What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

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ruralavalon
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, by Frederick Law Olmsted.

Olmsted worked as journalist for a predecessor of the New York Times, and was commissioned to travel in and write about the South in 1852-1857. He wrote three books about his trips. This book covers his travels in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The book is largely his first-hand observations about slavery, and the state of argriculture, commerce and industry in those States. I found the book interesting.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Fallible »

jebmke wrote: Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:59 pm
ScoobyDoo wrote: Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:35 pm
jebmke wrote: Mon Mar 08, 2021 2:25 pm Finished "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou today

half way through "The Burial Hour" by Jeffrey Deaver
What did you think of Bad Blood? would you recommend it?
Yes, fascinating detail. I was familiar with the broad scope of the fraud but the story and detail are gripping.
"Gripping" also describes my experience reading this page turner, waiting for the fraud to be exposed, for someone to speak up, for the enablers to admit their roles, for Holmes to confess to what was so obvious, and how it was a perfect example of the "Fake it till you make it" culture that could produce a Theranos.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by heartwood »

I quickly finished Klara and the Sun: A novel: Kazuo Ishiguro.

Now I have to figure out if I liked it and what it might signify. He's the Remains of the Day and Never Let me Go author.

I've moved on to Later by Stephen King. So far about a boy who sees dead people, and more. King seldom disappoints me.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by nisiprius »

Have read two of the four novellas in If It Bleeds. "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" is interesting for its recollections what it was like in the early days of the iPhone and financial data over the web. Mr. Harrigan is an extremely wealthy man, who ran a major conglomerate and then decided to retire to a small town in Maine. The narrator, an adolescent, introduces him to an iPhone. After initial lack of interest, his eyes pop when he sees the rudimentary stock market app displaying the Dow Jones Industrial Average changing in (fifteen-minutes-delayed) real time.

Started A Horseman Riding By by R. F. Delderfield.

Re-read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (a student of mine is going to read it) and again am struck both by its strengths and weaknesses. Apparently he showed the first three chapters to J. R. R. Tolkien right after he'd written them, and Tolkien thought they were "as bad as bad can be." The reasons aren't clear, but, yeah. It seems bizarre to me that Lewis he would go out of his way to use a symbol of pagan sexuality as the very first person a pre-teen girl meets in Narnia. I never thought about this as a kid, but ancient me keeps wondering whether Tumnus smelled. I am also struck (again) by the storytelling dishonesty, in which nobody but Aslan and the author know about the deeper magic from before the dawn of time. Finally, and I think this might have played into Tolkien's opinion as well, The Hobbit was published in 1937, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 1950. I'm just talking about a tone of voice, and narrative devices, which probably precede Tolkien--perhaps Beowulf uses them!--but I certainly see echoes-short-of-theft in Lewis.
It was the sort of house that is mentioned in guide books and even in histories; and well it might be, for all manner of stories were told about it, some of them even stranger than the one I am telling you now.
instantly recalled
Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of the stories I have heard about him, and I have heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale.
But then, it is just a device. I think there's something similar in Sherlock Holmes, and perhaps storytellers always want to pre-sell possible future stories.

Of course the strength is C. S. Lewis' visual imagination and sheer storytelling power. I'm struck yet again by the importance of nature and landscape in British fiction, and his description of things like the thawing of winter in Narnia are just... I think "believable" is the word I want.

Am I the only one who constantly mixes up C. S. Lewis' White Witch with Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen? As I read it, I kept saying "wait a minute, are there evil mirror fragments in this book or not?"

And yet again I am wondering whether I ought to place an Amazon order for some Turkish Delight. I'd probably do it if I were more clued in on what kind would most resemble Edmund's. What flavor? Chocolate-covered or not? The real thing or some British product?
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ScoobyDoo »

Just finished Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Loved it. great book and a debut novel!

Just started The City we Became by NK Jemisin
Not sure about this one....Second time I’ve started it. It’s different.
ScoobyDoo!
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by jebmke »

The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, by Rinker Buck

2011 trip by the author on the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon. Just getting started - about 20% in.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Pugs1351 »

Just finished Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. It’s not my typical type of book but I enjoyed it. Kept me turning the pages.

Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.

