If you have never read a Neal Stephenson novel and you find that one has somehow thumped its way to your bedside table, you may be forgiven for being intimidated. In fact, intimidation is a natural and healthy response at every stage of confronting a Stephenson novel.

At first blush, you can only widen your eyes to accommodate its naked bulk: since the publication of his 1999 doorstopper Cryptonomicon, his books have tended to weigh in at roughly a thousand pages per. As you sink into the first few hundred pages, you can be intimidated by its scope: his Baroque Cycle, comprising three individual doorstoppers of a thousand pages each, managed to span the entire world and was populated by a cast of real life figures that would make the British Museum wheeze. But your jaw may not truly drop until you get a sense of his novels’ raw ambition. Stephenson likes to grapple with ideas, the bigger the better, and generally from as many parts of the bookshelf as he can manage. And finally, it is what he can manage that is so profoundly intimidating.

Tags: Cryptonomicon | science fiction | Anathem | Neal Stephenson | book review | Baroque Cycle | Canticle for Leibowitz | Dune | phenomenology | Plato | quantum mechanics | cosmology

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For good or ill, Malcolm Gladwell has created his own publishing category with his books The Tipping Point and Blink. These books have achieved the gold standard of publishing success: not only massive sales, but wide pop culture cachet. Both book titles have become short hand epithets for bloggers, newspaper columnists, and dinner party bores the world over. Gladwell himself has achieved a level of celebrity - he's a highly coveted and presumably highly paid speaker - that mere mortal writers can only dream of. 

Of course many of these other writers have been hard at work on their own entries to the Gladwell category. (Will Gladwell's bookshelf niche become eponymous? Will we someday soon say things like "Have you read Seth Godin's new gladwell?") One recent gladwell of some note is Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori and Rom Brafman.

Tags: Sway | book review | Ori Brafman | Rom Brafman | Malcolm Gladwell

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Yes, I know I'm pretty late to this party. There are hundreds of marketing blogs out there, with an infinite variety of focuses, from technical tidbits to vertical specializations. And here I am, adding to the pile.

Why am I doing this? It's a good question. In truth, I've done a fair amount of marketing, and I've seen a lot of interesting things that I've never seen anybody write about. I'm also the sort of person who gets a fairly reliable stream of ideas and an accompanying need to share these ideas. Now, my preferred way to share these ideas is to buttonhole someone and tell them about this new, wonderful, exciting idea, whether they want to hear it or not.

Unfortunately, there's not always someone nearby with the patience and free time to listen. And often, when I've finished, I don't get around to writing the idea down. In fact, I often do my best idea development just talking to someone - they don't need to say anything. 

In any case, now through the miracle of the Internet, we all can have blogs to publish our random thoughts, pushed out into the ether with the hope that someone will stumble across our scribblings and appreciate what clever folks we all are.

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