Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
This about A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Should be too much charts after first few chapters.
It's an interesting but flawed book. Confuses the fundamentally vital issue of whether prices are random and whether they are correct in a true sense.
A financial book that I think goes under the radar is "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter Bernstein, it's worth a read if you haven't picked it up already.
Here's a great list/curriculum from the son of the James O’Shaughnessy who wrote What works on Wall Street
Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
This about A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Should be too much charts after first few chapters.
It's an interesting but flawed book. Confuses the fundamentally vital issue of whether prices are random and whether they are correct in a true sense.
I read a chunk of that a few years ago but never finished it so I'm working through it again. He definitely seems to conflate or at least not distinguish very well between the notion of total randomness and the idea that it's impossible to predict market fluctuations to your advantage.
Sorry I don't think that's the first time my reading list has brought you astray. Dalrymple was recommended from a 2p2 thread, and I knew nothing about him, I found him quite jarring at first, and I'm no wholly liberal, but I warned to him over the book. I think his writing is exceptional, but i can understand the criticism of him. I need to read more of him to really figure out what I think.
Stop finishing books Keane, I keep getting emails and when i open them I think you are reading Shantaram as it puts the book I am reading above your update. I then feel the shame of not having finished it while you plough through all those.
Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
Those Jim Butcher books are worth a go Keane? They seem excellently ranked with a class premise.
I find them totally entertaining. You know you're not reading Hemingway but he really understands how to write a fun, noir style plot and works in traditional folklore elements in novel ways. The consensus seems to be that the first book or two are not as good and that it takes off around the third one, but to be honest I found them all pretty good. The first one is probably the worst alright. They're perfect audiobook material for me.
Sorry I don't think that's the first time my reading list has brought you astray. Dalrymple was recommended from a 2p2 thread, and I knew nothing about him, I found him quite jarring at first, and I'm no wholly liberal, but I warned to him over the book. I think his writing is exceptional, but i can understand the criticism of him. I need to read more of him to really figure out what I think.
No I think what happened the other time was I read 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' and you just mentioned you could have told me not to bother in advance.
In any case, I have sort of decided it's important to try and read stuff that I won't necessarily agree with. In fairness, I'm sure there's more than a kernel of truth to his basic premise that people would benefit from taking as much responsibility for the situations they are in as possible. I'm totally unconvinced by his theories on where the tendency to do the opposite comes from (i.e. modern liberalism), to the point that I find his argument so far borderline laughable. Albeit I'm only ~20% in so it remains to be seen how I'll feel at the end of it. As you said his actual prose is very, very good. He comes across so far as a massive dickhead though
Stop finishing books Keane, I keep getting emails and when i open them I think you are reading Shantaram as it puts the book I am reading above your update. I then feel the shame of not having finished it while you plough through all those.
In fairness I was on holiday for two weeks there so I was bound to get through a couple! I tend to have a good few books on the go at a time and try to get through ~5% of a couple of them every day - sometimes that ends up where I finish a glut of of them at the same time depending how the lengths line up etc. I just finished two the other day and I have a feeling there will be another three knocked off by the end of the week so might be a good time to turn off your notifications
I don't suppose anyone hear has read the Andy Lee book yet? It seems to be getting very good reviews.
I bought it the other day because I heard from multiple sources that it was very good.
On autobiographies, GF is an avid reader, easily consumes 80-100 books a year, she read Andre Agassi's autobiography recently and said it was brilliant too, it's definitely one I'll get to soon.
I bought it the other day because I heard from multiple sources that it was very good.
On autobiographies, GF is an avid reader, easily consumes 80-100 books a year, she read Andre Agassi's autobiography recently and said it was brilliant too, it's definitely one I'll get to soon.
Despite finishing a couple of books lately I'm back with nine on the go as well. I've made a commitment to myself now that I'm not going to start anything new until I'm down to two or three at most.
After that I think it will be Gödel, Escher, Bach and Open based on all the recommendations. Might get someone to pick me up the Lee book for Christmas as well.
Despite finishing a couple of books lately I'm back with nine on the go as well. I've made a commitment to myself now that I'm not going to start anything new until I'm down to two or three at most.