“It starts with a man in a mask kidnapping him at gunpoint, for reasons Jason can’t begin to fathom—what would anyone want with an ordinary physics professor?—and grows even more terrifying from there, as Jason’s abductor injects him with some unknown drug and watches while he loses consciousness.

When Jason awakes, he’s in a lab, strapped to a gurney—and a man he’s never seen before is cheerily telling him “welcome back!”

Jason soon learns that in this world he’s woken up to, his house is not his house. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born.

And someone is hunting him”
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Jeepergeo »

Dark Sky by CJ Box. It's the latest in the Joe Pickett series. The series is a great read when you just want to escape.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by jdb »

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans. Browsing in Chicago used bookstore last month found hard bound 1960 edition with the 60 black and white photographs by Walker Evans. Had never read but had heard of the famous book over the years. The classic 1936 history of the young poet-writer Agee and professional photographer Evans spending weeks in south Alabama living with white cotton tenants and their families, known as sharecroppers. I found it mesmerizing. The dichotomy between the almost poetic prose of Agee anguishing over the dire poverty of these families juxtaposed with the austere almost elegiac black and white photos of Evans showing their innate dignity. I kept flipping between the prose and the photographs. This is a book I will read again. To say that I highly recommend is an understatement. But best if can locate the hardbound 1960 edition with the full page photos. Good luck.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by heartwood »

Win by Harlan Coben.

I finished it it a day or so. The title character is the recurring Win of several of Coben's Myron Bolitar novels.

It's darker than the Boiltar books, much more complicated too. Win is super rich. He keeps reminding you of the perqs of wealth, including an app available only if you have >$100 MM in assets. He's got more than that. (I type MM for a thousand thousand as I was taught to represent a million. Anyone else use that?)

It's about several things set against the main theme of 50 year old crimes. In the end Win solves them all, but, in my mind, no happy endings.

I'd read another (I read almost anything Coben writes), but would prefer Win as a character in a Myron book. I give it a 3/5.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by black jack »

The Informant by Thomas Perry.

A professional hitman, long retired after avenging an effort to kill him rather than pay him for his work (recounted in Butcher's Boy), is forced out of retirement to deal with bad guys who've been looking for him since that earlier incident.

This brings him to the attention of a Justice Department official who wants to recruit him as an informant.

It's a page-turner, intelligently told.

I goofed on the sequence of this series, and now will read Sleeping Dogs, which is situated in time between Butcher's Boy and The Informant.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

The Delusions of Crowds, by William J. Bernstein.

This is a survey of mass delusions, both financial bubbles and end-times religious fanaticism. I found myself wishing that more space had been devoted to investment bubbles.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by mrsbetsy »

Blowout by Rachel Maddow


If you think you understand why oil and gas prices rise and fall, you haven't heard the entire story. Fascinating and she/it just won a Grammy for best spoken word album in 2021. Audible is my preferred platform.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by mancich »

Just finished Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris, the 2nd in the Teddy Roosevelt trilogy. It is long, like the first one was, but well worth the read if you're a history buff.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by runninginvestor »

mrsbetsy wrote: Fri Nov 27, 2020 9:04 am Just finished "A Promised Land". I first started reading it but switched to Audible because it is even better read by the author...although it is 29 hours long.

The measured tone and careful explanation of the inner workings during those years answers many questions.
I find it interesting reading ex-president books. (Politics aside, I just find it interesting). But I agree, we have the book but I checked out the audible book from the library and it was much more enjoyable listening to. Definitely long, and there's going to be another book probably equally if not longer. I'll probably be like 3 days of listening to both books when the second one comes out.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by runninginvestor »

Currently: The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

About a third of the way through. I'm enjoying it. It's a nice spy thriller mystery so far. Although maybe calling it a spy book is not completely accurate.

Just finished: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott

It's an interesting meta philosophical novella. Kind of weird to read and explain, I just find these kinds of books intriguing especially since this one was from the late 1800s.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Engineer »

"Robert E Lee and Me--A Southerners Reckoning of the Myths of the Lost Cause". A well documented account of the revisionist history that raises REL to saint hood status. The author is a retired BG and professor emeritus of history at West Point.

