What Book Are You Currently Reading?

[Gustaf]

Since last post I've read:

The Human Factor
The Honorary Consul
Dubliners
Brighton Rock
The White Tiger

The Human Factor was yet another fantastic Greene and one that for once dared offer some hope to us. It also helped me realize some of his key themes with a handful of truly glorious paragraphs.

The Honorary Consul was good but a notch below, imo. Classic theme of course.

Dubliners was honestly a bit underwhelming. Maybe I didn't get it, but most of the stories didn't really engage me all that much, though some were pretty good.

Brighton Rock was again good, but good God, was it depressing. Emotionally draining and bleak without even a sliver of hope to cling on to.

The White Tiger was a fun, light read. It's sort of an introduction to India and since I already know most of the stuff it wasn't that exciting for me. It's not particularly well-written nor is the story all that engaging, but if you are new to India I guess it could be fun. Got nothing on Rushdie obviously.

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I can look back on a year where I read 35 books, so that's a decent count. Currently I'm halfway through The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Rushdie, but I'm taking a break to launch into In Search of Lost Time (I know, right?). Our stupid book club decided, in my absence, that it was a good idea to read it. They also introduced the new rule that anyone who doesn't finish it on time gets banned from getting books from the club in the future. Total stupidity but what can I do?

[Gustaf]

Gustaf, which of the stories in Dubliners did you like?

I liked the one with the pedophile and the one with elections (nerd am I). And the slightly longer one with the party and piano playing. The one with the prostitute was also decent.

[Gustaf]

Finally finished The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Great read, like most Rushdie. Unsure on where to proceed now.

[Gustaf]

Latest novel was Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene. Pretty hilarious and at the end of it pretty touching as well!

[Gustaf]

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Piketty. I'm a bit disappointed.

[Gustaf]

Fury by Rushdie. Came off as off-putting old man stuff for quite a while but vindicated itself a fair bit towards the end. Still, I'm a little disappointed, the worst book by him that I've read.

[Gustaf]

Americanah. Really cool book about race and pretty touching as well. Takes the unusual perspective of what she terms the "Non-American Black".

Then The Wayward Bus. Depressing and not my favourite Steinbeck, though it did have its moments.

[Gustaf]

"The Red Room" by August Strindberg. Very well written and sharp satire from one of my favourite eras (1870s) and a lot of it is still remarkably relevant.

It's a nice book. In English or Swedish?

[Gustaf]

"The Red Room" by August Strindberg. Very well written and sharp satire from one of my favourite eras (1870s) and a lot of it is still remarkably relevant.

It's a nice book. In English or Swedish?

Danish, I can only be bothered to read Swedish literature in the original if I know the Danish translation is sub-standard and Sven Lange's classic 1923 translation is excellent (which is no surprise since he was a great writer himself).

Yeah, I realized after I wrote that that it might as well have been in Danish. And I guess Swedish translates well into Danish. Crazy guy that Strindberg though not my favourite Swedish author.

[Gustaf]

Read all the Game of Thrones-books during long plane rides and general vacation. Decent, entertaining reads and adds a lot of welcome complexity and nuance to the tv show.

Royal Flash. New discovery for me, fantastic fun. I certainly intend to read all of the Flashman books when I can get my hands on them!

Luka and the Fire of Life. Sequel to Haroon and the Sea of Stories. Not quite as strong but still good! Rushdie writes very touchingly about his sons.

All the Pretty Horses, by McCarthy. My least favourite book of his that I've read, but moving and gripping all the same. I enjoy his work quite a lot.

Things Fall Apart by Achebe. I was underwhelmed. I read my first Nigerian book in the form of Americanah, but grand old classic as this is, I liked it less. There was a moral ambiguity in it that I didn't really like. And the main character wasn't all that sympathetic to me. But maybe I'm too white and colonialist to get it, who knows.

[Gustaf]

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st century".  Great book so far.

That's a waste of time.

[Gustaf]

Cannery Row by Steinbeck. A cute little read, though not the best of his works that I've read.

[Gustaf]

The Russians are great.

My two most recent reads were The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and Sweet Thursday by Steinbeck.

TULOB is undeniably a great novel, well written and lots of very insightful things in it about people (I was going to say the human condition but then I vomited in my mouth at that cliche).

At the same time he comes off as unbearable douche, so there is that. And the sexism in it was at times a bit too much for me. I don't mind sexism much in older books but this is modern enough that he should know better and there is a sophisticated evil to it that goes beyond mere ignorance.

Sweet Thursday is typical Steinbeck, very sweet and heartwarming.

[Gustaf]

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. After that I'll be working through a big stack of books that I accumulated as birthday presents recently.

What did you think? I'm a big Rushdie fan but that wasn't one of my favourites.

[Gustaf]

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. After that I'll be working through a big stack of books that I accumulated as birthday presents recently.

What did you think? I'm a big Rushdie fan but that wasn't one of my favourites.

Loved it. It was my first of his books though, so I imagine that a lot of what I liked so much about it - the prose, the imaginativeness of the magic realism and how that integrated with the politics of the region - are general Rushdie, so maybe it would have been more disappointing had I come to it after reading his other works. What didn't you like about it?

Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't dislike it. But I didn't find the characters as emotionally engaging as in some of his other books. And the political theme was also a little more abstract to me, not as focused as I might have liked. Both Shame and Satanic Verses are in many ways similar but I enjoyed them more. And if you want to feel like a child and cry Haroun and the Sea of Stories is hard to beat!