After that I think it will be Gödel, Escher, Bach and Open based on all the recommendations. Might get someone to pick me up the Lee book for Christmas as well.
I bought loads via Kindle, audible and hard copy that I have to get through.
I'm probably getting through 10 hours per week in the car but you definitely aren't as engaged as you would be otherwise via reading or listening with headphones.
I'm committed to not buying anymore till I'm finished what I have bought so that will probably be this time next year but at least GoodReads means you're at least marking them.
I'll likely miss 50 this year but I'm aiming for 70 next year as my year shouldn't be as hectic
Another one I have on my coffee table to knock off a few pages every now and again is Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World which I thought would be a good fit for this polymathy mission I've given myself. I'm not very far into it but so far it has briefly discussed the LIGO experiment, the Antikythera mechanism and the steam engine, so suitably broad!
Don't think I mentioned that I finished the above a week or two ago. It was a nice little read on different branches of engineering and how they have developed historically. In places it did slip towards the dull, as is probably to be expected with the topic even with the best writing in the world, but not bad overall.
My biggest complaint would be a bizarre last chapter in which he comes up with this notion that if humans don't divert from their endless drive towards precision we will be fucked - a position he doesn't really hint at anywhere else along the way, or really prove exists or even why it's bad. It seemed just like a very hamfisted attempt at elevating the rest of the prose with a unifying philosophical theme, but it had the opposite effect.
Not to be too harsh either, it was an enjoyable enough read.
Investing - A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Money Management - Your Money or Your Life
Totalitarianism - 1984
Soccer - Inverting the Pyramid
Atheism - God is not Great
History of Science - A Brief History of Nearly Everything
Sports Statistics - Moneyball
Evolution - The Blind Watchmaker
Roman Empire - Rubicon
Apollo Program - A Man on the Moon
Mormonism - Under the Banner of Heaven
Restaurant Industry - Kitchen Confidential
String Theory - An Elegant Universe
US Imperialism - The Essential Chomsky
War on Drugs - Chasing the Scream
The Financial Crisis - The Big Short
Relativity - A Brief History of Time
Zen - The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
History of Humanity - Sapiens
Cryptology - The Codebreakers; The Code Book
Artificial Intelligence - AI Superpowers
Technological Change - The Second Machine Age
Overcoming Adversity - Man's Search for Meaning
How to Think About the World - Factfulness
Productivity - Getting Things Done
Bullshit - Bad Science
Middle East Geopolitics - The Great War for Civilisation
US Civil War - Team of Rivals
Mathematics - God Created the Integers
Thinking Outside the Box - Freakonomics
Alternative Medicine - Trick or Treatment
CRISPR/Gene Editing - A Crack in Creation
History of Game Development - Masters of Doom
The right-leaning view of social problems & poverty - Life at the Bottom
Computer Science applied to Human Decisions - Algorithms to Live By
Maths applied to Human Decisions - How Not to Be Wrong
Making good predictions - Superforecasting
Anthropology - Guns Germs & Steel
Behavioural Economics - Thinking Fast & Slow
Global Progress - Enlightment Now; Factfulness
Scientific Philosophy - The Beginning of Infinity
I've added a couple of more books to the list above, again feel free to add to it.
From reading reviews I feel like 'The Beginning of Infinity' belongs here too, but I can't really nail down what heading it would go under!
Also interested if anyone (Tar?) has any recommendations on books around vegetarianism/veganism/animal welfare, as that's something I'd like to read a bit about.
In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, int…
It's pretty bleak but fascinating in it's own morbid way
People say I should be more humble I hope they understand, they don't listen when you mumble
Get a shiny metal Revolut card! And a free tenner! https://revolut.com/referral/jamesb8!G10D21
Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
Just because the others are so brilliant, I'm assuming Enlightenment Now is equally so. Added that to the burgeoning list of to-reads, cheers!