Carl
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by mcblum »

having recently developed an interest in Behavioral Economics ("The Why you do the Things you Do"), I have read William Bernsteins's "The Delusions of Crowds" and now, Michael Lewis's "The Undoing Project.

Bernstein's book was great but the biography of Kahneman and Tversky was fantastic.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

mcblum wrote: Fri Mar 19, 2021 3:05 pm having recently developed an interest in Behavioral Economics ("The Why you do the Things you Do"), I have read William Bernsteins's "The Delusions of Crowds" and now, Michael Lewis's "The Undoing Project.

Bernstein's book was great but the biography of Kahneman and Tversky was fantastic.
marty
Try Your Money and Your Brain, by Jason Zweig.

link.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Normchad »

I rarely read books, so this is kind of a big deal.....

Currently reading Your Complete Guide to Successful & Secure Retirement by Swedroe & Grogan.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by MP173 »

Three non-fiction books finished this week:

The Data Detective by Tim Harford - the author suggests 10 step process for analyzing statistics and data including acknowledging our "emotional attachment" to a subject, keeping an open mind, combining a "bird's eye and worm's eye view", asking "what is missing here" and several other rules.

Lightened up with the next two books:

Pee Wees by Rich Cohen...a year in the life of 11-12 year old youth hockey team in Ct. Should be required reading for all youth sports parents, regardless of the sport. Points out a number of the issues these days with the growth industry known as youth sports. I noted many of my past sins.

Sonic Boom by Peter Ames Carlin, subtitled The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records. If you were like me and purchased vinyl records in the 70s, many of those were Warner Bros. Records issues. This was an outstanding look at how Warner operated in the 70s/80s and was known as a "musicians record company." Very good book. I had previously read Ted Templeman's book - A Platinum Producers Life in Music...he was a producer for Warner Bros. I wish Sonic Boom had been read first. It would have provided a much better view of Templeton's work. Carlin seldom mentions Templeton, perhaps due to his book being on the radar.

Next up is Algebra of Happiness by Scott Galloway (I am a big fan of his podcasts), then back to some trashy mysteries to let my brain relax.

ed
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by pezblanco »

ruralavalon wrote: Fri Mar 19, 2021 9:35 am The Delusions of Crowds, by William J. Bernstein.

This is a survey of mass delusions, both financial bubbles and end-times religious fanaticism. I found myself wishing that more space had been devoted to investment bubbles.
When I starting reading the book, I expected it to be mostly about financial bubbles. His emphasis on dispensationalist (end times) beliefs across the three Abrahamic religions was completely unexpected.

The author has argued that in terms of importance to the world that we live in, having an understanding of these belief systems is invaluable. For example 42% of all Americans suscribe to these beliefs directly in the church of their choice. The creation of Israel is directly due to various players (Balfour and others) acting on this belief system in conjunction with the judaic version of dispensationalism. Similar statements can be made for various Islamic groups operating in the Middle East in the headlines with their own version of dispensationalism. Understanding this belief system attempts to explain a lot of what we see in the modern world around us. I thought that it was a new and refreshing viewpoint and brought together a lot of observations I had made myself under a common viewpoint.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

My Sixty Years on the Plains, by William Thomas Hamilton.

The author was born in Scotland in 1823, emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and grew up on a farm near St. Louis. A doctor ordered a change of climate and at age 20 he travelled to the west with a party of hunters and free trappers. He gives a vivid firsthand account of trapping, trading, Indian fighting, and life on the Great Plains, in the mountains, and California through the 1870s. First published in 1905.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by jebmke »

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State, by Declan Walsh
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by FreeAtLast »

"Julius Caesar", by Philip Freeman (Simon and Schuster 2008)

