In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Stephen Levy. Google is one of the key disruptive companies of this past decade. It’s more than a history of Google, it also helps explain the company’s core values as compared with many of its earlier competitors. One of the best stories was about the people with AltaVista, being worried that Google’s results were so good that users would not spend enough time looking at the ads that supported AltaVista. Remember AltaVista and others that are now part of the Search Engine Graveyard.
Levy also wrote How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web for Wired magazine in 2010j, which was passed around in our office to help us understand Google.
One Second After by William R. Forstchen — An EMP pulse chance life forever in the United States with the focus of the book being Black Mountain, N.C., a favorite place for me. The books is sobering and unsettling and is a book that people are passing along to others. See Forstchen’s web site at One Second After. Many years ago I enjoyed another post-apocalyptic tale Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jeffy Pournelle
Act of Will by A.J. Hartley — Hartley lives in Charlotte, but the book is set in a fictional world in the middle ages. I liked that the book was less than 340 pages and not the large volumes I see in similar quest stories. This was my first book by Hartley, but I’d like to read more.