What I Just Read

I have a bizarre passion for reading investment books that were written for past market cycles. I suppose I like the humiliation of it--it keeps me humble and helps me remember the fundamental truth that investment styles that look brilliant at one time can quickly destroy your wealth at other times. It also helps me maintain an attitude of contrarianism and cynicism in my investing. I almost always avoid or trade counter to strategies that I consider trendy, overly popular, or too widely embraced by other investors. Ironically, this has turned out to be one of my most dependable strategies for staying alive in the stock market over the past 15 years. Thus it is with a deep sense of irony that I say this: The Gorilla Game is exactly the kind of book that would have crushed you if you read when it was published, but it might be a perfect time to apply the strategies in this book right now. The thing is, books on investment strategies tend to come into the marketplace exactly when...

Stumbling on Happiness is by far the best book I've ever read on psychology. It's entertaining, easy to read and at times outright hilarious. Gilbert is a great writer, with a gift for a turn of phrase and a knack for coming up with amusing ways to describe the various foibles of our brains. In fact, Gilbert writes this book a little bit too well. Unlike Malcolm Gladwell, who is such a talented writer that he makes books about nothing sound absolutely fascinating, Gilbert's book is crammed with all sorts of incredible insights that I found myself almost glossing over because of his entertaining writing style. Which is a pity, because this book taught me more about my brain--how it misperceives, misremembers, misprojects and mismeasures nearly everything around it--than anything I've ever read. But I had to read it a second time (and take notes, even) to get the most out of it. Seriously, how often do you read a book that makes you want to not only re-read it, but take ...

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 ...

When was the last time you read a sports biography that wasn't completely narcissistic? When was the last time you read any biography and laughed out loud--repeatedly? And most important, when was the last time you found a book that you simply could not put down? Open is the best sports biography I've ever read. By light years. It makes "autobiographies" like Charles Barkley's Outrageous! (which Barkley famously claimed he never read) seem puerile, and it makes relatively intelligent books like Kareem Abdul Jabbar's Giant Steps or Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi seem pale and pointless by comparison. I was able to put those books down. Not Agassi's. Why do I read biographies? To learn lessons from other peoples' lives that I can apply to my own. To learn behavior I can model--or avoid. To understand the struggles and challenges of another person's life and use that understanding to help cope with the struggles and challenges of my...

You spent two weeks negotiating your new Infiniti with the dealership and got $10,000 off? Great. Does your life have a purpose? If you identify with the Infiniti buyer in the above sentence, don't bother reading The 4-Hour Workweek --it will be beyond your comprehension. In fact, do yourself a favor and stop reading this review right now. However, if the above sentence resonates with you, get this book and read it carefully. It will be an immensely helpful resource for handling problems and challenges ranging from time management to dream management, and it might give you the kick in the ass you need to completely change your life for the better. Let's get a few minor criticisms out of the way first. Admittedly, there's little truly original thinking in this book. Anybody can ruthlessly use the 80/20 rule to be more effective in life. Anybody can batch-process emails, cut back on reading the daily news and set personal deadlines to defeat Parkinson's law (meaning: ta...

"For most of human history we survived on unadorned animal and vegetable products. Now we eat mostly optimized and potent foods that bear little resemblance to what exists in nature." Why is it impossible to eat just one Dorito? Why do we crave some foods and not others? Why is it easy for many of us to eat far beyond satiation--even though we know we're going to regret it? Why, in short, do we overeat? These are the fundamental questions that former FDA Commissioner David Kessler asks in his new book The End of Overeating. In this book, you'll learn why some foods, tweaked and optimized by food designers and engineers to be "hyperpalatable," drive us to irrational cravings. You'll learn how our biology and our psychology conspire with these hyperpalatable foods to lead us to engage in "conditioned hypereating," causing us to eat far past the point where we're full. "Our business is to make something taste like something, even if it i...

Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life? is a difficult to describe book. Calling it a book about careers would be an oversimplification. But yet it's partly that. Calling it a life-coaching book also oversimplifies, but it's partly that too. It's unlike anything I've ever read, and yet it inspired me and--encouraged me--like few books ever have. Bronson, who traveled all over the country seeking out subjects for this book, builds his story around several dozen people who struggle with "the question." There's almost every sort of person here: old, young, smart, dumb, confident, insecure, emotional, analytical, rich, poor, failures, successes. Bronson paints by anecdote, choosing everyday people, and the result is an insightful and textured portrait of how people go about figuring out what to do with their lives. Some of Bronson's subjects can't figure out their passions. Some of them know exactly what their passions are, but they feel too f...

In government it is always easier to go forward with a program that does not work than to stop it altogether and admit failure. --David Halberstam The best history books don't just teach you about the past, they also teach you about today. The Best and the Brightest is a brilliant history of why America failed in Vietnam. It's a history of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and it's a history of the lives of the key Cabinet members and agency leaders Kennedy chose--the leaders Johnson later inherited when he unexpectedly became president. This book is also an exceptionally well-written postmortem of an era when our government made some of the worst decisions in its history. The title is an ironic reference to Kennedy's Cabinet, which he filled with the best and brightest minds of that era's establishment elites. These were leading intellectuals, captains of industry and key political thinkers of the day. People like McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk and Robert McNama...

"Let me tell you a few things about myself. Not much, but enough. In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence." --John le Carre, from his website I had the unique pleasure of reading for the first time a John le Carre novel, Our Game. I picked it out of a bin of throwaway paperbacks, thinking it would be a trashy, page-turning, throwaway novel. I expected a few hours of forgettable reading to help me forget that I was on a twelve hour plane ride to New Zealand . This book was not forgettable. And it introduced me to a new (to me) fiction writer who I look forward to reading again and again. Everyone compares these books to the action-packed spy novels of Ian Fleming, but the two are so different that the very comparison itself is misleading. Ian Fleming is flash, drama, excitement, and of course, narciss...