Very well-written and enjoyable biography of one of the most famous men of antiquity. As a professor once noted about one of my college chemistry texts, "it reads like a novel". There are many excellent historians of the Roman Republic, but not all of them can facilely explicate the machinations of Roman politics in Caesar's era like Freeman does. How do we know anything about one of the most extraordinary men who has ever lived? We have Suetonius and Plutarch and Cassius Dio and Cicero to rely upon and, of course, Caesar himself in his self-aggrandizing Commentaries. What (and who) to believe; what is the historical truth? I would label Freeman as a Caesar-phile, especially in his seeming acceptance of most of Caesar's claims in the Commentaries. However - one of his triumphs is at the end of the book when he lays out all of the possible motivations for the assassination of Caesar among those who eventually wielded the sharpened daggers against him. The two Brutus's (Bruti?), Cassius, Trebonius, Cimber: not even Shakespeare made it as explicitly clear as to why the knives had to come out. Once Freeman presents his case, the reader may accept that reasonable rationalizations for the regicide did exist, at least among those patricians who lived in 44 BC. I want to admire Caesar so much - what personal gifts! - but then one has to come to terms with the fact that he was a mass murderer of Gaulish families in his strivings for "glory" for himself and his Roman brethren. A reference for the bookshelf.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by youngpleb »

Currently reading Dune for the first time! It was a little tough to get into at first, but I’m now about 15% in and am really enjoying it.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by mega317 »

PinotGris wrote: Sat Dec 05, 2020 12:04 pm Promised land by Obama. 700 pages, nobody need to say anything for 700 pages.
It's only volume 1, it ends in 2011!
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by mega317 »

I'm catching up on this thread after missing a few months. Here are some updates:

Humble Pi by Matt Parker. A mathematician/comedian discussing some historic mistakes based on math errors. Pretty entertaining though I'm no engineer or mathematician. He's a performer and the audiobook was well done.

Medicare for All by Abdul El Sayed. He is a physician and was the head of the Detroit health department. Of course the book has an agenda but regardless of your politics it is helpful to know the basics of our healthcare system and how the people who support MCA see it.

Just started Burn by Herman Pontzer about metabolism and energy use. It's pretty good so far and I think I'll finish it despite a cheap shot on the Detroit Lions.

Fundamental by Tim James, about quantum physics. There is no possible way I'm ever going to wrap my head around some of that stuff. I can't really recommend--either you already know the material, or you will just feel dumb and lost for a few hours.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by mega317 »

ruralavalon wrote: Fri Mar 19, 2021 9:35 am The Delusions of Crowds, by William J. Bernstein.

This is a survey of mass delusions, both financial bubbles and end-times religious fanaticism. I found myself wishing that more space had been devoted to investment bubbles.
I am loving this so far.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by heartwood »

Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon.

It's the 1st (1992) of her now many, many Commissario Guido Brunetti crime novels set in Venice. Wikipedia says 30! The latest just out this month.

I've heard of her for years but never read anything by her. I'm half way into it and finding it surprisingly good!
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by abuss368 »

I have gotten to the point where I have read enough finance and investing books that I am not so sure I am gaining much of anything for a stay the course total market investor.

Does anyone ever feel this as well?

Tony
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by bertilak »

abuss368 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:42 pm I have cotton to the point where I have read enough finance and investing books that I am not so sure I am gaining much of anything for a stay the course total market investor.

Does anyone ever feel this as well?

Tony
For some time now.

A while back, in a moment of weakness, I bought The Psychology of Money since there was a good post about it here on BH somewhere but haven't read it yet.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Dave55 »

"Win" by Harlan Coben. Harlan is one of my favorite authors and the Win character is a lot of fun.


Dave
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Dave55 »

abuss368 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:42 pm I have cotton to the point where I have read enough finance and investing books that I am not so sure I am gaining much of anything for a stay the course total market investor.

Does anyone ever feel this as well?

Tony
Affirmative.

Dave
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ResearchMed »

heartwood wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:21 pm Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon.

It's the 1st (1992) of her now many, many Commissario Guido Brunetti crime novels set in Venice. Wikipedia says 30! The latest just out this month.

I've heard of her for years but never read anything by her. I'm half way into it and finding it surprisingly good!
These books were very pleasant, light reading. I may need to check if there are some I haven't yet read.

I had the luck/luxury of reading most of her then-published books (which was most of them) just before our trip to Venice. It turned out that the physical/paper books have a map of Venice in the inside cover, which show several main spots, plus a few locations that are specific to that particular book/story line.
I kept referring back and forth between the text and the map (until for any single book, I had a good idea of the key locations).

And so...when we were there, there really were quite a few ways in which familiarity with those maps helped me understand/remember just where we were. It was also fun to see some of the places she had generally described.

There are a few other similar "location-based" procedurals, two of them set in France, and no doubt many others I haven't discovered yet.

