What have you read recently?

Finished Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr. This shifts between 1939 with policeman Bernie Gunther tasked to find the murderer of a questionable Nazi at Hitler's Bertesgarten retreat and 1956 where Bernie is tasked by the Stasi to commit an assassination.

Very well researched material on the Nazi higher ups.
 
It took me about a month and a half to get through, but I finally finished Wade Pfau's Retirement Planning Guidebook. This is a very thorough planning guide. I see myself using it for reference as I make my way into retirement. At 462 pages, it's quite a bit to swallow, but there is a ton of information in there. It's a great stand-alone book but there is also a link to the author's website for the opportunity to take a "Retirement Income Style Awareness™" survey for those who might need some guidance in this. I took the survey, but for me it pretty much re-enforced what I already knew about myself. It might be helpful for others, though, and it's not required.

Without giving away all the author's hard work, I'll list the chapter titles below to show just how comprehensive this guidebook is:

Chapter 1: Retirement Income Styles and Decisions.
Chapter 2: Retirement Risks.
Chapter 3: Quantifying Goals and Assessing Preparedness.
Chapter 4: Sustainable Spending From Investments.
Chapter 5: Annuities and Risk Pooling.
Chapter 6: Social Security.
Chapter 7: Medicare and Health Insurance.
Chapter 8: Long Term Care Planning.
Chapter 9: Housing Decisions in Retirement. (includes reverse mortgages)
Chapter 10: Tax Planning for Efficient Retirement Distributions.
Chapter 11: Legacy and Incapacity Planning.
Chapter 12: The Non-Financial Aspects of Retirement Success.
Chapter 13: Putting It All Together.

It doesn't focus a whole lot on early retirement, (that's what this site is for - :LOL:) but overall I found it to be a well written book. I'm hoping to retire in about 3 years (ER Class of 2025!) and I'm glad to have this as a reference guide.
 
Armchair, thanks for your review and comments. I’m about 1/2 way through the book and concur with your assessment. Not every chapter and subject is as relevant and enlightening for me, but I’m learning a great deal about many of these subjects which I didn’t know previously.
Yes, there are good resources here on FIRE to find a lot of this information but it’s not all in one place like this book provides. Also, as the saying goes, “you don’t know what you don’t know” and this book puts a lot of that in one easy reference place.
 
I was surprised to see that me library has an ebook copy of Pfau's guide.
 
I recently read 3 very good and very different novels.

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (author of the wonderful A Gentleman in Moscow). An impressive novel about an unusual road trip, undertaken by a young man in the early 1950s in Nebraska. He leaves the family farm in Nebraska with his young brother after their father dies. Unexpected events continually happen and they find themselves traveling in the opposite direction of their intended destination.

Zorrie by Laird Hunt. I was not familiar with the writing of Laird Hunt but he has written many novels and short stories. His writing is excellent, and this novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2021. Zorrie is a woman in rural Indiana orphaned at a young age. She manages to overcome her many life challenges aided by friends and community. Looking back on this novel, I'm somewhat surprised that the author was a man.

The Promise by Damon Galgut. This novel won the Booker Prize in 2021. A family saga set in the author's native South Africa. The books spans the decades in a white South African family from apartheid to recent years, with each section coinciding with something memorable in South African history, as well as a family death. The novel doesn't flinch at exposing issues in South African society during each period.
 
Charles Duhigg's, The Power of Habit, explores how much of our personal and organizational behavior, good and bad, is ingrained in habit. It is a fascinating read with a lot of good suggestions on how to change the habits that set us back.
 
I finished Elizabeth Strout's latest novel Oh, William!. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Her writing is very idiosyncratic, but it somehow works. This once again features the Lucy Barton character.

I just finished The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman. This is the 2nd book in the Thursday Murder Club series. I loved this and thought that it was even better than the 1st book in the series. His writing is so witty and clever. I laughed out loud numerous times. The odd collection of characters are wonderful.
 
All About Me! An autobiography by Mel Brooks. I am a huge fan of his film and TV work but have never been a reader of autobiographies, and after reading this, still am not.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Sci-Fi / fantasy from 1992 that could have been written yesterday.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman, translated by Koch. I really enjoy Backman’s work.
 
Just finished Brad Edwards 'Relentless Pursuit'. It is about his legal pursuit of
Jeffrey Epstein.

Now reading Patrick Keefe's 'Empire of Pain'. It is about the Sackler Family history of making and selling Valium and Oxycontin. Nasty family.
 
Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience by Eli Saslow.

From the Amazon description: "Through Saslow's masterful, empathetic interviewing, we are given a kaleidoscopic picture of a people dealing with the unimaginable. These deeply personal accounts make for cathartic reading, as we see Americans at their worst, and at their resilient best."

The stories are heart-wrenching and uplifting all at the same time.

A lot of the stories first appeared in the Washington Post in the early days of the pandemic; I remember reading them at the time. Saslow is a Post reporter.
 
