’s healing happening there. The telling of stories allows me to process, to figure things out, to think things through and find meaning or comfort or grace.

That’s probably why, in my moments of greatest distress, I turn to writing. I tell the story. Some of those stories aren’t meant to be told to anyone but myself, but still I tell them.

In adoption, I think this is why it’s important that we tell the stories. It’s easy to gloss over what could be uncomfortable details and avoid those stories. But by telling those adoption stories, we give voice to them, we shine a light on any “messy” details and we find a way to embrace them. A story gives us the narrative to do that. It gives us a voice and something to cling to when we’re confused or fearful.

That’s powerful.… Read more

0 Comments | Posted: February 28, 2013 | Filed Under: Adoption, Books, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Talking About Books: Annotated Bookshelf

by Kevin D. Hendricks

In case you can’t tell, I like talking about books. That’s what happens when you write an entire book about how to read more books.

I’ve been writing about some of my favorite books lately, but sometimes it’s more fun to stand in front of your bookshelf and do it. So here’s a shot of one of the bookshelves in our house. Click over to Flicker and mouse over the image to see a whole bunch of ridiculously annotated notes about the books (and other things). It’s kind of fun (and, yes, kind of weird).

Though not as weird as sorting your books by color.

My Book Shelf (G-Z)

Bonus: I wrote a guest post on Ally Vesterfelt’s blog about doing what you love, inspired by that whole reading a bunch of books in one year thing.

0 Comments | Posted: February 21, 2013 | Filed Under: Books | Tags: , ,

Lessons from a Reader: Make ‘em Expendable

by Kevin D. Hendricks

I love gripping stories. I love reading a book I can’t put down, where I have to know what happens. A good tense story is often better than most movies. That’s something I talk about in 137 Books in One Year—the value of knowing what you love and pursing it as a reader.

So as a writer, one of the things that heightens the tension in a story and makes it so gripping is when you’re willing to make characters expendable.

Yes, killing off characters makes for better stories.

As you can imagine, this post is going to be full of spoilers. So get used to it.

I experience this recently in the zombie thriller Feed by Mira Grant. She created a post-zombie uprising world that hasn’t descended into the post-apocalyptic. Instead, people find ways to live with zombies, which mostly involves fear, lots of blood tests and guns. More than a story about zombies, Feed is the story of a trio of bloggers following a presidential campaign and uncovering a massive conspiracy.

Sidebar: In the post-zombie world bloggers come in a few stripes: Newsies who are your typical factual reporters, Fictionals who create fictional stories, and Irwins who pursue first-hand encounters with zombies. The Steve-O award is bestowed on deserving Irwins. Took me three-fourths of the way through Feed before I realized what Irwins was referring to. Get it? Brilliant.

Feed Spoilers
As the tension rises in Feed, people start dying. That’s pretty typical for a zombie story. But when one of the three primary bloggers in the story is killed, you know the stakes are high. At this point in the story, killing Buffy was pretty intense. It shook up the world for our two remaining bloggers, siblings Georgia and Shaun. But we still had those two. The story really gets intense when one of them dies. Killing two of your three main characters? Whoa. That puts the tension through the roof.

What’s perhaps more interesting is that writer Mira Grant chose to kill of Georgia, who had served as the story’s narrator. Not only did she kill off a main character with 75-some pages to go, but she killed off the freakin’ narrator.

That might seem like taking things too far. In Feed, it worked. Grant also turned the story into a trilogy that continues without two of her three main characters, or the primary narrator for the first book. That’s bold. I’ll let you know if it works.

Other Spoiler-Filled Examples
This strategy of killing off characters is put to work beautifully by Joss Whedon. In his Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series he employed it to a minor degree [BUFFY SPOILER ALERT] by readily killing off supporting characters (Jenny Calendar, Joyce Summers, Tara, Anya) or moving characters off the show (Angel, Cordelia, Oz, Riley, Giles). While he never completely kills one of his three primary characters, Buffy does die twice, Willow becomes evil and Xander loses an eye.

Whedon takes it up a notch in Serenity, the theatrical finale to his canceled Firefly TV series [here come the SERENITY/FIREFLY SPOILERS]. As the movie approaches the climax he kills off Shepherd Book, one of the nine original crew. That’s big, but Book also wasn’t on the ship at the beginning of the movie. You know the stakes are high, but the core crew of the movie still seems safe, right? Wrong. When pilot Wash is killed moments after a successful crash landing, suddenly all bets are off. As the climax reaches its crescendo and our heroes are fighting for their lives, nobody is safe. Injuries pile up, characters are shot and we have no sense that anybody is going to make it.

Serenity is possibly the best example ever of killing your characters to heighten the tension.

Unlike the original Star Trek series where the main characters were never in any real danger (the “redshirt” phenomena, lampooned brilliantly by John Scalzi), this approach makes danger real and the outcome unknown. Tension heightened.

If you want your readers to be on edge, prove how high the stakes are.

0 Comments | Posted: February 15, 2013 | Filed Under: Books | Tags: , , , , , , , ,