RM
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ScoobyDoo »

Just finished Murder On The Orient Express by Agatha Christie! Great murder mystery!!!!!! loved the storytelling & the audible presentation made it very entertaining!

Didn’t realize she wrote so many! Have them on my TBR list now as this was my first Agatha book...
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by oldcomputerguy »

I had previously tried to start "A Game of Thrones", but my attention veered along about the start of chapter 2. I recently picked it back up, and I'm glad I did, I'm getting into it this time. Currently on chapter 56. After I finish this volume, I'm going to change course and pick up "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" by Allan J. McDonald. It's an insider recounting of the events leading to the Challenger disaster.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by abuss368 »

Dave55 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 4:02 pm
abuss368 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:42 pm I have cotton to the point where I have read enough finance and investing books that I am not so sure I am gaining much of anything for a stay the course total market investor.

Does anyone ever feel this as well?

Tony
Affirmative.

Dave
Dave -

If you ever write a book it will be a New York Times best seller and I want an autographed copy!

It would be a bigger book signing than Gordon Gekko in Wall Street II.🤣😂

Tony
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Dave55 »

abuss368 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 5:20 pm
Dave55 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 4:02 pm
abuss368 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:42 pm I have cotton to the point where I have read enough finance and investing books that I am not so sure I am gaining much of anything for a stay the course total market investor.

Does anyone ever feel this as well?

Tony
Affirmative.

Dave
Dave -

If you ever write a book it will be a New York Times best seller and I want an autographed copy!

It would be a bigger book signing than Gordon Gekko in Wall Street II.🤣😂

Tony
I have already been on the NY Times bestseller list. The great thing about posting here is I get to be anonymous.

Dave
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by nbseer »

Anything by Peter Hessler. He's lived in and written about China and Egypt. A great writer who learns the language and establishes relationships with the people. A mix of sociology and journalism.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

Reykjavic Nights, by Arnaldur Indridason.

Rookie police officer on the night shift becomes concerned about the drowning death of an alcoholic homeless man.
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MP173
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by MP173 »

Just finished "The Algebra of Happiness" by Scott Galloway.

I affirm above comments regarding financial books.

Looking forward to "Win" by Harlan Coban. I enjoyed his earlier works with Win and his sidekick (name escapes me). I am number 32 on the list at the library for it.

Ed
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Nicolas »

The Auschwitz Volunteer (2012) by Capt. Witold Pilecki, translated from Polish

This is the official report of Capt. Pilecki, a Polish resistance fighter in WWII who intentionally got himself arrested by the Nazis in a Warsaw street roundup to find out what was really happening in Auschwitz to get word out to the Allies, and also to try to organize some kind of resistance among the inmates there with a view to aiding in the expected rescue. But ultimately, as we know, there was no rescue, no help came until the advancing Red Army liberated the camp on 27 January, 1945. Capt. Pilecki survived Auschwitz but was tortured and executed by the communist Polish government after the war. This was an amazing man.
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PinotGris
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

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mega317 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:51 pm
PinotGris wrote: Sat Dec 05, 2020 12:04 pm Promised land by Obama. 700 pages, nobody need to say anything for 700 pages.
It's only volume 1, it ends in 2011!
I am on the last few pages. Very enjoyable.
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nisiprius
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by nisiprius »

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, by Brian Merchant. It's wonderful. I'll say that even though I'm only 38% through. The title is a little misleading. It's not limited to what was happening at Apple. It's as good a book as I've ever read about how technology is developed and how innovations happen. It is all about identifying and pulling together the threads of technology whose confluence resulted in the touchscreen smartphone as we know it. It is not about debunking Steve Jobs' claim that Apple invented the iPhone or trying to take all the credit away from one person and give it to another (think Antonio Meucci or William Friese-Greene or Alberto Santos-Dumont). His point is that the touchscreen smartphone needed to have multiple new technologies in it, all of which were really essential--capacitive multitouch screens, lithium batteries, inertial sensing, etc.

I don't know if Cathie Wood is the real goods or not, but certainly anyone who wants insight into innovation--whether they can use it to pick stocks or just for its own sake--should read this book.
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protagonist
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by protagonist »

abuss368 wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:42 pm I have gotten to the point where I have read enough finance and investing books that I am not so sure I am gaining much of anything for a stay the course total market investor.