[Gustaf]

Speaking of Japanese literature currently reading Botchan by Umeji Soseki.

Nastume Soseki. Umeji Sasaki is the translator. (Botchan's an absolute delight. If you like it maybe also try Wagahai wa neko de aru.)

Excuse me for my gross error. I do hope to read some more East Asian literature over the next few months.

This is the cat guy right?

I think that since last update from me here I've only read:

Invisible Cities by Calvino. Which was good but not as compelling as previous books I read by him. Maybe my disinterest in architecture made this more inaccessible.

Breakfast for Champions by Vonnegut. He is always a delight to read even if this was not as strong as other works by him I read.

The End of the Affair by Greene. This turned into one of my favourite books by him. Heartbreaking and had me in tears for long periods of time. Beuatifully written as well in my opinion.

[Gustaf]

Speaking of Japanese literature currently reading Botchan by Umeji Soseki.

Nastume Soseki. Umeji Sasaki is the translator. (Botchan's an absolute delight. If you like it maybe also try Wagahai wa neko de aru.)

Excuse me for my gross error. I do hope to read some more East Asian literature over the next few months.

This is the cat guy right?

Yeah. Wagahai wa neko de aru is I Am a Cat. I'm aware that it's pretentious of me to have used the Japanese title, but it's hilarious in a way that translation doesn't capture (Japanese has a variety of levels of formality for both pronouns and copulas, and the connotation of the word choice here is something like My Most Serene Highness Has the Distinct Privilege and Honor of Being a Cat; that is, exactly how you'd expect a cat to say that).

Haha that is hilarious and fits the tone of the book nicely. I guess there are still traces of that in the English translation, because it does sound a little pompous. It's probably my favourite Japanese novel, not that I've read a lot or anything.

[Gustaf]

What's the focus of your course Averroes? It's sort of my field.

[Gustaf]

The thing with prospect theory, as I recall, is that it adds a lot of complication without much extra predictive power. The classic model actually holds up pretty well when you test them against each other.

[Gustaf]

The thing with prospect theory, as I recall, is that it adds a lot of complication without much extra predictive power. The classic model actually holds up pretty well when you test them against each other.

Predictive power in what sense?  Take hyperbolic discounting.  There's no good way to isolate discount rates anyways.  Ask a sell side analyst where he gets his WACC from...

But in a very indirect sense, relative utility is a great explanation for why we don't see any kind of Beta premium.  People would rather ride the highs with his neighbor than experience  a better long run risk-adjusted return.

In the sense that if you take experimental data on people's choice in risk and calibrate parameters in a prospect theory model you don't get a better fit to the data than if you do the same thing with the standard theory.

[Gustaf]

I've picked up a novel from Henning Mankell's Wallander series. About halfway through.

Oh, Sweden pride. There are better Swedish novels though, even better crime novels.

I last read Momo. German children's book from the 70s about how our traditional values are being destroyed by a sinister conspiracy of greedy bankers. We must eradicate the bankers to get away from progress because only in poverty can people be truly happy. I didn't like it that much.

[Gustaf]

I've picked up a novel from Henning Mankell's Wallander series. About halfway through.

Oh, Sweden pride. There are better Swedish novels though, even better crime novels.

Well, I'm still really liking it. It's The Fifth Woman FTR. The case in itself is absolutely thrilling, very emotionally gripping and keeps the right balance between what to tell and what to leave in mystery. I like that it delves into gender issues, and it's done pretty well by having some passage be told from the murderer's perspective. It's paced a bit slowly at times, but I guess that was intentional in order to make it feel more like a real police inquiry. I was pretty disappointed by the social commentary, which really seems to boil down to "everything was better back in the days", but I take it as being Wallander's specific point of view as a grumpy, frustrated, aging cop who hasn't been very successful in his personal life.

If you have recommendations, I'd like to have a look at them.

"everything was better back in the days" is the core principle of all Swedish leftism. And I'm only being very slightly hyperbolic about that.

The best for any Atlasian would of course be the books by Bo Baldersson but I sort of doubt that they're translated. They're political satire in the form of detective novels about an utterly incompetent cabinet member. They were written by a pen name and to this day it's a classic speculation on who may have written them.

I liked Åke Edwardsson's detective stuff as a kid. Sjöwall & Wahlöö are ok at least initially as are the Hamilton books. Both of those go insane at some point though.

Outside the realm of detective novels the best Swedish author is Selma Lagerlöf, but there are plenty of other good ones.

[Gustaf]

Most recent reads:

Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut. A very great novel by an American genius, according to the first sentence of the introduction, written by Vonnegut himself. Classic Vonnegut, mad collection of nonsense but contains a lot of moving and thought-provoking gems. I liked it a lot.

The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck. Didn't like it initially but it grew on me and I learnt that it was quite historically significant as an inspiration for resistance movements across Europe during WW2 so I ended up liking it anyway.

The Passport by Romanian Nobel Laureate Hertha Müller. I might have been too dumb for this book. Didn't quite like the style it was in, random sex scenes and I did not engage with the characters. Interesting basic theme though, so there was that.

[Gustaf]

Most recently read Happy Birthday, Wanda June a play by Vonnegut. Pretty fun read.

On a bit of a reading break right now sadly.

[Gustaf]

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.

Ugh, hated, hated that.