What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by chaz »

"Play Dead" by Harlan Coben. Good suspense.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by frugalguy »

I'm thoroughly enjoying the audiobook of "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins. It's a murder thriller set in the London suburbs. I was unaware of all the buzz surrounding the book and picked it up solely because of the premlise: A woman on her daily train commute in and out of London becomes obsessed with the occupants of one of the houses along the route. That sounded kind of Rear-Windowish. The woman, Rachel, sees this young couple every day, gives them names, and imagines what their life is like. She witnesses some things happening on the porch of this house from the train and later, the young woman is found dead (murdered). It doesn't help that Rachel has problems with drinking and was in the area of the murder while drunk, and apparently "did something", which she doesn't remember. She gets flashbacks and snatches of nightmares but can't piece anythng together.

There are three narrators of the audiobook, each representing the point of view of one of the women in the book. The matter-of-fact, well-spoken introspective commentary by these characters in English accents helps one get a glimpse into the life of young English suburbanites.

I know some people reading the book in regular book format and enjoying it, but I feel this book is especially well-suited for the audiobook format. The narrators do a nice job and I feel like I am right there on the train.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by jginseattle »

I'm on a Michael Connelly kick lately. The Brass Verdict was very entertaining. One of his best.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by fetlock666 »

Just finished the china study by T. Colin Campbell. A real eye opener. On to the new rational manager by Kepner-tregoe (study time!).

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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by reggiesimpson »

Brother Iron
Sister Steel
by Dave Draper (The Blond Bomber).
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by gkaplan »

I am reading The Catch by Taylor Stevens. This is the fourth book in her Vanessa Michael Munroe series. I had difficulty getting into this book, so difficult that I considered dropping the book and the series, even though I liked her previous book. After about one hundred pages, however, the book picked its pace up, so I am glad I stuck with it.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by duffman12 »

Just finished The Bogleheads guide to investing, going to start The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham this weekend :)
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by seeshells »

House of Medici:its Rise and Fall, by Christopher Hibbert.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by gkaplan »

I am reading Hand in Glove by Ngaio Marsh. This is the seventeenth Roderick Alleyn mystery Ngaio Marsh wrote. I liked her sixteenth, False Scent, written in 1960, very much. I thought it was her best up to that point. Hand in Glove, written in 1962, is even better.

(Edited to insert "Roderick Alleyn" in the second sentence.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

The Naked Detective, by Laurence Shames. Set in Key West, he sets up a bogus detective agency so he can deduct part of the cost of his house on his taxes. He hopes never to be hired, so he can live a peaceful life. He even turns down a would be client, but he winds up with a murder to solve when that would be client is killed. Very good.

Hunter's Moon, by Randy Wayne White. Ford, Tomlinson, and an ex-President are in Central America to avenge old wrongs, and discover the truth about the past.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by heartwood »

Just finished "Ancillary Justice" by Ann Leckie. Takes a bit to get used to all characters, female & male, referred to as she. A sci fi novel about ancillaries, dead humans animated to serve the empire with collective awareness among 20 or more plus the ship utilities.

I'm not explaining it well at all, but it was a good read. I await a sequel Ancilliary Sword out soon.

I quickly gave up on Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn set in the Phillipines of the 1950s and 60s. Not my type of story.

I've also bailed on Cormac McCarthy's "Gardener's Son". I did not realize its a decades old screenplay rather than a recent novel. After starting it I went back and read the reader posts on Amazon. Many of the popular posts say little or nothing about the story and only talk about Mr. McCarthy and his novels.

