Socks: The Rule Book by Sock Club London

Book review: I have often wondered as I meander along the sunny beaches of my home town Luton in my little white shorts whether it is appropriate to be wearing these thick socks with my sandals. Now thanks to this book I know the answer.

I have also often wondered to myself what socks I should wear when I grace the top quality park-maintained tennis courts of my home town Luton in my white sports t-shirt, white training shoes, white sweatband and little white shorts (not to mention my fancy racquet). And thanks to this book I now know.

What’s more I have also often wondered to myself as I’ve traversed the gold-paved streets in my home town Luton during coldest winter when even the snowmen are going indoors to get out of the cold what socks I should be wearing to compliment my winter costume of polar bear fur hat, coat and little white shorts (made from the polar-bear’s face), and thanks to this book I now know.

Yes, this book has changed my life. Gone are the days when I walked into parties only to be shunned by all and sundry because my novelty Tinky Winky socks were simply not fit for polite society. These days I can stride in with my head held high knowing that, after many hours of deliberation beforehand, my sock game will be top notch and that all the ladies will soon be swarming towards me urgently wanting to hear about how I moved up the sock ranks so quickly to become the true sock aficionado I am today.

True I needed to chuck the kids and wife out to make room for my suddenly expanded sock collection, but that doesn’t matter because I now have the finest merino wool socks money can buy. And even though I had to remortgage the house and max out all my credit cards I know that when I slip my foot into that hand-linked toe sock with the argyle pattern my worries will just slip away.

However there is a part of me that wonders if this book hasn’t just duped me, as if in this book isn't just one big advert for Sock Club London and their cult where anonymous members live by the motto “No apologies, no regrets”. When I think these thoughts I become morose, stop ironing my socks and start throwing them around the room instead before also emptying my sock drawers in a massive rage before breaking down just like a girl wondering just why did I let my wife and children go.

Overall then this is a great book, but please bear in mind the small caveat as mentioned above.

Amazon UK link: Socks: The Rule Book

Brilliant Answers to Tough Interview Questions by Susan Hodgson (5th edition)

Book review: The blurb says this book will “banish your nerves”. Well I don’t think it will banish them completely but this book, being thorough, will certainly aid you in being as prepared as possible.

The author “was head of the careers service at London South Bank University” and she “worked with a wide range of employers to ensure that she knew exactly what they were looking for.” Basically she has lots of knowledge and she’s put a lot of work into getting the best advice possible, and it is all here in this book.

If you are preparing for interviews then just reading through this book will get you into the mind-set to do well. It covers everything you could think of, although you obviously have to tailor the answers to your situation.

Chapters typically start with a few questions at the beginning with some detailed guidance of how to build and plan your answer for these types of questions, followed by lots of other questions with suitable answers following the same approach. It’ll help you develop your own answers related to yourself.

There is even a chapter covering competency based interviews, which is useful for me if I want to progress where I currently am, and how to interpret these types of questions (which isn’t always obvious). Furthermore things you wouldn’t consider to be covered in this book are, like illegal questions because of discrimination laws, how you should approach the “do you have any questions?” question at the end, and how to deal with Skype and telephone interviews. Even interviews you might conduct yourself to gather information about an industry you are interested in to see whether it would suit you are covered.

Even if you think the material might be a bit dry it isn’t as it is broken up with a bit of humour, e.g. “your answer might provoke a follow-up question – or even the need to reach for a sick bag” and some “Never Never” boxes giving you real examples of where interviews have gone wrong, which may help relax you (at least my interview won’t be that bad). If you still don’t feel like reading the book in detail then you can refer to the index and pick and choose the questions you want to read.

Maybe if you are critical you might say there is a little bit of repetition, especially in the introduction of the book which seems to have been hastily put together at the end. But the rest of the book is excellent (although with the caveat I have yet to put it to test in actual interviews).

Publication date: 1 Dec 2014

AMAZON UK link: Brilliant Answers to Tough Interview Questions

Practice & Learn French: Ages 9-11 by CGP Books

This is a book and DVD-Rom (to help with pronunciations). The DVD Rom has a nice little pocket at the back of the book to keep it in so it hopefully won't get lost. It also has the 7-9 and 5-7 French modules on it which are relevant to the separate books for that age group. These sections cover simpler versions of what this book covers plus bits about "in my pencil case", "my house" and "where do you live?" As for this book for the 9-11 age group the topics covered are:

- Hello!

- What is your name?

- Numbers

- Colours

- Months

- My family

- Animals

- Clothes

- Food

- What do you like doing?

- What time is it?

