More book recommendations, from Infonetics Research's Andrew Schmitt and ADVA Optical Networking's Ulrich Kohn.

Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for carrier transport networking at Infonetics Research

It has been a bit of a thin year for me. And what I’ve read is a little outside the job. It seems like with all of the new media at hand I make less time for long-form consumption.

My wife is a big rower and I bought The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their epic quest for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown for her. But then someone recommended it to me and I started reading it before she could. It is a fantastic underdog story about the University of Washington crew team and their road to the Berlin Olympics. It has lots of colour of what 1920's and 1930's America was like and it does a good job of conveying the subtleties of the sport. The central character has everything in life stacked against him but relies on a bottomless ability to suffer both in and out of the boat to grind his way towards a goal. There is so much vivid detail about the personalities and the races that I am slightly skeptical about whether it was all accurate but a fantastic read nonetheless.

Probably my favourite book of 2014 was Zero to One: Notes on startups, or how to build the future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one to mention it. It is like the anti-business book, blowing up all of the conventional thoughts surrounding start-ups and makes for a refreshing read. Excellent signal-to-noise ratio. I suppose Blake Masters deserves more credit than he has received for canning the thoughts of Peter Thiel in a very readable way.