I'm also working my way through the Clifton Chronicles by Jeffery Archer. I've read "Only Time Will Tell" and "The Sins of the Fathers". I thoroughly enjoyed both and look forward to the remaining volumes. Set in Britain before and during WWII and after, the story has everything and every cliche imaginable. I'd forgotten how I enjoyed Mr. Archer's writing many years ago.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by chaz »

"Choke" by Stuart Woods.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by singern »

"Enough" Jack Boggle :D
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by gkaplan »

I am currently reading The Ice Soldier by Paul Watkins. This book is almost as good as the The Forger, the last book of Watkins I read. I said almost, because The Forger set such a high bar. Watkins' voice in the books he writes under his own name seems different from the voice in the Inspector Pekkala series he writes under his Sam Eastland pseudonym, which probably is why Watkins is such a good writer no matter what he writes.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Fallible »

singern wrote:"Enough" Jack Boggle :D
Peter I. Bernstein's praise for this book I thought said it best: "Jack Bogle's wonderful, thoughtful, helpful, and fun-filled little book inspired me to create my own title: Never Enough of Jack Bogle! "
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by nisiprius »

American Cornball: A Laff-O-Pedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller. It's really good. It's an A-to-Z collection of short examinations of various objects and things that formed the subject of humor in the early 20th century.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

Money Talks, by Laurence Shames. Set in New York City, a middle-aged mediocre novelist is hired to ghostwrite a book for a real estate billionaire, and gets a front row seat to the unravelling of his real estate empire.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by MidMNtom »

I'm reading Maude by Donna Mabry.

Stunning and well worth it!
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by protagonist »

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

I haven't gotten very far, but so far it is slow to capture my interest, despite good writing style. Not like Neuromancer. I'm going to try a little longer.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by seeshells »

Coursera classes have great offerings in Financial educational pursuits, fwiw.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by gkaplan »

I currently am reading The Great Depression: a Diary by Benjamin Roth. I believe nisiprius recommended this book several months ago. The book was published in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession, and the similarities between these two eras is eerie.

The diary covers the period between June 5, 1931 to December 31, 1941. Mr. Roth, who was born in 1894, died in 1978. I am curious whether he continued to keep a diary in the years following the end of this particular diary.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by market timer »

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Comic novel about a young Medieval history professor in post WW2 Britain.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Bungo »

Recently completed:

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves. Average murder mystery set in the Shetland Islands. The writing and plot were undistinguished, and really the only noteworthy element was the location. I won't look for any more books by this author, but I did enjoy what I have seen of the Vera TV series, which was based on some of her other books.

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny. The second of a series of murder mysteries set in a small town near Montreal. The writing is a notch better than typical for the genre, but the plot was rather stupid in this one (the first book, Still Life, was better) and the characters are starting to get on my nerves. I probably won't read any more of these, either.

The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat by Dave Tomar. The author earned his 15 minutes of fame a few years ago when his essay of the same name was published (under the pseudonym Ed Dante) in The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/ I enjoyed the essay but should have known that the material would prove too thin for a successful expansion to book length. The author spends much of the extra space ranting and giving us a rather grueling narrative of his insanely hectic work schedule. It's a good story, but stick with the essay.

Currently reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, the first novel of the "Culture" series. Having read and enjoyed the second book, The Player of Games, it seemed reasonable to back up and read the first one before continuing, even though it is not generally as well regarded. Pretty good so far.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by steve roy »

"Lincoln's Boys" - a biography about John Hay and John Nicolay, who were Abraham Lincoln's private secretaries during the Civil War.

Nicolay was the senior White House aide, but Hay is the more interesting character. A dapper, 22-year-old man about Washington D.C., he became much like a son to Lincoln after Willie Lincoln's death. In the 1870s, Hay married a railroad baron's daughter and grew wealthy, afterwards becoming a mover and shaker in the Republican Party. Serving as both Secretary and Assistant Secretary of State in three administrations, he was also a poet, short story writer and novelist. But Hay's most important literary achievement is his ten-volume "Life of Lincoln," written jointly with Nicolay, which framed the 16th President as a great war leader and liberator of slaves, pretty much the modern view of Abraham Lincoln.