- The weather

- In my town

- Masculine and feminine

- Plurals

The book has activities for each as well as an answers section which can be pulled out of the centre so that your child's work can be checked. You may want to take this bit out (and it is easily detachable) before you give the book to your child in case they are tempted to cheat.

This book cannot be used again once done (unless you photocopy the pages). That's ok I suppose seeing as you want your child to progress to the next level anyway, but not so ok if you want another child to also do the same exercises. 

Overall then this is a useful aid to your child's learning, but probably to be used in conjunction with other teaching.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)

Leading Teams: Tools and Techniques for Successful Team Leadership from the Sports World by Paolo Guenzi and Dino Ruta

This was an interesting book. This would surely be a 5 out of 5 rating for someone who is passionate both about sports and leadership. For me though my passion is more on the sports side so for the parts with no mention of sport, for example the whole of chapter 2, my enjoyment was less, but still overall I liked this and learnt from it, having never read any leadership material before.

The chapters:

1. Why Sport and Management?

2. Management Models of Team Leadership

3. A New Team Leadership Model

4. The Team Leader as Manager

5. The Team Leader as Coach

6. Team Leadership: A Word from the Coaches

The main things I learnt are that “to transfer ideas from sports to business and vice versa, first we need to clarify the key similarities and dissimilarities between the two,” and just general leadership stuff I didn’t think about before, such as how a leader should do their best to reduce uncertainty for their followers.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed to purchase HERE.) 

Practice & Learn: Mental Maths (Ages 5-7) by CGP Books

I got this for my 6-year-old who is in Year 2 of school (age 6-7). Whilst working through this it is quite clear that this is the sort of stuff she is learning at school which is good as it means the book is focusing on the correct topics for the age group it says it is catering for, these topics being:

- Adding

- Subtracting

- Number Facts to 10

- Number Facts to 20

- Counting by 1 and 10

- Bigger numbers

- Doubling and Halving

- Multiplying/Dividing by 2

- Multiplying/Dividing by 5

- Multiplying/Dividing by 10

- Two/Five/Ten Times Table

- Problem Solving

The book has an answers section which can be pulled out of the centre so the answers can be checked. This will be useful for parents to check their child's work, but do take it out before you give the book to your child in case they are tempted to cheat (although at this age that is probably not a consideration).

This book is similar to other learning tools that are out there such as the website Mathletics. There are differences though - this book cannot be used again once done. That's ok I suppose seeing as you want your child to progress to the next level anyway, but not so ok if you want another child to also do the same exercises. On the other hand this book does have some exercises which are not available on the likes of Mathletics, like the Race to the Beehive board game at the end.

Overall then: a useful aid to your child's learning, but to be used in conjunction with other teaching.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed HERE.)

The Man Who Wanted to be Happy by Laurent Gounelle

The Man Who Wanted to be Happy is a self-help book built around a story. The story is that of Julian who is a school teacher on holiday in Bali. He hears of a healer and goes for a check-up. Whilst there the healer, Samtyang, diagnoses Julian's problem - he is unhappy.

From there Julian is taken on a journey with the healer/wiseman where many things are revealed to him. And Julian laps it up across several visits on several days of his holiday.

Samtyang reiterates ideas that are already widely known, e.g. you are what you believe, and to achieve your goals you need to set out in detail the steps needed to get there. But there is other stuff in there you might not know.

For me the two best bits were one part where Julian is tasked with getting five people to say no to his requests. He struggles to do it though because each person he approaches refuses to give an outright no and instead try to help with his request, no matter how absurd. The other best bit was where Julian talked about how he was bad at something because he had done it once and it had not gone well. Samtyang talked about a baby taking his first steps as he learned to walk, and how he would fail time and time again, but his parents encouraged him and the baby becomes an expert walker.

Lastly to get the most from this book you need to read it slowly to digest it, and do it at the same time, e.g. Julian has to write out some lists along the way, and that was something I couldn't do at the time on the train with all the other commuters giving me the beady eye (although Samtyang would probably have some words of wisdom about that ...).

The book reminded me a bit of The Richest Man in Babylon which was a book with some simple stories with messages to do with money management, except not as good in my eyes (and on a different topic) but it's short and easy to read along with.

This book is listed on Amazon HERE.

Quickbooks 2012 for Dummies, UK Edition by Stephen L. Nelson and Loredana Stroup

Having read QuickBooks 2012 for Dummies I still find myself perplexed by the intricacies involved in maintaining a proper accounting system - I feel less inclined to buy the QuickBooks software (if I can't understand the dummy what chance do I have in fully utilising the software)?

Although the book was very informative - I found it quite wordy (the fact that I don't have an accountancy background I confess may have contributed to my total confusion on what value Quickbooks will add to my business).

