read at least one book per month

In October (I could swear I already wrote this, but I’m getting forgetful in my old age) I read The Vivisector which I had found in a pile of castoffs on Bornholm. The modern cover for the book is appalling, the version I have is quite artistic and more a propos. This was an intense read and very, very good.

I just spent two weeks of being very productive, and was beginning to feel a little blah. It occurred to me that I find reading fiction regenerative and time well spent for more reasons than one. So the other night I picked up Back When We Were Grownups (Ann Tyler) and plowed through it in two days. I feel better able to focus on my economics homework right now, and continuing the rest of my project to-do list which is finally, after several years, getting down to th point where I can entertain the time to start writing again, get my PhD apps assembled, etc. at a proper pace. And throughout, I will keep reading. I can easily read another book this November.

...with all the reading I’ve been doing this semester I’m going to count it as “books read.” Originally I wanted this to be based on books outside of school, but now my life revolves around the pile of books I have to read. Literally, in my philosophy of political science class I have 7 full books to read (not even joking), my research methods class I have only 2, and my Anthropology class I have 1 (2nd was optional-no way in hell I was going to read that). That’s a total of 10 books I have to read in 3.5 months. I loathe my political science class but it was the only class available for me at the time, and I have to take it in order to graduate. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve drooled on my book about Socrates because the phrasing knocks me out into narcolepsy that only Socrates provokes. Reading book after book, page after page of Socrates is literally painful. I wouldn’t even wish it on my enemies. I know this isn’t such a positive entry about reading, but not all reading experiences will be good. My Dad is a writer, he would tell me how crappy of a book he was reading. I’d ask him, “why do you keep reading it?” He simply said, once you start it you should finish it. I later interpreted this in different ways; read it as if you were critiquing it/editing it, read for the sake of understanding anothers point of view (whether you agree or not), read it for enjoyment (of course), read it to expand your knowledge, etc. But I used to have a quote on my wall when I was younger, I can’t remember it word for word. But it went something to the effect of “keep reading, even if there is only one grain that rings true, or only one sentence that enlightens you…it’s worth the read.” I’m sure I completely butchered it, but you understand. I try to keep that mentality, even with the most difficult reads.

My book for September was The Republic of Plato.

Also I forgot to make an entry for August, I read Tuesdays with Morrie. I highly recommend it, one of the few class requirements I truly enjoyed and found very helpful in my personal life.

September – Eclipse by Stephanie Meyers
Animal Farm by George Orwell

October – The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman

... is called “Sheeple: Caucus Confidential in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa” by Garth Turner, a former Conservative-turned-Independent-turned-Liberal Member of Parliament who claims to have been the first politician in Canada (or possibly the world) to have been “dooced”. To be “dooced” is to be fired for something one has written on a blog. This book is Mr. Turner’s first hand account of how the blog he kept regarding his daily activities and observations as a Member of Parliament from 2006 to 2008 made him more accessible to his constituents, angered his colleagues, at times rescued him from binds but ultimately contributed to his political demise. Being the first “digital MP” was an experiment in a new type of representative democracy that sought to make the way government works more transparent to the general population and to make the MP more accessible. Garth Turner, with a penchant for theatrics and a love for being on camera (he was once a journalist), was a flawed hero for this “movement”. However, no one else had the guts to do this, to challenge his own party to debate when he thought their course was wrong.

The book’s title,”Sheeple”, was intended to reflect what Turner describes as the sheep-like behavior of the members of Stephen Harper’s Conservative caucus who dared not challenge their leader on anything. Garth Turner was someone who had fundamental disagreements with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and rather than keep quiet about them, as he was instructed to do, he spoke and wrote about them openly and dealt with the consequences. I was a long-time reader of Garth Turner’s blog, having first encountered it after reading a story about him in the Canadian press about having been kicked out of the Conservative caucus for supposedly blogging about confidential party business. During the years I read his blog, I not only enjoyed reading about the political intrigue but also learned a lot about how Canadian government works.

“Sheeple” reads very much like Turner’s blog, and in fact passages from his blog are quoted liberally. His journalistic experience is apparent in the descriptive language he uses and in his at times almost distant recounting of events he was intimately involved in. I was surprised that he doesn’t talk much about being an Independent or about his time in Opposition leader Stephane Dion’s inner circle. He doesn’t even mention the Conservative who defeated him in the October 2008 election by name. (Her name is Lisa Raitt, by the way. She, in her role as a cabinet minister for Stephen Harper, was in the news this week for having been caught on tape saying that Canada’s medical isotope shortage, which is harming cancer patients, was a “sexy” issue that could further her political career.)

