A Bit On the Side by William Trevor

I haven't been reading much fiction lately, and sadly, I can't remember the last time I read a book of short stories.

And now, thanks to reading William Trevor's book A Bit on the Side, I've been reminded all over again of the elegance and artistry of a really good short story.

An Irish writer, Trevor has a gift for describing how regular people face the harsh challenges of life. His touching and elegantly worded stories address our fallibility, our loneliness, our fundamental weakness.

His work reminds me a bit of Thomas Hardy, except his characters aren't quite such hapless victims of fate. His story Sacred Statues is a textbook Hardy-esque tragedy, a slow, grinding calamity where the reader hopes against all odds that things will work out for the main characters--yet the odds play out just as expected. Sitting with the Dead, the first story in this collection, is a brief and moving vignette about a woman greedy for what marriage might be, who paid for it with the best years of her life.

Readers familiar with the classic short stories of O. Henry will love William Trevor too. Let me qualify that: lovers of O. Henry will love William Trevor more, because they won't be forced to suspend disbelief and swallow implausible plot twists.

These stories were a gift to read, and I can't recommend them enough. If you're a fan of short fiction, you'll enjoy this book thoroughly.

Highly, highly recommended.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all "riddled" with errors and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction by J. Allan Hobson for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as Restful Sleep by Deepak Chopra for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...

By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy by Michael G. Vickers

The least deceptive way to read this endless, muddled and minutia-laden memoir would be to view it as a very long piece of propaganda: a type of limited hangout of all of the covert (and overt) things the United States does globally in its attempts to project power. It can also be read as an attempt at an extended--and I mean extended --defense of the CIA and all of its meddlings all over the world. This is if you actually read the book. Don't. Piled up with words but saying little of substance, this is the most obfuscatory memoir I've ever read. The author's voice fundamentally irritates: he has a compulsive need to share staggering amounts of unnecessary detail, he comes across as a relentless credit hog, and he repeatedly attempts to place himself right in the middle of the action--even when it's clear he wasn't. Perhaps least ethical of all, he has a habit of framing his actions and decisions so they appear more correct and predictive in retrospect than they ac...

The Dhandho Investor by Mohnish Pabrai

Worth reading, and rereading, and re-rereading. An elegant book that teaches fundamental principles of value investing, and much more. The Dhandho Investor also has the highly unusual quality of being useful at a wide range of reader sophistication levels: you can gain tremendously from this book as a beginner or as a deeply experienced investor. I'll single out Chapters 5 and 6 for particular mention: Chapter 5 describes author Mohnish Pabrai's investing framework, with nine interlocking and synchronistic rules. Chapter 6 describes in very simple language all of the gigantic structural advantages of investing in the stock market, as it offers low frictional costs, a tremendous selection of possible businesses, and, most importantly, periodic incredible opportunities. These two chapters explain why you will take a pass on almost all investments--but then, once in a while, make large bets on specific situations that meet your requirements. [A quick affiliate link to Amazon ...

What I Just Read

Search This Blog