I was first introduced to Michael Lewis by an article of his in the now-defunct Portfolio entitled The End of Wall Street’s Boom. Despite being published last December, it’s still the second-most viewed article. Liar’s Poker is a memoir about investment banking in the late 1980s, an era of rapid financial innovation not too dissimilar to [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Books’
May 30, 2009
Book Review: Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Anathem by Neal Stephenson is the most dense novel released to my knowledge. The characters frequently break into what is called Dialog on Arbre, the world in which the book is set. In those Dialogs, learned characters discuss complex issues of science, epistemology and so on. On Arbre, the world has been split into (essentially) [...]
May 29, 2009
Book Review: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
I’d been looking forward to reading Blink for years but had always balked at the high cover price for such an old book. The Kindle price is more affordable. It was a pleasant read throughout, without the annoyance that I felt about the end of Outliers – which I didn’t take the time to write about.
Blink [...]
May 28, 2009
Book Review Thoughts
At the start of this year, I resolved to write about every book that I read. Partly, I motivated by a desire to stimulate more discussion about books among my friends, selfishly looking for more reading material. For the rest, I wanted to motivate myself to read more often and to retain more. I’ve been [...]
May 26, 2009
Book Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
I’ve read a few of Sedaris’ essay collections before, so Engulfed in Flames wasn’t entirely fresh. His schtick is to write humorous essays about his family, a clan from Raleigh, North Carolina, and his boyfriend.
I laughed frequently, but not too hard. Sedaris elicits New Yorker-style laughs, not belly guffaws. The remarkable thing about some of [...]
May 25, 2009
Book Review: The Psychology of Romantic Love by Nathaniel Branden
I picked up this book last month during a rain storm from the Barnes and Noble accross the street from one of the apartments I lived in during High School. I’d been looking around for it for a while, and the fact that they had it in stock was a happy coincidence. I’ve liked just [...]
February 25, 2009
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, Translated by A. A. Brill
Page numbers refer to the 1997 Wordsworth edition.
More than 101 years after its original publication, the thesis of The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud remains controversial at best, nigh-universally rejected at worst. His work has been voluminously evaluated by scholars, professionals and historians with more experience and knowledge than I have.
Reading this, I felt [...]
February 14, 2009
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
It took me longer to finish Tender is the Night than I had anticipated. It begins with an alluring and frightening portrait of a man and a woman commonly thought to be stand-ins for Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – Dick Diver, a young psychiatrist, and Nicole Warren, the institutionalized heiress to an American railroad [...]
February 8, 2009
Book Review: Tribes by Seth Godin
I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s blog for several days now, after following a link from The Simple Dollar. As I’m short on cash right now, and wanted to read at least one of his books, I took advantage of the free offer that Audible has going for the audiobook. Godin talks about the complete failure [...]
January 10, 2009
The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature by Neal Pollack
I was first introduced to Neal Pollack through his blog and his comedy writing for McSweeny’s, although these days, it looks like he’s mostly given up on producing satire in favor of more lucrative book on Gen-X parenting. I bought his Anthology years ago, but for some reason sat unread in my pile.
I was at [...]