The book raised a few interesting questions in my mind:

• Do people vote for a party and demand that their representatives adhere strictly to whatever the party doctrine is, or do people elect individuals who use their common sense and independent judgment to stand up for the interests of their constituents even when those interests are at odds with the best interests of the party?

Based on the way I worded the question, my opinion is probably obvious. There’s a trend in American politics that I find disturbing, and that’s where the ideological purists on either the Democratic or Republican side want to weed out any and all dissent. Conservative radio talk show hosts rant about wanting the “mushy moderates” out of the Republican Party, and progressive bloggers write of moderate, “blue dog” Democrats with scorn. This contributes to the increased polarization and failure of reaching consensus in government. I believe that the majority of voters are middle-of-the-roaders who would take a pragmatic, rather than ideological approach to government.

• Do people want their leaders to govern based on an open deliberation of the various sides of an issue, or do they elect leaders who are “daddy figures” whom they expect to dictate what’s best for them without any serious, public deliberation?

I understand the need for discipline and unity in message in order to govern successfully, but I have absolutely zero respect for politicians that rubber stamp legislation, keeping quiet about serious drawbacks, just to curry favor from party leaders and advance their own careers. I don’t understand carrying the “us versus them” team mentality to the extent that healthy political debate, even within a party, is stifled. I would like to think that there could be a better, more inclusive way of governing than what Turner described of Harper.

• Finally, are people even ready for politicians that maintain real, substantive, interactive blogs?

Every word is under the microscope, and nothing can be taken back. Politicians often misspeak, say things with one intention that can easily be taken out of context to be spun in a way benefiting their opponents. Consumers of news are bombarded with so much information that they don’t have time to evaluate the accuracy of everything reported or understand the subtleties, so the spin, no matter how wrong, sticks. It’s no wonder politicians are reluctant to post their words unfiltered for public consumption when the public is so unforgiving.

I don’t know that Garth Turner should attempt a return to politics, but someday I would really like to see more politicians be so open with their constituents about the job they’re doing and how they’re doing it and be so open to receiving feedback…

...is called “How Barack Obama Won: A State-By-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election” by Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, who are political directors at NBC News. While there were some obvious underlying national trends that affected the outcome of the election (the unpopularity of Bush, the Iraq war, etc.), the states had their own peculiarities that affected their results individually. In their discussion, the authors cluster the states into broad categories such as battleground states, receding battlegrouds, emerging battlegrounds and the clear cut “red” and “blue” states, and they talk about the historical and emerging demographic trends in each state and their potential political implications for the future. For each state the book includes the vote totals as well as the exit poll results for a variety of different demographics including age, gender, race, income, education, religion and others for both the 2008 and 2004 elections. (As a statistics geek, this is the kind of stuff I like…)

In looking at the exit poll numbers, there’s just one thing that I don’t think gets talked about enough, and I was disappointed the authors didn’t do it here although they had the numbers staring them in the face. Despite the “historic” quality of this election, it seems race is still a big issue in the South. In Alabama, the exit poll results showed 88% of the whites voted for McCain and 98% of the blacks voted for Obama. It would just seem that “all other things being equal”, if we lived in a truly “color blind” society, race shouldn’t be so highly correlated with the vote outcome; I would expect to see each race voting for the winning candidate in whatever state by roughly the same margin. Of course, the “all other things being equal” condition is false, but even controlling for other demographics and socioeconomic characteristics, it just seems striking that in the Southern states (and nationally for the African American population) you can just look at someone’s race and know more than likely who they voted for. ..

...is called “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China” by John Pomfret, a journalist with The Washington Post who in 1981 was one of the first American students admitted to a Chinese university after the communist revolution. He recounts his experience as a foreign student in China as a history major at Nanjing University and tells the stories of the lives of the Chinese classmates he had come to know. Each of his classmates had lived through the Cultural Revolution (a period during the late 1960’s to mid 1970’s when China’s government led a campaign of terror to force the people into absolute submission to the state), and they all had trying (some truly horrific) situations they had to cope with. They were all trying to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the “new”, more open China of the time. The author follows their lives through the decades and tracks the successes and setbacks in their careers and family lives, both often as a result of how they played the system under the Communist Party. Pomfret also tells of his own exile from China as a result of his journalistic coverage of the student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and of his eventual return to China where he meets his wife.