Hmmmm I thought it was very good and Bill Gates said it's his fav book ever https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now but as I said before it's similar to Factfulness but I think you're reading them in a better order as Enlightenment Now is more in-depth but not necessarily better
Ploughing through the Patrick melrose books at the moment , excellent stuff ( had already watched the also excellent tv series). really captures the awfulness of the British aristocracy very well, also hilarious in spite of dealing with some very dark subjects
Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
Don't mind reading good news twice! Been meaning to read a Pinker for a while. Him and Gore Vidal and Chomsky are my main reading oversights of the recent American giants. Plus maybe Steven Jay Gould
Yeah I bought a couple of Chomsky too but I haven't read them but they're all quite small books. I was actually listening to some YouTube videos with him today on Social Darwinism because a book I'm getting through now "The Righteous Mind Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" has had the author Jonathon Haidt accused of Social Darwinism. It seems good so far, he's pretty anti The New Atheist group who I tend to like so maybe it offers a different perspective.
I listened to a lot of Chomsky last year, my impression was of a towering intellect.
I found it very rewarding from the POV of hearing just shitloads of stuff about America's global military operations and how they developed and maintained their hegemony since WW2. I found listening to that stuff totally compulsive.
I also found he had interesting perspectives on things, e.g. despite the fact that he seems to consider Trump an incredibly dangerous development he was quite sanguine about the general notion of normalising relations between Russia and the west in a way that has mostly been lost in hysteria about twitter trolls etc more recently.
Even the stuff on linguistics you will find in 'Essential Chomsky' and the likes, while being very technical is very enjoyable.
There's loads of his stuff available as podcasts and on Youtube - with himself actually speaking, which I would think adds a lot.
I read Imperial Ambitions by Chomsky this weekend. I couldn't put it down to be honest. I think the combination of the Q&A format, depth of knowledge on a topic and the nuanced interpretation of various aspects of colonialism are brilliant.
I can imagine some may appear somewhat tinfoil hat in aspects but it seems so logical.
Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
Who's Sean on Goodreads? (in the IPB group) Tempted by this he read recently: "Anyway, Where Was I?: Geoff Hill's Alternative A-Z of the World"
That would be me.
It was quite a good book. Occasional hat tips to Flann O'Brien in the way the chapters were structured added to it early on. However I felt the final parts (50/75 pages odd) were a bit forced and the overall thing started to feel a little stale...
It's a good book and comes in very convenient bit size chunks for reading with other things or while on the move. You probably need to be on board with his sense of humour to enjoy it, even if that sense of humour gets somewhat tiresome later on. If the first few chapters don't suck you in I'd just let it go.
Pinkers a fraud , comforting bedtime tales for adults nothing more. I’d Say his name will become a sort of black joke amongst survivors of the next big conflict to break out
Read 'How the Mind Works' years ago, thought it was really great. Have Pinker's ideas been debunked or something?
I haven't got around to How the Mind Works so I can't comment on that aspect of his work.
As far as his most recent books, The Better Angels of our Nature and Enlightenment Now, they're excellent with the latter painting a pretty optimistic view of the progress humanity has made with the English Enlightenment being the catalyst in his view.
As far as what PSV is referring to, I have no idea tbh but the article he shared does very little to debunk anything that Pinker cites recently.
Pinker’s hyper-optimism and faith in progress have little to do with the actual views of Enlightenment thinkers. Scholars who point that out aren’t enemies of Western civilization.
That review is a better critique of Pinkers work so you can make up your own mind but PSV would need to elaborate on what he means.
I read more of the Dalrymple book last night, this time an essay on the correlation between tattoos and criminality and I realised I've been taking him way too seriously.
Up to that point I had been reading him totally unironically, and hadn't really twigged that the book was an anthology of articles/essays rather than a single piece. I now think he's writing in a slightly tongue in cheek manner, as if a well educated and erudite version of Jeremy Clarkson was doing a low level trolling with a grain of truth shtick.
I actually enjoyed it a lot more when I figured out he's not expecting to be taken 100% literally.
Finished Shantaram, last quarter was quite dire, found myself skipping lots of it and I never do that. The best bit was the description of the melting pot of culture and the darker side of India but the actual characters, meh (apart from prabu). Self-aggrandizing pseudo philosophical aphorism nonsense written by a wanker. It could have been a very good book if it was a quarter of the length and cut out a load of crap, especially his overwrought florid prose.
