With only a day to Christmas Eve, it seems crass to talk about the markets, prices, money. Anything serious seems out of place. And everyone’s trying to bribe Santa by being nice. (This is the time of year when even opposition members have trouble being brought to criticize the governments they want to replace. A wave of goodwill drowns everyone.)
Anyhow, I’ll do here what all the other media do at this time of year: Have a books show!
I’m not a radio call-in show, so I can’t have you call in and tell me what you’re reading, but I’ll tell you what I’ll be trying to read, in between changing diapers, stopping the girls pulling down the Christmas tree and trying to digest turkey. I hope to be reading some of this stuff on the new Kobo ereader my wife and I bought ourselves for Christmas. (It had better work!) Hopefully some of this will be markety enough to qualify to appear in this blog:
Read Also
Crop insurance’s ability to help producers has its limitations
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1) Gordon Brown’s Beyond The Crash – Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization.
Gordon Brown isn’t a particularly likable guy, or a successful Prime Minister, but as Britain’s finance minister during the 2008 market meltdown he had to deal with the daily carnage of the near collapse of the British financial system. I imagine he felt like the duck Ferdinand felt about Christmas in the movie Babe. So I want to hear his version of what that was like. He – at least temporarily – saved Britain’s banks, so he did better than Iceland and perhaps better than what’s going to happen to Ireland. Political memoirs are completely unbalanced, total spin-jobs, and absolutely self-serving – but my turkey-stuffed belly will put me in a non-too-critically-minded mood in the next few days, so this should do me well. Brown was also anti-Euro currency for Britain – a call that looks mighty wise. (My favorite self-serving political memoirs are Winston Churchill’s – both his First World War ones and the more famous Second World War series. A colleague of his wryly called them: The War, and How I Won It, by Winston Churchill. Self-serving, yes, but he was a fabulous writer and it’s nice to pretend it’s all true while you’re reading it. At the end of every chapter I feel an unstoppable impulse to get up and salute the flag!)
2) Maggie Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years
Maggie’s a hero of mine, something which will horrify and offend half of you out there. But methinks she saved Britain’s economy and turned around its terminally negative view of itself in the early 1980s, and she kept the Union Jack flying over the Falklands and once more demonstrated that the Soldiers of the Queen are the finest fighting force on the planet. So I don’t care if only about one in five of the people I know don’t despise her. I’m hoping her self-serving memoirs from a couple of years ago are a good companion to Gordon Brown’s, because she led the fight against the United Kingdom getting too-enmeshed in the European Union, and her Euro-skeptical views are proving to be prescient.
3) Fred Schwed, Jr. – Where Are The Customers’ Yachts? A Good, Hard Look at Wall Street
This is an old investment industry classic that I bought this summer to read on my holidays then. I only got a few pages in before toddler-crises distracted me. But I’m hoping to get back into it now. Schwed is a trader who lived through the last year or two of the 1920s boom in the markets, lived through the collapse, and came out of it all with lots of wry wisdom about all the nefariousness of Wall Street. He makes observations about Wall Street behavior that completely match the phenomena that occurred in the late 1990s and the mid-late 2000s – and did this half a century ago. So it’s worth reading just for that. But the main reason to read it is that IT’S FUNNY! This shouldn’t be remarkable, but there are precious few books about investing and Wall Street that have any humour whatsoever, so this guy is a nice dose of medicine to the diseased idea that financial books have to be dull and grave.
4) Mervyn Peake – Titus Groan
A couple of you might recall some bizarro references I made to Gormenghast in this blog in the past few months. I am re-reading some classics of my long-lost youth, and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is part of that. As I did in 1985, I read the second in the series first, and am now about to embark on the first – Titus Groan. It’s a unique series of fantasy novels, written in the 1940s, about a medieval-style earldom-city that appears to have been forgotten by the rest of the world and just carried on in a feudal manner by its own terrible momentum of tradition and ritual. It’s remarkable not just for some of the best descriptive writing in the English language, but for being a work in the fantasy genre that employs no magic, no supernatural elements, and nothing beyond the laws of the universe that we all live with. So it’s more like a thought experiment of what could be, rather than an escape from what it – which is what most fantasy writing is.
5) Yukio Mishima – Spring Snow
Mishima was a homosexual Japanese fascist who committed ritual suicide with a Samurai sword. (Not very Christmasy, I know.) I am none of those three things, and I don’t intend to do that, but I love his writing. And this is another of those books that moved me in the mid-1980s, when I was still capable of absorbing fresh perspectives. Mishima profoundly regretted the passing of the Japanese feudal system and wrote a series of four books exploring the changing ethos of Japan from the pre-First World War era to post-Second World War, using the notion of reincarnation as a foil. Spring Snow is the first of the series, and it’s a beautiful love story of a boy and girl and exploration of Japanese society after its victorious war with Russia and its emergence as a modern power. Japanese people generally disliked and distrusted Mishima and his writing – I mentioned him to a Japanese man I once interviewed, and a look of utter horror came over his face – but he’s a wonderful window onto a strange shard of the Japanese soul. (Mishima never got over the Japanese Emperor’s declaration at the end of the Second World War – a declaration forced by the Americans – that he was not, in fact, a god. Mishima was a reactionary with a capital R. I think I admire him because he was heroically absurd. And a great writer.)
6) Sylvia Plath – any of her poems
My favorite modern poet. What else do I need to say?
Well, there you have it. A big reading list. Of which I will get through little. But I’m going to give it a go. I wish you well with any of your reading plans and hope you succeed more than I am likely to.
Have a Merry Christmas and I’ll see you on the other side.
