What have you read recently?

[Kings over Queens]

Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goggins

Loved that book.

a related good read is "Living with Seal" written by Jesse Itzler. He described the month that david goggins lived with him, only then you didn't know it was goggins.

really good book.

 

[Luvtoride]

Just finished Henry Winklers Autobiography, Being Henry: The Fonz and Beyond. I really enjoyed it. I've starting watching BARRY on Max, after reading about his resurgence as an actor in that great series. I'm really enjoying Barry.

I'm currently reading "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, since I read that this is on many schools "Banned Books" list. I know its a Young Adult book, but with tween-age granddaughters, I was interested in understanding the content and controversy.

 

[frayne]

About half way through "The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel." A fun read for anyone who likes history with a little engineering flavor. The guy was the personification of the old cliche about genius being 1% talent and 99% hard work. Also a good perspective of how the world was just as chaotic back at the turn of the century as it is today.

 

[MichaelB]

Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin by Larry White and The Future of Money by Eswar Prasad. The second is broader and better.

 

[scfr]

I just finished listening to William Bernstein's The Four Pillars of Investing (2023 version). It's even better than I was expecting. But now I want to be able to see the charts & graphs, so I've put the physical copy on hold at the library.

Becase The Four Pillars is rather meaty, for something lighter I'm also listening to The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl by Stacy McAnulty, a sweet juvenile fiction story about a 12 year old girl with special abilities and quirks trying to fit in to middle school.

 

[ArmchairMillionaire23]

I just finished "Holly" by Stephen King. A little off-putting at first with the timeline jumping around a lot, but it turned into a real page-turner in no time at all. It follows the Holly Gibney character from the "Mr. Mercedes" series on her own adventure. Grisly, but I enjoyed it.

As a cool side note, the text (and anything yellow) on the dust jacket glows in the dark so when you wake up in the middle of the night in the pitch dark and look towards your bedside table, you get to see STEPHEN KING and HOLLY so you remember what book you're reading.

 

[Lsbcal]

The Last Neanderthal. Offers us a fictional account of what it might have been like for our ancestors 40,000 years ago. Insights into human evolution. Grounded in paleo archeological knowledge. If nothing else, you will look very smart with this book. And if you have some blue green eye pigment you might just have a bit of Neanderthal genetics.

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Neanderthal-Novel-Claire-Cameron-ebook/dp/B01LL8C14C/ref=sr_1_1?crid=S98C97EHCJNH&keywords=the+last+neanderthal+claire+cameron&qid=1707581666&sprefix=the+last+nean%2Caps%2C195&sr=8-1

 

[braumeister]

And if you have some blue green eye pigment you might just have a bit of Neanderthal genetics.

Unless you were born in Africa, most of us do.

 

[lucky penny]

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

My book group chose it & I had zero interest in reading it ("a re-imagining of David Copperfield") but it won me over. Vivid characters & splendid storytelling, bringing Dickens' tale to life by placing it in Appalachia as the opioid crisis was arriving. Brilliant! Even without the literary connection, it’s a great read that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022.

 

[braumeister]

The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 – 1066 by Marc Morris

I guess most of us have little or no knowledge of England between the time the Romans left and the Normans took over. I found this most interesting, and it explained a lot that's relevant today.

 

[indiajust]

From the investing and mathematical modeling crowd, I just wrapped up Didier Sornette and Why Stock Markets Crash. He spends quite a bit of the book establishing and defending his premise. The penultimate chapter is a complete review of exponential functions with a compressed sinusoidal overlay of a range of complexity. At the end he defends the reverse of the boom, the mapping of the bust. Reasonably intense and meticulous, right down to the unit conversions and constants.

 

[indiajust]

Mark Spitznagel's Safe Haven is similar in approach. The gold umbrella on the cover gives away the "answer" for the only historical safe financial asset during crises. But he does cover everything and show how they fit together.

 

[indiajust]

My building book club opened with the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. This managed to be a profoundly mediocre book that was a poor substitute for a range of books. Weak characterization and plot structure, To Kill a Mockingbird is so much better and tighter. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil does a much better job of localization and eccentricity. Convolutions and plot interactions are so much better in Confederacy of Dunces or Maximum Bob. Somehow H & E manages not to deliver the groceries as well as its peers, regardless of how you stack it. It just came up short.

 

[ncbill]

Hell House by Richard Matheson.

Maybe a fun book club book?

 

[Qs Laptop]

"The Exchange: After The Firm" by John Grisham. I generally like Grisham's books but was really let down by this one. Book claims to be a sequel to The Firm. Technically it features two of the characters from The Firm, Mitch and Abby McDeere, and it takes place after the events of The Firm, in fact, fifteen years after. (Is it really a sequel if it's 15 years later and there is nothing remotely resembling the original story?)