(Side bar: Hay is a major character in Gore Vidal's historical novel "Lincoln." I re-read the book recently, and realized some of Vidal's wittiest turns of phrase in the novel come not from Gore Vidal, but John Hay.)
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by callen »

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides. It chronicles the attempt of the USS Jeannette to sail to the North Pole in the late 1800s. I have enjoyed some of his other works and thus far have not been disappointed by this one.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

Unbroken, by by Laura Hildebrand. In WW II a former Olympic runner is a B 24 crewman, ditches in the Pacific while on a search and rescue mission, survives 40+ days in a raft, is captured by the Japaneese on Kwajalein and spends the war in brutal POW camps singled out for beatings and other mistreatment. It is hard to put this book down, stayed up reading until the end of the book.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by ruralavalon »

Sparkling Cyanide, by Agatha Christie. Two apparent suicides during two celebrations at a fancy restaurant, which couldn't possibly be murders.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by MP173 »

Recently completed books:

"All That Remains" Patricia Cornwell....my first reading of her books and I enjoyed it. Looking forward to a large inventory of books of her to read.

"Cries of the Lost" by Chris Knopf - another new author for me and pretty good mystery. This was the second in a series (the first was "Dead Anyway") in which a researcher who is married to a beautiful woman is left for dead after his wife was assassinated. In "Dead Anyway" Arthur Cathwell fakes his death, establishes new identities and solves his wife's murder, finding she was deeply involved in skimming money from insurance companies (she owned an insurance brokerage company). Arthur teams up with a female blackjack dealer and they use their skills to solve the issues of why his wife had skimmed the money. Pretty good book, but "Cries of the Lost" was a little difficult to follow at times.

Currently reading "Making Rumors" by Ken Caillat who was the producer of Fleetwood Mac's giant "Rumors" album. It is an inside look at the technical and personal aspects of making this album. Lots of anger, lots of booze, lots of pot, lots of coke, lots of great music recorded. Amazing FM is still together. I saw them in Chicago and they were outstanding.

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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by nisiprius »

Just finished The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain. I think it has been ate least fifty years since I last read it. Reading it now, boy, does it raise hundreds of questions about the times. Some I was able to figure out, like what "a big Milum apple" was. Mark Twain's boyhood would have been around 1850 or so, and one of the things that fascinates me about the book the cultural distance between 1850 and 1900 or so. I think it must be much larger than the distances between 1900 and 2015. The thing that really struck me is the relative cultural isolation. There is of course no TV, no radio, but also no magazines and no newspapers. Of course newspapers existed in 1850 but they are not mentioned anywhere in the novel. Most of what people "know" is what they have heard verbally at first hand from others. The only obvious methods of cultural transmission from the outside world are the church and the school. The children have learned much of what they "know" from the superstitions of black locals.

I think Tom Sawyer's fascination with pirates and his insistence that their play-acting match the books is probably a reflection of Twain's own individuality, not a cultural universal... I'm thinking that Tom Sawyer might have been the 1850's equivalent of the modern teenagers-and-up who like to play role-playing games.

The near-absence of manufactured objects is interesting. The idea that a dead rat could be a child's toy!
"Do you love rats?"
"No! I hate them!"
"Well, I do, too—live ones. But I mean dead ones, to swing round your head with a string."
"No, I don't care for rats much, anyway. What I like is chewing-gum."
So, there was chewing-gum. Tom and Becky share a piece. But what was it like? Did it come in a stick with a wrapper, or was it just obtained in some kind of raw, bulk form at the general store? What did it taste like--mint, sugar, or only one's companion's saliva?

And apparently, instead of watching television, children considered spending an hour looking at pictures in a picture book together to be an absorbing activity. (It's a little hard to sort that one out... it's part of some complicated flirtation and I am never quite sure of the age of Twain's characters, sometimes they seem to be 9 or 10 and sometimes they seem to be 15...)

