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Upcoming Titles

What follows is my current book queue. As always, I would be grateful for additional title suggestions from any readers out there! Please leave a comment in any of the posts in this blog. You can also reach me at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman

Find More Time: How to Get Things Done at Home, Organize Your Life, and Feel Great About It by Laura Stack

Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Maxwell Maltz

Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard A. Swenson

The Great 401 (K) Hoax: Why Your Family's Financial Security is at Risk, and What You Can Do about It by William Wolman and Anne Colamosca

Note: What I Just Read reserves the right to read these books out of order.
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The Prophet of Edan by Philip Chase [The Edan Trilogy #2]

We all have our part to play and our duty to perform. This is a beautiful novel about performing your duty with honor, even in the face of almost certain failure. Author Philip Chase has an unusual gift for telling a compelling story, and The Prophet of Edan works on two levels: on the individual level, with characters we care about and root for, and on the grand, civilizational level, where entire nations  hurl themselves at each other in a desperate war of survival. And the geopolitical dramas in Philip's world of Eormenlond are downright Kissingerian --with betrayal, realpolitik and honor, all in equal measure. Now, any story with a large cast and a lot of moving parts presents the author with a structural challenge: how do you help the reader keep everybody and everything straight, but yet do it in a way that's organic to the story? After all, this is the second part of a trilogy,  and a lot happened in Book I . So I'll share an example here of what this author does,...
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The Investor's Manifesto by William J. Bernstein

In just under 200 pages, The Investor's Manifesto gives you everything you need to manage your investments: * A historically grounded discussion of the tradeoffs between risk and return, * How to design an investment portfolio using index funds, including advice on withdrawal rates and how (and how often) to rebalance, * A good discussion of human psychological biases (the author uses the wonderful phrase "investing psychopathology" to describe this topic), and * How to navigate the financial services industry without getting your head handed to you. Finally, there's a chapter that summarizes everything, followed by a solid reading list for continuing your investment education, broken down by topic: theory, history, psychology, and business. Anyone wanting to reach a reasonable competence level in investing should read at least one of William Bernstein's books. This one or The Four Pillars of Investing  will suffice. Since he's not a Wall Street guy--he's...
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Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

A wonderful, beautiful work. Ask me about it, and I'll start nattering at you about sphex wasps, fugues, isomorphisms and "jumping out of the system." And my voice will trail off and you'll see me get a faraway look in my eyes. It's actually quite difficult to describe what this book is about--at least, impossible to describe in a few short sentences. [1] But there are so many ways to read Godel, Escher, Bach , and such a wide range of ideas and insights one can get out of it, that it becomes a different book for every reader. And let me confess, if you haven't read GEB  yet, I am jealous of you. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] First of all this book can be understood on many levels. You can read it a...
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