The best part of it is that I get to eat Indian food at my book club meet when discussing the first half tomorrow. Worst part: Our tongues writhed, and slithered in their caves of pleasure. Tongues proclaiming what we were. Human. Lovers.
No SP is there but he keeps his well of knowledge on private so I guessed it was one of the guys I mentioned
Didn't realise I was on private, I'll change that. Mostly reading crime novels and a bit of General fiction
Loved George v Higgins's very unusual style of hard boiled Boston crime from the 70's. Read a few James lee Burke Robicheaux books and they were ok might or might not read more.
Picked up the Belfast based Milkman but found it hard to engage with and have put it down while I fly through Barbara Kingsolver's new novel which I am enjoying but not as much as either the Lacuna or Poisonwood bible both of which are brilliant reads. I'll probably go back to Milkman and then I'll be looking for some decent sci fi.
Ugh! just had a horrible moment when it hit me again that there just aren't going to be any more Culture novels, ever
Ugh! just had a horrible moment when it hit me again that there just aren't going to be any more Culture novels, ever
Such marvelous books, I re-read one of them every few years and unfailingly still get the same pleasure from it as I did first time around. It's such a pity he didn't get to write more of them.
I'm finishing off re-reading the Forever War books right now, and then will be getting stuck into Dan Simmons stuff again, but - a few new books aside - have already planned to do all of the Culture books for a 2nd time in 2019. I feel the same about them as most of us here; such a joy to read!
I've still only read a couple of those. The ones I did read I enjoyed but put down Use of Weapons part way through one day and just never picked it up after. I really need to put them back up the list again. I'm not overloaded with new fiction to read at the moment anyway so the time is probably ripe.
I've been meaning to read the Culture books for some time now, must get around to it. Currently back on the Sherlock works and then maybe The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World.
I like how the book brings up how our misunderstanding of science in the past actually allowed us to gain more understanding of it, things we created in err by us being wrong about scientific phenomena were able to progress science by accident. Seems an interesting book.
Finished Sapiens and the follow up Homo Deus recently. Both great reads and very happy to recommend. Did think it got a little tedious at times in Homo Deus. Possibly because I jumped into it straight after Sapiens and it re-hashes some of the content.
Started listening to the audiobook of Hit Refresh this week. Its by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and details their turnaround over the last few years as well as chunks of his life story. Its rather engaging and surprisingly lacks much of the corporate speak I would have expected. Anyone with an interest in technology will dig it.
Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
ffs - got to read 10 Culture series now?! They look fascinating, but keane just dumped 25 fascinating seeming wizard detective series on my shoulders. 2019 is going to be a slog! (off to buy them all)
Finished Sapiens and the follow up Homo Deus recently. Both great reads and very happy to recommend. Did think it got a little tedious at times in Homo Deus. Possibly because I jumped into it straight after Sapiens and it re-hashes some of the content.
I started listening to the Audiobook of Sapiens recently because it is so well praised. About a third of the way into it and I think it's a lot less good than others seem to. I'm an underdog to continue. Started listening to Mythos last night.
Originally posted by Hitchhiker's Guide To...View Post
ffs - got to read 10 Culture series now?! They look fascinating, but keane just dumped 25 fascinating seeming wizard detective series on my shoulders. 2019 is going to be a slog! (off to buy them all)
@ keane what that books he referring to? The Harry Dreson Files"?
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity, but I know none, therefore am no beast.
I started listening to the Audiobook of Sapiens recently because it is so well praised. About a third of the way into it and I think it's a lot less good than others seem to. I'm an underdog to continue. Started listening to Mythos last night.
I know it received a lot of criticism in certain circles for various conjectures it made and some questions around historical accuracy but i did like it.
Keane turned me off getting Mythos but I probably will get around to it at some point.
If you had the time could you recommend some philosophy and/or psychology books?
I remember reading the first few books... But stopped reading after a while ... Think it gotten to the stage where o felt it was just repetitive.
Yeah I think that's a valid criticism, they all follow the same essential noir-ish structure and you basically swap in and out different types of baddies.
He does quite a good job of weaving it all together into a bit of a grand theme in the later books believe it or not. There are a couple of points throughout the series where we get a callback to earlier events and you go 'no way' as pieces fall into place and this overarching conspiracy starts to emerge. I'm not sure if it would be more impressive if that was the plan from the start or if he managed to manufacture it later on.
