Archive for ‘Currently Reading’

4 results.

Currently Reading 3

by admin on February 12, 2012 at 11:40 am

Burrough and Helyar – Barbarians at the Gate

This is supposedly one of the great business books of all time, describing the true story of the making of one of the largest leveraged buyout deals of all time. It follows a large cast of characters and firms on Wall Street in the eighties in a complex and fast paced plot, and gives a good picture of the financial landscape of the time.

Though I did enjoy reading this, and had my eyes opened to some of the practices prolific on the street, I found this book fairly hard going. Written from the third person perspective, it gives a neutral perspective on events, which at times was a little dry. The number of characters also makes it slightly hard to really understand some of the decisions that were made, although the authors do go to lengths to give depth to the major players.

Overall, it’s a book I’m glad to have read, and will probably pick up and read again at some point.

Niall Ferguson – The Ascent of Money

R bought me this as a Christmas gift, and she did a good job picking it! As the book points out, with today’s developing major economic events unfurl, it’s easy to forget that there are hundreds of years of economic records and history to look back at. This book looks back at the development of our financial system, just about as far as history goes, and progresses forward to the events around 2008. It does get technical in it’s explanations, and there are facts, stats, and graphs, but these things are offset by Ferguson’s great ability to explain concepts clearly whilst telling a story. And there are photos, what more can you ask for?

Michael Lewis – Liar’s Poker

This book is referenced in Barbarians at the gate, and being a story of Wall Street in the 80′s, shares some characters and a lot of principles. It is written in the first person, describing the career of a bond trader at Salomon Brothers. I’ve only started reading this, but am thoroughly gripped by the writing style and looking forward to reading more.

 

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The Average American Male

by admin on September 9, 2010 at 8:44 pm

This book is high amongst my favourites of all time.

Apparently there was loads of hype on the internet at the time, but I must have missed all that, and it was recommended to me by a random forum post a year or so ago. I approached the book with no preconceptions at all, and was absolutely blown away. For a start, it is incredibly easy to read- once you start you will not be able to put it down. This isn’t because there is an amazing plot with a bunch of twists, because as the title suggests the book is purely character based. However I found myself wanting to get deeper and deeper into the narrators mind throughout. Of course it also doesn’t hurt that the book is written from an extremely exaggerated egotist male perspective which I personally found incredibly easy to relate to, and that it truly delivers comedy blows on a page by page basis.

The author has this to say about the book:
“Mom, thanks for always encouraging me to write and be creative. I’m sorry the end result of that encouragement is something you will not want to read”

So what is it about? I would say the main subject of the book is emphasising the difference in male and female outlook on relationships. That might sound like the domain of a women’s best-seller rather than an overpoweringly ‘laddy’ book, but the way in which the subject is approached- centred around various sexual encounters of the unnamed narrator- means that at no point will you have to worry about it straying into gossip column territory. I don’t want to spoil this book for anyone who may read it, but the most interesting thing about it is how accurate some of the observations about male thought process regarding women are. These are all totally over the top and more to the point, isolated from any other thoughts that the narrator may have, meaning that the narrator appears as a bit of a twat. But I think that most men will find themselves agreeing with him regularly, and most women will be questioning just how close to reality it is, and consequently how honest their respective ‘men’ may be.

I persuaded R to read the book recently. I wanted to know how she would interpret it, and if it matched her expectations of male inner psyche. I genuinely didn’t know how she would take it, and once you have read the book, you will understand that this experiment could have gone horribly wrong. After reading, she did have “some questions” for me which I managed to answer carefully. I would strongly recommend to all men reading this post that you should beg, borrow or steal a copy of this book and give it a shot.

It is only a few quid and I can guarantee that at a minimum it will make you laugh, as well as make you think. However, lend it to your significant other at your own risk.

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Currently Reading 2

by admin on August 21, 2010 at 2:52 pm

Noam Chomsky – Understanding Power

I started reading this after having an interesting discussion with an acquaintance. I am amazed by Chomsky’s critique of US foreign policy and authoritarian governance and this book has opened my eyes to a whole different way of looking at world events. The book is in question and answer format, from a series of talks given by Noam between 1989 and 1996 (I think) and it is suprising, shocking even, how well the principles he discusses apply to events and situations which have arisen long after it was published.

How To Read A Book – Mortimer J Adler

This book does what it says on the tin really. It isn’t especially interesting but it is well worth reading if you want to get more out of reading studies and papers of more complexity than “The Da Vinci Code”. I’m about half way through (after probably a year) and I want to finish it soon, but it is a bit of an effort to read at times.

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Currently Reading 1

by admin on November 21, 2009 at 2:51 pm

I recently set myself the challenge of learning Haskell, and to do this I am going to write a little command line networked Poker game. I started off just using the GHC tutorials and what little I remember from a 10 credit university module on functional languages, but I much prefer to have some dead-tree in my hands, so I ordered this from Amazon. I’m currently three chapters in, and so far the book has given a good introduction to the language, although nothing that I didn’t already know. Flicking through the book, it looks promising, and I am pretty excited to see what it has to offer, so I will update this when I have read more.

One of my all time favourite books. I am currently reading it again at a more leisurely pace to really soak up every word. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. For those not in the know, it is a brilliant tongue-in-cheek dig at 1990′s yuppie life: funny, clever and brutal.

This book was recommended by many influential people in the software industry including Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, so I thought it would be worth the investment. I am over three quarters of the way through the book, and it has easily paid for itself already. The book is simply a series of interviews with some of the “all time greats of programming” on a variety of topics, but it has really rekindled my creative spark and got me thinking about some new ideas and problems which I hadn’t previously considered. I will probably post some blog entries on certain related topics at some point, and also some excerpts from the book which I found particularly poignant. However, for now you will have to trust me and just go and buy the book!

I have recently started watching college football, mainly due to the lack of NFL coverage on TV in the UK. Its at better times, the fans are more passionate, the games are a bit more random, and they have massive marching bands, so whats not to like? I was feeling a little be bewildered by the amount of teams and the quick turn around of players, and I really enjoyed reading a few other football books such as Bloody Sundays so I thought I would order “Every week a season”.

It is amazing to me the amount of commitment that the players and coaches put in to an amateur sport (although I obviously realise the pressure to get an NFL contract drives it beyond the love of the sport). The book is a series of accounts of the author spending a week at a selection of the leading football programs. I found that the author gives a very neutral description of events which is good from the perspective of factual integrity. However the writing is somewhat bland, especially when describing the progress of the football match at the end of each week, and a little passion for the team he is attached to would not go amiss. The book does become slightly repetitive by the end but it is interesting to compare the subtly different approaches of the teams and their head coaches. A big bonus for me is the fact that the book is from the 2003 season, so I recognize a lot of the player names from the current NFL rosters (for example Jonathan Vilma and Fred Gibson). Overall it was an interesting insight into the workings of the teams, but it wasn’t quite the broad overview of the NCAA division 1 football league that I was looking for.

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