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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,

A 2014 non-fiction book by American surgeon Atul Gawande. The book addresses end-of-life care, hospice care, and also contains Gawande's reflections and personal stories. He suggests that medical care should focus on well-being rather than survival.
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Recommended here by Rodi.:)
 
I think that understanding how Germany moved to extreme Fascism is a good lesson in extreme politics. Back then the extreme right and extreme left, Nazi's versus Communists were battling it out. It didn't take a majority for the Nazis to gain power.

Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series (14 books) does a great job of discussing the politics back then with fictional characters but also actual, well researched characters too. I decided to start with Philip Kerr's first book: March Violets:

Wisecracking cop turned private investigator Bernie Gunther specializes in missing persons, and as the Third Reich’s power has grown, Bernie has become a very busy man. But as he takes on cases involving millionaire industrialists, stolen diamonds, and Hitler’s most powerful cronies, Bernie finds himself mired in the brutality and corruption of a country on the brink of war.
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Then I saw a book list with the books in event chronological order. See the list somewhat down on the page here: https://www.howtoread.me/bernie-gunther-books-in-order/

This had me reading Metropolis which was sadly Philips Kerr's last book:

Summer, 1928. Berlin, a city where nothing is verboten.

In the night streets, political gangs wander, looking for fights. Daylight reveals a beleaguered populace barely recovering from the postwar inflation, often jobless, reeling from the reparations imposed by the victors. At central police HQ, the Murder Commission has its hands full. A killer is on the loose, and though he scatters many clues, each is a dead end. It's almost as if he is taunting the cops. Meanwhile, the press is having a field day.

This is what Bernie Gunther finds on his first day with the Murder Commisson. He's been taken on because the people at the top have noticed him - they think he has the makings of a first-rate detective. But not just yet. Right now, he has to listen and learn.

Metropolis, completed just before Philip Kerr's untimely death, is the capstone of a 14-book journey through the life of Kerr's signature character, Bernhard Genther, a sardonic and wisecracking homicide detective caught up in an increasingly Nazified Berlin police department. In many ways, it is Bernie's origin story and, as Kerr's last novel, it is also, alas, his end.

Metropolis is also a tour of a city in chaos: of its seedy sideshows and sex clubs, of the underground gangs that run its rackets, and its bewildered citizens - the lost, the homeless, the abandoned. It is Berlin as it edges toward the new world order that Hitler will soon usher in. And Bernie? He's a quick study, and he's learning a lot. Including, to his chagrin, that when push comes to shove, he isn't much better than the gangsters in doing whatever he must to get what he wants.
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I read a very good thriller titled The Corpse Flower by Anne Mette Hancock, translated from Danish. It was especially impressive as it is her first novel. A Danish newspaper reporter is contacted by a woman who is wanted by the police for murder.

I also read Don't Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin. This novel was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Fiction award in 2018. I had never read any novels by this author before. The story revolves around a young ranchhand in western Nevada. He aspires to be a boxer and leaves the ranch to pursue that goal. The description of life on the ranch at the beginning was very interesting, but ultimately the book became very depressing.
 
Gumby said:
We're opening new versions of our long running threads so that they'll load faster on phones.
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I got "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel for Christmas and I just finished reading through it a second time.

It's okay. For me, it was a lot of common sense. But I can see it being good for the younger generation who are just starting out.

The book contains quite a few anecdotes about how your attitude towards money can go a lot farther towards becoming wealthy than just having a good job. The intro describes a software genius who made a ton of money but threw it away (sometimes literally) on frivolous things and also a gas station worker / janitor who amassed $8 million by saving and investing.

Again, mostly common sense.
 
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

I've seen this recommended several times in several places, but I kept putting it off because it sounded too dry.

Only part way through it, but I've been most pleasantly surprised by how much I'm enjoying it.

From Wikipedia:
The book's main thesis is that of a dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The book delineates rational and non-rational motivations or triggers associated with each type of thinking process, and how they complement each other, starting with Kahneman's own research on loss aversion. From framing choices to people's tendency to replace a difficult question with one which is easy to answer, the book summarizes several decades of research to suggest that people have too much confidence in human judgement.
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I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock, a near future exploration of geoengeneering to counter global warming. Very interesting. The most fascinating parts involve clashes on the “Line of Actual Control” separating India and China. I was not aware of this strange, brutal 60 year stand off with no guns allowed.
 
braumeister said:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

I've seen this recommended several times in several places, but I kept putting it off because it sounded too dry.

Only part way through it, but I've been most pleasantly surprised by how much I'm enjoying it.
Click to expand...
That’s an excellent book. He makes it easy to see how a psychologist could earn a Nobel (Memorial) Prize in Economics.

A little off topic, but here’s a link to an interview with him by Tyler Cowen, who is (IMHO) on of the best current interviewers in the US. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/daniel-kahneman/
 
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