In conclusion - I think on this occasion the saying `leave it to the experts seems apt' and rather than toiling and trying to unravel my accounts - I should leave the accounting details to the external accountant we use.

- Chuka

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed here.)

Times Table Explorer by Dr. Maths

This is a book of 30 quests like the short example on the front where the explorer starts at an X on a map then makes his way across the map to one of the locations upon it dependent on the working out of the multiplication sums. Each answer gives the number of spaces you can move and the direction is given by a compass point at the beginning of the question. After this is complete there is a space to draw a picture relating to the journey (first one is of a boat journey) and also a bonus question to answer.

My daughter is 5 and hasn't done times tables before. We started these and she enjoyed doing them despite not knowing her times tables to start with. Day 2 and she requested that we do more - a sign that she enjoyed it. Also I noticed she'd picked up on what we'd done and was able to do the sums better - she was learning.

The pages can be ripped out of the book, photocopied and used in a classroom situation if required (50 copies permitted). And solutions are in the back of the book too just in case you need them.

We will continue through the book and see how far we can go because later on the times tables will be harder (i.e. higher numbers are used) but I am really happy with it so far. She finds it fun and wants to go back to it each day plus she is improving her times tables knowledge. I can't think how you could make multiplication sums more fun to learn so well done to Dr. Maths for putting this together.

My only negative is that older kids who can easily do times tables might not like this. But for us it is perfect.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed here.)

Practice & Learn: English (Age 6-7) by Richard Parsons

I got this for my 5-year-old who is in Reception Year. It's mostly too advanced for her; it is aimed a higher age group after all so it'd be wrong if it wasn't. There is some stuff she could do but the rest we'll wait until later to teach her. The topics in the book are:

- Phonics

- Air and ear sounds

- Plurals

- Sentences

- Prefixes and suffixes

- Tongue twisters and riddles

- Compound words

- Adjectives

- Questions

- Punctuation

- Words that are the same and opposities

- Joining sentences

- Poems

- Non-fiction and fiction

- Finding facts

- Checking over your work

The book has an answers section which can be pulled out of the centre so the answers can be checked. This will be useful for parents to check their child's work, but do take it out before you give the book to your child in case they are tempted to cheat.

Overall then: a useful aid to your child's learning if they are 6-7, but to be used in conjunction with other teaching. 

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed on Amazon here.)

Practice & Learn: Maths (Age 5-6) by Richard Parsons

I got this for my 5-year-old who is in Reception Year. Whilst steadily working through it she said it was the sort of stuff she was learning at school which is good as it means the book is focusing on the correct topics for the agegroup it says it is catering for, these topics being:

- Numbers and words

- Counting in 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s

- Ordering numbers

- More or less

- Adding and subtracting

- Pairs of numbers

- Money

- Patterns and ordering

- Measures

- Time

- Shapes

The book has an answers section which can be pulled out of the centre so the answers can be checked. This will be useful for parents to check their child's work, but do take it out before you give the book to your child in case they are tempted to cheat.

This book is similar to other learning tools that are out there such as the website Mathletics. There are differences though - this book cannot be used again once done. That's ok I suppose seeing as you want your child to progress to the next level anyway, but not so ok if you want another child to also do the same exercises. On the other hand this book does have some exercises which are not available on those electronic mathematical games, such as colouring in the correct number of things, which was one of the exercises my daughter liked doing the best.

Overall then: a useful aid to your child's learning, but to be used in conjunction with other teaching. 

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed on Amazon here.)

John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success

I normally struggle with these self-help books. That's because in my reading time I don't like to concentrate too much on what I'm reading which is why I normally read fiction or non-fiction on a topic that I love. So I tried reading this book like a normal book and found that, as I expected, I was struggled with it. I changed my approach. There is simply too much to take in and reading it in the manner I had been meant I wasn't doing that. Instead I started to read it slower and consider what was on the page. In fact this book is ideal for this approach. You can dip in and out of it easily because each idea typically takes up only one or two pages. Also the way each idea is laid out, normally an opening quote followed by some description often including examples and more quotes with key points and bullets in boxes, helped me take in the key messages without as much difficulty as I expected. (In fact when I used the Amazon look inside feature before getting this book I thought that the layout was going to be beneficial to me.)

So under this new reading approach I did enjoy this book and did pick up a few tit-bits, like if I want to succeed in a particular field then I have to be fully committed. Naturally though this book doesn't guarantee you or me to succeed, after all they are just ideas and you can do with them as you wish. But I'm hoping that I am a better person because of it and that's all I can do.

(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is available to buy here.)