Yearend Reviews
The best finance book I read this year was the first 248 pages of Alan Greenspan´s book. The worst book I read was the remaining pages of the same book. What was the need to pad it up?
Nassim Taleb wrote a more nuanced book, The Black Swan, than his previous rant, “Fooled by Randomness”. Either he has become more subtle or I have, so I enjoyed this one more. Like some directors make the same film again and again, only a little better (like David Lynch), Taleb writes the same book again and again, but this is much better. Will Self, who got kicked out long ago from John Major´s plane for doing heroin on the flight, wrote a very funny review of the book.
One book I really wanted to read, but never managed to get the time for was William Cohan´s book on Lazard. If I ever wanted to work at a bank, I wanted it to be Lazard, only then followed by Goldman Sachs. Goldman´s bankers maybe very good, but they are boring and Lazard has always had all the characters. Like Edouard Stern. Rumor has it that he was shot by a mistress who wanted a parting gift of $1m, that Stern refused. So, she coaxed him into a latex suit in preparation of some orgy, shot him and left him bleeding. A friend dropped by, and thought that this latex suited body was a new piece of modern art that Stern was in the habit of buying and so left, without helping. Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.
In fiction, the best read was Manuel Vazquez Montalban´s “The Buenos Aires Quintet”. For me, a novel has to hark back to the first novels, “Gargantua & Pantagruel” by Rabelais or “Don Quixote” by Cervantes. Echoing Borges story, “Pierre Menard”, Carlos Fuentes once said that the better one of his novel gets, the closer it is to Don Quixote. This novel is very Rabelaisian, full of outrageous recipes, murders, music, sex and of course, Buenos Aires. And of course, in various parts of the book, it tips its hat to Rabelais.
In non-financial non-fiction, my best read was Bill Buford´s “Heat”, that chronicle of the year that the author spent as a slave in Mario Batali´s kitchen at Babbo and later, as an apprentice to various people in Italy. Again, the link to Rabelais, food and recipes. Maybe I should listen to my shrink a bit more and develop new interests.
Another nice read was Mohsin Hamid´s “The reluctant fundamentalist”. A short book that can be read at one sitting, it works very well as an allegory, as James Lasdun points out in this review.
A remarkably bad book, but one very highly praised by critics is Ramachandra Guha´s “India After Gandhi”. Super-boring, it reads like a bad textbook. Maybe that is the final market for it. If you have no new insights, why write a new history? I compare it with Tony Judt´s Postwar, a wonderful new history of Europe after 1945. If you want to write a sweeping history, maybe being a little opinionated helps, rather than regurgitating accepted versions of history.
In blogs, I continue to maintain that there might just be four readable blogs in the Indian blogosphere. Headed by the remarkable Buoyantville, followed by Chandrahas, Neha and Meera.
Tags: Reviews
December 24th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
How much sense does Taleb actually make? I sometimes get the feeling that he makes a lot of logical flaws while going at the quants and theorists but am unable to pinpoint them.
December 25th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
I read Alan Greenspan too.
December 26th, 2007 at 10:23 am
I wanted to write a very, very long amazon review on Taleb. Something like our Shoba aunty. I thought I will call it karuppu daan yenakku pidicha coloru. Cheran will be pleased. But decided against it. Basically, the book is immensely readable - I must have read the whole book thrice & some chapters 5+ times. That said, it is complete garbage. Whole portions of the book are contradicted by whole other portions. So much filler, so much opinion, so much make-believe, calling it non-fiction is amount to treason. If you have 1 whole day to kill, just read every single negative amazon review of Taleb - much more to the point than the book itself.
I think the best piece of moviemaking this year by a long stretch is Charlie Wilson. And its the same damn thing. Best movie, period. Immensely watchable…making a movie on taliban while mentioning the word taliban a total of zero times in a screenplay of 2+ hours…that by itself is an achievement.
Essentially, Charlie Wilson is a Taleb. You oversimplify issues & add so much drama & lots of very pretty nipples, you simply daze the audience. The ratio of boobs to dialogs in the first half is something like 10 to 1. Never heard so much applause, not even in a Rajni movie, and that is saying something. When diverse American audience as a whole get up & clap loudly & go Wow & Yeah! for what are basically incredibly smart wisecracks, and I, 30+ nri, am clapping along even though the reality from my subcontinent’s pov was quite different, you know the whole thing is just a trick.
I will spend atleast another $100 on Charlie Wilson. I will watch it n more times in the local multiplex & then buy the dvd also. And I will spend n hours in the loo with the black swan as well.
We’ve basically entered the age of sophisticated obfuscation. If you don’t have anything to say but you go on & say it anyway in 200+ pages or 2+ hours & the audience thanks you for saying so while knowing fully well you are not saying anything new under the sun, whom do you blame ? Malcolm Gladwell & Aaron Sorkin are 2 fish in same pond overlooked by our karuppu swan Taleb.