The plot is ridiculous. The events from about mid-way through the book to the end resolution would never happen in a million years. There is no action, just descriptions of things that happened on videotape. Pages and pages and pages describe Mitch on an airplane, Mitch on the phone, Mitch in hotels in foreign countries, Mitch in meetings, Mitch eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc. etc. On and on and on with this stuff.

I started skimming pages. Then I started skipping pages. I didn't miss anything. If this wasn't sold as being a sequel to The Firm I would have quit reading, probably about half way through.

In short, it was a gigantic waste of my time that I could have better spent reading something good.

 

[bloom2708]

FX has released "Shogun" as a TV series. It reminds me how much I enjoyed the Shogun series by James Clavell.

Fantastic books that span the centuries. 6 books in all Shogun, Gai-Jin, Whirlwind, etc.

Highly recommended books if you like the long/detailed/not gonna finish in a week books. I like them longer the better.

I'm tempted to reread the Shogun Asian series, but the books are quite expensive right now. Well, everything is expensive right now.

 

[rodi]

I am on book 8 or 9 of the Wheel of Time series. I enjoyed the Netflix series but am enjoying the books even more. I will be bummed when I finish this series.

 

[Trailwalker]

I am on book 8 or 9 of the Wheel of Time series. I enjoyed the Netflix series but am enjoying the books even more. I will be bummed when I finish this series.

I give you credit. I got bogged down by book four. There are so many characters! I still agree that the books are more enjoyable than the series.

I've started a far less ambitious project in the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, which has fewer characters and shorter books.

 

[donheff]

"The Exchange: After The Firm" by John Grisham... ...was a gigantic waste of my time that I could have better spent reading something good.

Ditto.

 

[Qs Laptop]

Ditto.

I have my doubts that Grisham actually wrote this book. It doesn't sound like his usual delivery. Maybe the first couple of chapters but then it got very workmanlike and lacked style.

 

[anethum]

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, is a wonderful novel. It was published in 2012 but I had never read it. It's set in a fictitious college town in Wisconsin. A gifted college baseball shortstop makes an uncharacteristic error which affects the lives of 4 other people. Most of the novel is not about baseball, however.

Cork Dork: "A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste", by Bianca Bosker. I am not a wine geek, but I found this book interesting. I came away convinced that there is science behind many things spouted about wine---with the exception of "tasting notes". Some of the most interesting passages were descriptions of staff & customer behavior in high-end restaurants in NYC. The writing is very good, but I think the book could have been pared down somewhat.

Best Men is a fun LGBT novel by Sidney Karger.

 

[anethum]

I Am Pilgrim is an absorbing thriller by Terry Hayes. It came out about 10 years ago, but I hadn't heard of it until recently. Given that the main character & narrator is American and much of the story concerns US intelligence, it's a bit surprising that the author is British. Be warned that the book is over 600 pages long, though it didn't drag at all. The author has worked in film, and I'm somewhat surprised that this thriller hasn't been turned into a movie.

The Paris Daughter by Kristin Harmel is an excellent historical novel about mothers who have to make excruciating decisions in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Paris.

 

[indiajust]

I just finished Didier Sornette, Why Stock Markets Crash.

This is a detailed mathematical modeling book, with a twist. First he develops a narrative around the eminently human concept of the emergent behavior of market crashes, panics, greed, fear, doom loops, manias... He uses heaps of past data on famous crashes, large and small to discern an underlying common theme. Each characteristic gets developed into a mathematical representation.

There is a bunch of development and defense of his chosen model, followed by a range of fitting of the model to booms/busts from the distant past to gamestop present.

He extends the boom concept into the bust by reverting the same equation/model.

Ultimately he lands on an exponential fit, a time delay, with a linearly compressing sinusoidal component that captures both the variation and the excitement which shortens the period of the oscillation.

He claims it helps him predict the extent and approximate timing for the boom.

I plan to couple this with BoomBustology from Vikram Mansharamani. I want to add more of the emotion to couple with the content from Sornette.

 

[indiajust]

Separately, I met the author recently and am reading The Generalist from Vikram Mansharamani. If you wanted a recent version of the tried/true Horatio Alger type novella/biopic, here you go.

Plain vanilla writing, but the life and the optimism are real. I hope for better from his first book, the previously mentioned BoomBustology that I am coupling with Stock Market Crash.

 

[pugmom]

Self-help book

I just finished re-reading Scott Adam's book:

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

I was wondering if anyone else has read this. I find it to be the best single "advice" book I have ever read, and I was thinking of sending it to my niece for her graduation from college (soon).

Just one example: he talks about how "systems" are better than "goals". Also, about how personal health and fitness is a pre-requisite for a good life.

I realize you might (correctly) say that dozens of books have advice like this. I just feel that this one is right on the money.

Has anyone else read this?