Even more amazing to me was the description of what can only be called a pet tick. I'm reading the description of how Tom and Joe Harper play with a tick for an extended session... I keep saying to myself, "a tick? Really, a tick? Aren't they afraid it will bite them?"

And then there are the veiled references to sexuality. I really ought to find out how Twain's contemporaries reacted to the idea of a schoolgirl looking at a picture of a nude male in an anatomy book.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Bustoff »

The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz - examines how we make decisions and the distress that can result when confronted with an abundance of choices.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by hudson »

gkaplan wrote:I am currently reading The Ice Soldier by Paul Watkins. This book is almost as good as the The Forger, the last book of Watkins I read. I said almost, because The Forger set such a high bar. Watkins' voice in the books he writes under his own name seems different from the voice in the Inspector Pekkala series he writes under his Sam Eastland pseudonym, which probably is why Watkins is such a good writer no matter what he writes.
Thanks gkaplan!
On the book's Amazon Kindle page, there is a "try it for free" where they'll send you a sample. I'm going to give it a shot. I'm looking for a good author. I've read all of Steven King, Michael Connelly, Dan Brown, Nelson Demille, Vince Flynn, Kurt Vonnegut, David Baldacci, Lee Child, and Stephen Coonts. I've read some Follett...also Odd Thomas books from Dean Koontz, and they are OK. I can't finish books that I've started by Stuart Woods, Clive Cussler, James Patterson, John Sanford, Tom Clancy, or John Grisham.

http://www.amazon.com/Ice-Soldier-Novel ... 8&sr=&qid=
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by protagonist »

nisiprius wrote: the cultural distance between 1850 and 1900 or so. I think it must be much larger than the distances between 1900 and 2015.

1800-1850 even more! Imagine the hapless fellow who falls into a coma in 1800 and awakens in 1850! Civilization in 1800 operated upon the same basic principles that it had for at least 5000 years. To get from point A to point B you walked or rode on an animal, or something pulled by an animal. To communicate you talked in person or sent a messenger with a message on foot or on an animal. So life really hadn't changed much since ancient Egypt. Will Durant claims it took, on average, longer to travel from London to Rome in the early 1800s than it did in the 2d century. Waking up in 1850 would have brought you the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph, the cotton gin, anesthesia, photography, immunization..... He would imagine he awakened in a sci-fi movie.

1850-1900 was only slightly less remarkable. Incredible advances in medicine that touched everybody. Automobiles. Telephones. Cinema. Transatlantic cable.

Even 1900-1950 was pretty dramatic....airplane, antibiotics, radio, TV, electric lights, phonograph and, perhaps foremost, the nuclear bomb that changed our vision of the world forever.

By contrast, you could fall asleep in 1950 and awaken in 2000, and be completely comfortable as if almost nothing happened. The PC/internet was a huge deal but was only beginning to change the average person's life in the late 1990s. The moon landing was something to be amazed about but had zero impact on the way people lived. I would go so far as to say the two things that changed people's lives in the latter half of the 20th century more than anything were the ATM and the digital display. You no longer had to leave work and line up at a bank by 3 PM on Friday afternoon or be stuck without money all weekend.

The first half of the 21st could promise to be exceptionally radical. There are a lot of big, unpredictable changes afoot to say the least. According to some website Victoria sent me to, I am supposedly going to die on April 16, 2049, so I will not be around to judge this.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by jebmke »

Bustoff wrote:The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz - examines how we make decisions and the distress that can result when confronted with an abundance of choices.
Restaurants sometimes find that their business improves when they thin their menu down. Seems counter-intuitive but it is true.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Beth* »

The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail but some don't by Nate Silver. An excellent explanation of probability theory for non-mathematicians/statisticians. The book discusses prediction in a lot of fields (weather, earthquakes, war, terrorist strikes, economic growth, etc.) and explains why some predictions are more accurate than others. He has a very good discussion of why predictions of how the stock market will perform are generally unreliable and why buying index funds that mirror the market is much more likely to result in financial gain than trying to beat the market. I highly recommend the book for Bogleheads!
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by shmidds »

Just finished Home by Julie Andrew.
Also, finished 1453 by Roger Crowley about the siege of Constantinople.
Almost finished My Life in France by Julia Child.
Next up is Empires of the Sea about the siege of Malta by Roger Crowley.

