I like to read, so naturally faster reading sounds attractive to me. I always have a number of yet-unread books. I bough a book about speed reading once and came away severly unimpressed: you got a set of fixed prescriptions for faster reading. And some of them just weren't handy.

Hurray, I've now found a faster reading book that works. Abby Marks Beale's 10 Days to Faster Reading. Divided into 10 chapters, every chapter:

• Tests your reading speed with a short exercize. You can track your progress this way. I progressed from some 350 words per minute to 600.
• Gives a new "pointer". "Pointer" being a guidance system for your eye. Where the original book I read only prescribed one, this book acknowledges that there are multiple strategies that could work in different situations and for different persons. I've got three that I use regularly.
  • My favourite: put a finger in the right hand margin of the text, just a bit below the line you're currently reading. Slowly move it downward while reading the text. I get both a bit of rythm from this and my eye has a handy "hit point" in the right margin. (Describing it is hard).
  • Business card above (definitively NOT below!) the line you're reading. Move it down slowly. This technique makes it harder for me to jump back a line to re-read something. That's exactly the number one point that slows me down!
  • Finger in the middle of a narrow newspaper column. If you've practiced enough and if the column is narrow enough, you can spot the whole line as one chunk of text. No more horizontal eye movement. Something I need to be well-rested for. It sometimes helps me a lot in flying through a newspaper.
• Discusses the theory of faster reading. You get background on why things work and on why certain reading strategies are (counter)productive. Every chapter also aims at different types of reading material: you might need to adapt your style to what you're reading.

One closing comment: this is about "normal" faster reading, not about "diagonal reading" or so in which certain people apparently can go through a book with only 4 seconds per page or so. No: this book is highly practical and applicable. Strongly recommended!

I saw Ricky Spears' list of books he read in 2007 and thought "such a list is a great idea. So I delved into my memory and came up with a reasonably complete list of books I read in 2007. I didn't include the ones I re-read in 2007 :-)

L.E. Modesitt is easily my favorite author. So I read a couple of new paperbacks that came out this year and bought a few of his older works that I had not read yet. He writes both SF and fantasy, both with a good eye for human nature, practicality and, within bounds of course, realism.

• alector's choice, part 4 of a series. Insight in a culture that was only hinted at in 1-3.
• cadmian's choice, part5. Some heavy action. Who says all-powerful beings cannot be defeated?
• soarer's choice, part 6. The culture sizzles out misserably and disappears off the face of the earth. Modesitt outdid himself by making the end so miserable and seemingly pointless. Appropriate.
• Eternity artifact. Stand-alone book. A nice read, nothing spectacular. Attractive through the multiple (6 or so) main personae.
• Archform: beauty. Politics, media, art. Nice. Get into the atmosphere of the current US presidential race.
• flash. Builds on archform: beauty. More action. Very well thought out: recommended! And in-between attacks on him and by him, the main persona needs to feed kids and get them to school.
• Hammer of darkness. This is a weird one. Weird. I read it in two days, but it was quite some work to get through. Weird. At the end it is all wrapped up amazingly well.

I like history. Apart from the first book, none of them are recent, either.

• Norman Davies' Europe at war (I read it in Dutch: oorlog in Europa). World war two history that's much more centered on the eastern front. I'd consider it recommended reading when you want to get a better feel for the second world war. A good number of data, too, to put common misperceptions into perspective (in man-months, the western front from D-Day to the end in 1945 doesn't compare to several of the offensives in the east at all, for instance).
• It never shows in September. Surprising account from the German side of things about the Market Garden airborn assault in 1944. Highly recommended!
• I was a stranger by British airborn general Hackett. Severely wounded at Arnhem, he was hidden away at the house of three dear older ladies. He recounts his stay there and, at the end, his escape to freedom.
• Kenneth Macksey: invasion. About a fictional early (and thus succesful) invasion of England by the Germans in July 1940. Well worked out.
• Alfred Duggan: count Bohemond. Well-readable book about one of the crusaders in the first crusade. Well-described battle scenes. A good insight into the mood and the morals of those days.

Assorted fiction.

• Harry potter and the deathly hallows. A fitting closure.
• Tom Holt, faust among equals. Hard to get started, but was reasonably funny after the first hurdles.

Technology and personal development

• Kuestenmacher/Seiwert: simplify your life. I read the book in the original German language. Great, practical book for improving yourself and get yourself more on track.
• Von Weitershausen: web component development with Zope 3

• Brooks: The mythical man-month. A classic!
• Strengthsfinder 2.0. See a separate blog post with my results .
• Niven: The 100 simple secrets of successful people. Not that good.
• Seth Godin: the dip. Finished it off in about 35 minutes. A good one.
• Levine: cut to the chase. Good tips.
• Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz: the power of full engagement. I've really got to put this into a separate blog post. Valuable insights!

That's it for 2007 :-)