Does anyone ever feel this as well?

Tony
I rapidly got to that point when I started on this course. If you accept the basic Bogleheads principles as a wise way to invest, investing wisely is incredibly easy. I have explained it to several people in 15 minutes or so, to the point that they can probably invest as effectively as any of us, and really, I don't have a lot more to say....the rest is just noise.

If I were to recommend additional reading, I would go outside the box. Read things that were not written by people in the finance industry who were trained with finance industry dogma (I am not picking on finance folks....this is probably true to varying degrees in any profession).

Maybe start by reading about chaos and complexity theory, which will give you a good understanding of how complex nonlinear systems work, like the stock market for example, or the economy. James Gleick's "Chaos" is a pretty good place to start for the general public, or try this excellent short manuscript written by MIT physicist Michael Beranger entitled "Chaos, Complexity, and Entropy: A physics talk for non-physicists".https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... 75/cce.pdf

Also, for a good primer on statistics and prediction, so you can better critically evaluate what you read, try Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise".

And for fun, and also to give you an idea of just how accurate expert predictions are when looking years or decades in the future, "The Book of Predictions" by Wallace, Wallechinsky, et al. (the authors of "the People's Almanac", which members of my generation might recall)- see how predictions made when the book was written around 1980 have stood up to the test of time. It is one of the few books I keep on my coffee table.

And this New Yorker article, "Everybody's an Expert": https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005 ... -an-expert

And then maybe some Benoit Mandelbrot if you want to go deeper.

Because when people decide how to invest, they are all trying to make future predictions based on what they know or think they know.

After reading a few of these, you should have a whole different perspective and insight when reading stuff published by the "finance experts".
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by bertilak »

protagonist wrote: Sun Mar 28, 2021 9:43 pm If I were to recommend additional reading, I would go outside the box.
I enjoyed three of Peter L. Bernstein's books I bought as a set:
  • Against the Gods
    Capital Ideas
    The Power of Gold.
Especially the first one.

A Jewish scholar I happened to be sitting next to on a flight noticed me reading Against the Gods and we got into an interesting discussion. I explained that it was all about risk. He wondered why he had never heard of Peter Bernstein.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

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HEDGEFUNDIE wrote: Sun Sep 09, 2018 4:50 pm Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

A great corrective to getting me out of my upper middle class bubble.
whaler08 wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 8:07 pm Evicted by Matthew Desmond. Follows eight family's in Milwaukee ( think Kenosha) Poverty and profit in Wisconsin
Just finished this book, after picking it up at a Little Free Library in the neighborhood.

I’m not sure what to make of it.

I think that some of the people in the book are just hopeless and are largely their own cause of misfortune. Others aren’t and a few overcome. And some are just greedy and selfish and deserve some measure of misfortune themselves.

And I am not sure that the author’s proposed solution would really solve as much as he argues it would, although he does make a compelling argument that a lack of resources in the US is not why poverty persists.

And I do think that he is right in saying that “there is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land.”

If nothing else, the book should be read just to provide some perspective.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by protagonist »

bertilak wrote: Sun Mar 28, 2021 11:04 pm
protagonist wrote: Sun Mar 28, 2021 9:43 pm If I were to recommend additional reading, I would go outside the box.
I enjoyed three of Peter L. Bernstein's books I bought as a set:
  • Against the Gods
    Capital Ideas
    The Power of Gold.
Especially the first one.

A Jewish scholar I happened to be sitting next to on a flight noticed me reading Against the Gods and we got into an interesting discussion. I explained that it was all about risk. He wondered why he had never heard of Peter Bernstein.
The little I read by Bernstein seemed very good, and especially useful for new investors. If I had to recommend one book on investing to a newbie, one of Bernstein's beginner's books would probably be my first choice. You really don't have to read much more than one or two of his books when it comes to understanding how to choose your investments, and probably being able to do so as well as any of us. But I would definitely add at least one of the sources I mentioned in my previous post, for a sense of perspective and to add a touch of humility to one's decisions (something often sorely lacking). As for which one, it would depend on who I was trying to advise.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

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