I usually read a book on a pleasant subject followed by a book on a not so pleasant subject.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by LadyGeek »

I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. It's over 1,000 pages long and is on the List of longest novels.

I'm past the half-way point and it's still interesting.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by mickeyd »

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

About Wall Street goings-on (especially @ Salomon Brothers bond desk on 41st floor of WTC). Book has been around for a while but I like Lewis's later books and decided to read his first one.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by gkaplan »

As readers of this thread probably are aware, I have been reading the books of Paul Watkins, both the books he writes under his own name and the Inspector Pekkala series he writes under the Sam Eastland nom de plume.

Right now, I am reading Night Over Day Over Night, written under his own name. This is Watkins' debut novel, written when he was twenty-three and a graduate fellow in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by gkaplan »

LadyGeek wrote:I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. It's over 1,000 pages long and is on the List of longest novels.

I'm past the half-way point and it's still interesting.
I'm surprised From the Terrace is not on that list
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by protagonist »

jebmke wrote:
Bustoff wrote:The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz - examines how we make decisions and the distress that can result when confronted with an abundance of choices.
Restaurants sometimes find that their business improves when they thin their menu down. Seems counter-intuitive but it is true.
Not counterintuitive to me at all. The quality of the food probably improves. It is easier to do a few things extremely well.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Christine_NM »

Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell.

New but classic Rendell, this time with a twist of working in the stages of aging. Subtle, deep but smooth writing about 70-somethings acting out and being undone by their pasts in suburban London.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by Chin00k »

LadyGeek wrote:I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. It's over 1,000 pages long and is on the List of longest novels.
It took me four years of on-again, off-again reading to finish Atlas Shrugged.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by VictoriaF »

protagonist wrote:
jebmke wrote:
Bustoff wrote:The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz - examines how we make decisions and the distress that can result when confronted with an abundance of choices.
Restaurants sometimes find that their business improves when they thin their menu down. Seems counter-intuitive but it is true.
Not counterintuitive to me at all. The quality of the food probably improves. It is easier to do a few things extremely well.
Even if the quality of food does not improve, when people face fewer options they are more likely to get engaged. This is quintessential behavioral economics, in contrast with standard economics where having more choices is always better. One of the most important related findings is that when a 401(k) plan offers too many investment options, fewer people contribute to 401(k). Regardless of the fund choices, it's usually advantageous to contribute to 401(k) up to the company match, and people forgo this benefit simply because there are too many options.

More generally, increased choices reduce happiness. See, for example, Eric Barker's recent blog post How To Find Happiness In Today’s Hectic World. The post relies on Barry Schwartz's work and Barker's interview with him, and it covers:
Eric Barker wrote: - Why a world of so many choices can make us unhappy.
- Why always wanting the best can be a path to clinical depression.
- How gratitude and relationships can be the key to fixing these dilemmas.
- The one sentence you need to remember to start on a path to a simpler, happier life.
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by drawpoker »

gkaplan wrote:
LadyGeek wrote:I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. It's over 1,000 pages long and is on the List of longest novels.

I'm past the half-way point and it's still interesting.
I'm surprised From the Terrace is not on that list
Not understanding that comment about From the Terrace. ?

I have read all of John O'Hara novels (terrific 20th century writer, maybe the best) and I would not consider any of them to be overly lengthy (long)

Are you being sarcastic - you did not like "From the Terrace" and found it hard plowing to get through to the end? Yikes, then I guess you did not care for "Ten North Frederick" either ?
gkaplan
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by gkaplan »

drawpoker wrote:
gkaplan wrote:
LadyGeek wrote:I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. It's over 1,000 pages long and is on the List of longest novels.

