Some Stuff I've Been Reading

Liar's Poker and The Big Short by Michael Lewis
To the extent that one can have physical affection for written words, I have a total crush on Michael Lewis' writing. Liar's Poker is about the Gordon Gecko culture of 80s Wall Street. Lewis was a fresh out of grad school, and had the good fortune to land a job at Salomon Brothers-- a major Wall Street bond trading firm, and the originators of the mortgage-backed security.* The Big Short is about the economic meltdown of 2008, as seen through the eyes of a handful of analysts who saw the disaster coming. Though they were written 20 years apart, when read together these books are an awesome chronicle of the rise and fall of the mortgage security market. Lewis has a real flair for personal details that keep the stories and real-life characters engaging and interesting, such that the books read like novels, even during detailed discussions on how bonds work.

*If Salomon sounds familiar, that's because they were the inspiration for The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Liar's Poker reads like a real-life version of that book. Except that Liar's Poker is well written, and enjoyable to read. (Oh yeah, I went there. Tom Wolfe is a hack.)

Kraken by China Miéville

What do a mild-mannered museum curator, an underground mollusk cult, a statue-dwelling union leader, a supernatural police squad, and a mystical crime lord trapped inside a tattoo have in common? Why, they're just a few of the people scouring London for the formalin-preserved specimen of Architeuthis dux-- the giant squid-- which has mysteriously disappeared from the British History of Natural History. And which may or may not be causing the end of the world.