What I Just Read

A fascinating, stately novel about idealists who get chewed up and spit out by the very social changes they seek. Before the Dawn takes place in the decades following Japan's 1853 "Black Ships" event, when the USA's Commodore Perry arrived, unannounced and uninvited, to force Japan to open itself to world trade. Perry's arrival, one of history's more blatant examples of gunboat diplomacy , sent shock waves throughout the island nation, resulting in a complex political and social revolution, civil war, and, eventually, a radically changed Japanese state. [A quick  affiliate link to readers to the book here . You can support my work here by buying all your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or my sister site  Casual Kitchen . Thank you!] The main character, Hanzo, is the son of a village leader on the highway between Edo and Kyoto. He is sensitive, idealistic, and he dreams of a restoration of traditional Japanese values, both intellectual a...

Two pamphlet-length works here: the first,  Speculation as a Fine Art, is a foundational old-school text for investors, cited repeatedly in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator . The second, Thoughts on Life , contains short chapters of quotes and sayings in the style of Baltasar Gracian or Epictetus (see The Golden Sayings of Epictetus , a wonderful book, and it's free and in the public domain.). Recommend ingesting the first and skimming the second. As with most books of sayings, there's gold in there if you dig for it, and in the notes section below I copy-pasted some of the quotes that grabbed me. Maybe you can even skip skimming Thoughts on Life and instead skim my notes! [A quick  affiliate link to readers to the book here . You can support my work here by buying all your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or my sister site  Casual Kitchen . Thank you!] As for Speculation as a Fine Art : it talks through some blunt ideas, some of which inves...