This book, which is both biographical and autobiographical, often reads as a novel and you develop a close connection with the characters he describes. One classmate that I particularly liked reading about was called “Book Idiot Zhou”, who as an eleven year old child joined the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution and went around destroying things and terrorizing people who were deemed disloyal by the Party. As an adult, he taught Marxism and on the side he had his own capitalist venture collecting urine from public toilets to sell the enzymes he extracted from it to pharmaceutical companies. One irony is that when he was with the Red Guard he destroyed the houses of people who burned incense and ceremonial money to honor their ancestors that he would be doing the same ritual today for his own parents.

What I found striking is that people involved in either committing atrocities during the Cultural Revolution or who were victims during it went about their lives afterward with either no remorse or in the case of the latter with desire to please the Party. Another one of the classmates called “Old Xu”, a Party loyalist whose parents were both killed for being intellectuals, described the situation with the phrase “mei banfa” which means “no way out” – people just did what they needed to do to survive. The author paints a picture of a society where people felt obligated to snitch on each other (or even make up charges against someone) to either gain favor with the Party or to avoid seeming out of sync with it. During the Cultural Revolution children were forced to denounce their parents and publicly humiliate them if their parents ran afoul of the Party. The Communist Party controls everything, and any change that happens in China is only allowed to the extent the Party can maintain its grip on power or receive any cut of the benefits. For instance, communism as an economic philosophy is for sure dead (although everybody learns it and gives lip service to its superiority), but the authoritarian aspect of the communist system is seemingly unbreakable.

The issue the author leaves us with is the unknown implications of the explosive growth of China’s economy and the rapid change of its society. One of the author’s classmates who was sympathetic to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations said he changed his mind and believed years later that it would be a mistake to topple the Party because China otherwise has no moral backbone to hold itself together. With no religion, in this new economy he said it seems that materialism is the god of the people. My closest coworker/friend who was 18 and present at the Tiananmen Square demonstrations had previously told me that he also now thought it would be a mistake to end state control. He said that China is largely poor and uneducated and that the people wouldn’t know what to do with so much freedom and that today there’s no societal framework (like what took industrialized nations even hundreds of years to develop) that would permit a Western style democracy to operate. Change needs to happen somehow, but just “how” is the question…

After reading this book, I feel, in a contradictory way, that I understand both more and less about the things my Chinese coworkers/friends have lived through (or what their parents may have lived through) and how it affects who they are today.

...is called “Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President” by Lincoln Chafee. Lincoln Chafee is a former Republican senator from Rhode Island known for speaking out against many policies of the Bush Administration and was the only Republican to vote against the resolution authorizing the war in Iraq. I follow politics closely (the same way that most normal guys follow sports) and have always been intrigued by Chafee’s reputation as a maverick as I like maverick types in general. I admit that my opinion of Chafee was mixed and biased before reading this book. I say this because I liked his independence but didn’t understand why he would continue to be a Republican and run for reelection as one when his support for the Republican leadership would only further the causes he was so much against (just a note: after losing reelection he left the Republican party to become an independent and now supports Obama for president). After reading this book, I can say that my opinion of Lincoln Chafee hasn’t changed all that much but I do have greater respect for the complexities of his thought process in taking the political stands he did.

To me it seems like Chafee had an inner struggle to stick rigidly to his principles or to be pragmatic. It is apparent he has a strict personal code that he abides by which can at times make it hard to be pragmatic. For example, he goes on and on about how incompetent and dangerous he finds President Bush and how there was no way he could have voted for him in 2004, yet rather than support Kerry who had a shot to defeat Bush he chose to write-in the name of Bush’s father for president saying that he couldn’t have voted for Kerry since he had voted in favor of authorizing the war in Iraq to begin with. I admire such steadfast adherence to one’s principles, but he wasn’t always consistent. For instance, he justisfied sticking with the Republican party for pragmatic reasons in that Rhode Island would lose federal money if he were not part of the ruling party, and he also seemed to have some unfounded idealism that he could change things from within (which eventually faded of course).

I found Chafee a highly honorable and principled politician who isn’t cut out for the highly polarized warfare that characterizes the national politics of today. This is really too bad as I hope Chafee can someday play an important role in government again. I also hope one day that the political environment becomes less toxic and more receptive of the bipartisan consensus that Chafee envisioned. Yes, this book is very biased as it’s one man’s perspective of events that he experienced and about political positions he firmly believes in, but it’s a fascinating perspective on the events that shaped US politics over the past few years.