I'm past the half-way point and it's still interesting.
I'm surprised From the Terrace is not on that list
Not understanding that comment about From the Terrace. ?

I have read all of John O'Hara novels (terrific 20th century writer, maybe the best) and I would not consider any of them to be overly lengthy (long)

Are you being sarcastic - you did not like "From the Terrace" and found it hard plowing to get through to the end? Yikes, then I guess you did not care for "Ten North Frederick" either ?
I liked all the John O'Hara novels, particularly From the Terrace. As I recall, From the Terrace was well over a thousand pages.
Gordon
drawpoker
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by drawpoker »

Yes, you are correct about the no. of pages. My bad. :oops:
Funny how the memory can play tricks years later. Oooops. Guess I devoured "From the Terrace" so quickly it didn't seem like a "long" novel at the time. "Ten North Frederick" was a veritable slim book compared to "From the Terrace", wasn't it.

"Gibbsville" ? "Butterfield 8" ? Now feel urge to go back and re-read.
gkaplan
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by gkaplan »

drawpoker wrote:Yes, you are correct about the no. of pages. My bad. :oops:
Funny how the memory can play tricks years later. Oooops. Guess I devoured "From the Terrace" so quickly it didn't seem like a "long" novel at the time. "Ten North Frederick" was a veritable slim book compared to "From the Terrace", wasn't it.

"Gibbsville" ? "Butterfield 8" ? Now feel urge to go back and re-read.
I remember when I read From the Terrace. I was stationed overseas. I started it Friday night after I got off work. I read perhaps one hundred pages. I resumed reading it after working a half day Saturday. I read until late at night, resumed reading Sunday morning, and finally finished it that mid afternoon. I went about forty-eight hours without eating, having last eaten Friday lunch.
Gordon
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avenger
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by avenger »

LadyGeek wrote:I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. It's over 1,000 pages long and is on the List of longest novels.

I'm past the half-way point and it's still interesting.
This is on my list, based on my desire to complete this list in my lifetime:

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/
cheers ... -Mark | "Our life is frittered away with detail. Simplify. Simplify." -Henry David Thoreau | [VTI, VXUS, BND, VTEB, SV fund]
protagonist
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by protagonist »

VictoriaF wrote:Even if the quality of food does not improve, when people face fewer options they are more likely to get engaged. This is quintessential behavioral economics, in contrast with standard economics where having more choices is always better. One of the most important related findings is that when a 401(k) plan offers too many investment options, fewer people contribute to 401(k). Regardless of the fund choices, it's usually advantageous to contribute to 401(k) up to the company match, and people forgo this benefit simply because there are too many options.
Couldn't that simply be because they don't UNDERSTAND what they are choosing between because they don't understand enough about investing and are thus intimidated by more CONFUSING choices? Restaurant choices are simple. I doubt you would find people walking out of restaurants because they have to choose between orange, grapefruit, peach, strawberry or pineapple juice rather than just having orange juice on the menu.
VictoriaF wrote:More generally, increased choices reduce happiness. See, for example, Eric Barker's recent blog post How To Find Happiness In Today’s Hectic World.

I'll have to check that link out when I have time. I can't believe that more options per se make us less happy. There are so many potential confounding variables.
LiketoHike
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Re: What Book Are You Currently Reading? Part VI

Post by LiketoHike »

ruralavalon wrote:Unbroken, by by Laura Hildebrand. In WW II a former Olympic runner is a B 24 crewman, ditches in the Pacific while on a search and rescue mission, survives 40+ days in a raft, is captured by the Japaneese on Kwajalein and spends the war in brutal POW camps singled out for beatings and other mistreatment. It is hard to put this book down, stayed up reading until the end of the book.
I am reading this now. I take a lot of recommendations from this thread and normally, I am silent..... but, Holy Cow, what a life! What a book! One of the best books I have ever read!
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