While on vacation I read two books (well, read one and finished the other): Moneyball by Michael Lewis (buy it) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (buy it). Moneyball is about baseball on the surface, but deeper down it applies to my – and pretty much everyone else’s – workplace. It’s about how Billy Beane managed to make the Oakland A’s a top team when they have a third the budget of other clubs, and about the baseball fraternity’s refusal to acknowledge the validity of his methods.

The Da Vinci Code was a good summer book. I flew through it, and it kept me interested without sending me off on tangents of thought. The downside of more complicated books (like The Guns Of August (buy it), which I’m reading now) is that an idea or insight gets my brain going and I spend half an hour daydreaming instead of reading. Da Vinci is silly enough to keep that from happening, but still entertaining enough to kill a long summer day.