- White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. It’s hard to come into a book like White Teeth without any expectations. As the rookie-year novel of such a well-known writer as Smith, one tends to hear a lot of good things. She didn’t disappoint. White Teeth is a period-jumping novel dealing with a handful of themes: the weighty ambivalence of the immigrant; the conflicts of identity in their second-generation and mixed-race children; life-long friendship; war; the burden of history; the social costs of religious zealotry.
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion. Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking was one of the most memorable nonfiction books on life I’ve read, which inspired me to pick up her collection of her essays written almost 40 years earlier. She seems to pop up on a lot of lists of the best essays of all time. My favorite one is the title piece about San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the summer of 1967, and she describes the young culture and their grandiose but fuzzy mantras: “They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words… their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.” Sloppy language reflects sloppy thinking.
- A Heart So White, by Javier Marías. Marías, a talented story teller with a controlled yet lyrical voice (stoically poetic?), derives his title from a line in Macbeth that Lady Macbeth says to her husband after he’s killed Duncan, a murder she’s persuaded him to do. “
My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white.” It’s a great novel and deals with the elusiveness and weight of past deeds and secrets, as well as language and conversation.
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Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. I love Nassim Taleb. I read Fooled By Randomness a few years ago, and both books strongly shaped my thinking about statistics and finance. His main idea is that “experts” try to predict highly complex future events (like the direction of the stock market) using the same tools used to calculate simple events (like the outcomes of 10,000 blackjack games), leading to massive overconfidence and massively wrong predictions. We live in a primitive era of statistics: Basically, the only tool we currently have to predict the distribution of future events is the Gaussian bell curve, which is like trying to build a house with only a hammer. There’s been movement towards using fractals, notably by Benoit Mandelbrot, but to me, this seems like we’ve just added a flathead screwdriver to our tool belt. Taleb’s point is that we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking we can predict the future; we don’t have the tools yet.
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Superfreaknomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I love these guys. They get a little pooh-poohed by mainstream economists for being overly simplistic and focusing on trite issues, but I believe they are pushing economics in the right direction. Economics is not just about the exchange of money for goods and services; it’s the patterns of human behavior and coordination that drive those transactions. Taking the rigor of economics to nontraditional fields, i.e. other types of human interactions, is absolutely germane. It’s also really entertaining.
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How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen. I hate this title. But I liked the book. While slightly awkward reading in public when (umm) alone, Franzen’s essays are a pleasure to read. He’s at his best when discussing fiction and personal history. I excerpted one of my favorite parts in a previous post.
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Mr. Market Miscalculates, by James Grant. Grant has become one of my favorite writers on finance, a topic that doesn’t exactly draw the most thoughtful wordsmiths. Reading him in real-time requires a $1,000 subscription to his newsletter. The books retails for a lot less and compiles his best pieces from the past decade. Enjoyable and educational, but it doesn’t read like a book with a singular theme or like a current newsletter with relevant perspectives. It reads like reading old newsletters.
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