...is called “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a story about a father and son’s journey of survival being among the few remaining survivors of an apocalypse that destroyed most living things and the world as known by humanity. They travel (i.e. walk) this dangerous road through desolate stretches of land with the goal of reaching the coast, holding on to some unfounded hope that there could be some salvation there. What else could they do? Their journey takes them through harsh weather in which they forage for canned food in buildings abandoned years previously, constantly hiding themselves and their few belongings from bands of desperate cannabalistic robbers (i.e. the “bad guys”). We never learn what caused this cataclysmic destruction and we never know the principal characters’ names; they’re just referred to as “the man” and “the boy”. I think this is because the emphasis of the story is on human nature and what lengths people would go to for survival, not on how the situation came to be. I think the characters are nameless because in this particular situation they are intended to represent any of the few “good guys” left in the world and how they would think and act.

The first thing that struck me about this book was the minimalistic style in which it was written. For instance, the sentences are terse and abrupt, dialogue is not in quotations, and short contractions like “can’t” and “don’t” are spelled without the apostrophe. This more than anything gave me a strong sense of desolation and disconnect. For this very reason, I had a hard time getting into this book. In fact, I put it down for a couple of months and then came back to it. I never really felt connected with the story or the characters. I felt hopeless for the characters and that it didn’t matter if they died and death was my expectation for them.

Another thing that impressed me was the detail describing the father and son’s predicament and their mental state through their ordeal. Just to give one example, although it seems obvious to me now, it would not have initially occurred to me to think about how important having adequate shoes would be on such a journey and how hard to come by they would be after years of anarchy and lawlessnes and how you would have to improvise ways to protect your feet. Also, it was interesting to see how the son (less than 10 years old, I think) matured in some ways and how the dynamics of the relationship with his father changed as they engaged in activities they needed to do for their survival that in ordinary circumstances would have been morally questionable. The father and son began working more and more as a team in making decisions and the son started gaining his father’s insight as if the father were training him for the inevitable day when he would have to fight for his survival alone.

Although I never entirely connected with the story, as I contemplate what I just read I appreciate the story’s nuances more and more. So, I recommend it and will probably need to read it again myself at some point to understand it more fully.

I haven’t read any books to completion this year so far. I feel so embarrassed. Part of the problem is that since the start of the year, I’ve had a difficult time finding focus. I’ve started a couple of books but never finished them. I still plan to when I find my focus again. In the meantime, it’s not like I’ve been slacking off… entirely. I have been reading two textbooks (along with several dense journal articles) in preparation for my actuarial exam in May, just a month away. Quite possibly, they may be my companions next Jaunary through April as well, if I don’t pass the exam this time. It’s going to be tough, since as I said, I’ve been unfocused, but anyway, I share my thoughts on these required reading books here.

1) Investments by Zvi Bodie, Alex Kane, and Alan J. Marcus. This text figures prominently on the reading lists of many MBA schools, not just on the actuarial exam syllabus. It’s excellent for what it is, a survey of financial investments. I could find better texts with more comprehensive coverage on any one of the major topics the text touches on, like bonds and fixed income securities, portfolio management, arbitrage pricing and so on. Nevertheless, it provides a solid introduction. There’s a reason why it’s so popular, and I get why that is.

2) Options, Futures and Other Derivatives by John C. Hull. This text is also part of the ciriculum of many MBA program and is an intermediate-level introduction to the study of financial derivatives. It’s more mathematically intensive than the average business text, but it still uses hardly any calculus and is very wordy. The wordiness I think is good because the author does try to instill an intuitive understanding of difficult concepts. Still, I could get better intuitive understanding of the trading strategies presented in the text by skimming some books on options trading in the business section of Barnes and Noble or browsing some websites devoted to this topic. However, I recognize the book’s intent is to be more theoretical than practical. I guess it does the best it can presenting the ideas of geometric Brownina motion, Ito’s Lemma and the Black-Scholes pricing formula without using much calculus or probability. As I think about it, it’s pretty amazing how the author manages that. I like this text, but I still feel I need to go elsewhere to develop both more intuition and technical maturity.

This book, written by a graduate and consort of MIT, is a quick read about the tenets of simplicity and their usefulness. Mostly, Maeda uses things like anagrams and mnemonics to get his points across. Frankly, I found most of it to be pretty intuitive from the get-go, only I hadn’t bothered to come up with some snazzy little word games to remember the maxims of simplicity. He outlines 10 rules… Reduce, Organize, Time, Learn, Differences, Context, Emotion, Trust, Failure, The One. Want to know more? Well, read it, or check out www.lawsofsimplicity.com for more information.