But yeah the individual books and stories themselves are definitely very formulaic and potentially I might have gotten tired of going through them one after another if I had been reading rather than listening also.
Two contenders for my next reads, maybe one as my bookclub pick. Although still tempted to put something I've read for that. Enders Game, Sapiens, Hitchhikers Guide or something like that.
Two contenders for my next reads, maybe one as my bookclub pick. Although still tempted to put something I've read for that. Enders Game, Sapiens, Hitchhikers Guide or something like that.
I think Freakanomics is pretty good, it's similar to Malcolm Gladwells or Michael Lewis type stuff. I'd say hitch would argue Michael Lewis is in a class of his own but they're in a similar vain I think.
I was in Bali on hols on the way home from NZ last year and I was reading Freakanomics, walking back to the pool.
American guy walking beside me just says: "Freakanomics, good book, a bit basic though" and walks off.
Sound, thanks for that.
I think Freakanomics is pretty good, it's similar to Malcolm Gladwells or Michael Lewis type stuff. I'd say hitch would argue Michael Lewis is in a class of his own but they're in a similar vain I think.
I was in Bali on hols on the way home from NZ last year and I was reading Freakanomics, walking back to the pool.
American guy walking beside me just says: "Freakanomics, good book, a bit basic though" and walks off.
Sound, thanks for that.
On the last lap (or third section, known as Nostos) with only three chapters and about 160 pages to go.
The second half of section two was a trip and a half (which i suppose just echoes the overarching and recurring themes of journey in the novel).
Trickiest by far was the Oxen of the Sun episode written in different styles of English (wiki tells me they are - latinate prose, Anglo-Saxon alliteration, Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Pepys, Defoe, Sterne, Walpole, Gibbon, Dickens, and Carlyl) mirroring the development of the language itself AND the nine months of pregnancy which is pertinent to Bloom's visit to Hollis Street maternity hospital where the episode takes place.
This was the hardest chapter of all to digest but did get somewhat easier as the English got more modern.
The Nausicaa episode just before Oxen sees a voyeuristic Bloom masturbating on Sandymount strand and is easy to evoke for me as i run past, round and over it regularly - i could smell the sea air in my nostrils on a warm summers evening as dusk lazily drew in and Bloom's imagination ran wild.
The Circe episode which ends section 2 is basically a 120 page hallucination (written in the form of a play replete with stage directions) in the red light district around Montgomery Street and is often very funny and occasionally very touching - visions of Daedalus' dead mother and Bloom's dead son make significant appearances.
It focuses in a suitably psychedelic way on the tumult of human fears, dreams, hopes etc... and has a great cast of characters too including Cunty Kate and Biddy the Clap. Despite being quite weird it was easy to read.
Hope to finish over the Christmas holidays now and am still in thrall to its majesty, boring the hole of friends with impassioned descriptions of the unusual yet very ordinary goings on as i observe them eventually tilt their heads slightly patronisingly, waiting until they can move the conversation on to something else. I am hard to stop though when i get going.
Can't wait for the final chapter, Molly's soliloquy, but for now I am with Bloom and Daedalus in a cabmans shelter beside Butt Bridge at the end of that June 16 night as exhaustion sinks in and something profound starts to unravel.
The thing I like about the sound of Freakonomics is it is a lot more research and science based than Gladwell's stuff. Plenty of people that are experts in the field it supposedly talks about say the research is good and they just sometimes take a less than conservative approach to reporting the results, which isn't the worst criticism. I've seen some similar comments on reddit as that ass that you met.
Another contender is Fahrenheit 451 which I somehow have never heard of until recently.
I've not read Brave New World either. Animal Farm might be good as a stepping stone I'm not sure my bookclub would be ready for 1984's bleakness.
Thoughts on Philip K Dicks books? I haven't read any yet but I'm watching The Man in the High Castle at the minute and I think the concept is very good.
I know alot of his stuff has been used on the screen, I assume Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep & The Man in the High Castle are the ones to read first?
Ubik is held in high regard too
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