What I've Been Reading
Moontower Munchies #57
Friends,
A couple quick hits before ripping open today’s bag of munchies:
1) A week ago Euan Sinclair requested a few charts for moontower.ai. We got them into production yesterday. Here’s a short video using them to compare USO and XLE. We also added a zoom feature to the scatterplots.
2) I’m teaching math at my sons 5th grade class tomorrow. Teacher said I could do whatever I wanted. I figured let’s learn something fun. We’ll see how it goes. Here’s the lesson plan: NCAA, Binary Trees, & More
Q1 Books
I have an aspirational goal to read 2 books a month. Last year I read 20 books the most I’ve pulled off since my commute-by-subway days in NYC. Exactly a year ago I also joined my first book club ever (Khe was reading The Sympathizer with another friend and when he noticed I was in Vietnam suggested I join in). What I learned about book clubs is they use a pretense to route around our grindset habits that prohibit us from blocking out 2 hours on a calendar to “talk about whatever”. Highly recommend.
In December, book club started Brothers Karamazov but we abandoned it 1/3 of the way through. While engaging and thought-provoking it’s just slower than what I’m in the mood right now. After 300 pages I was doubting the payoff was going to be there. I felt that way about 3-Body Problem’s first 2 books. There were moments of peak provocation but on the whole didn’t feel paid off. I didn’t read the third.
With Brothers, I was proud of abandoning a book without branding myself with a scarlet letter. I dropped Pivotal Decade quickly too. I feel like this a healthy muscle to build. The sum of false negatives is probably less than the time you waste on words you’ll never care about out of some misplaced sense of finish-what-you-startedism. I say save your swipe-left energy for books not people (I’ve been married since before dating apps fully replaced bars so also maybe ignore me on swiping strategy).
Anyway, here are some books I have read this quarter until the end:
Fortune’s Formula by William Poundstone
High recommend — it led to my Kelly side-quest plus it’s loaded with amazing stories and trivia that relate gambling, high finance, politics, crime, and scientific geniuses. I published some thoughts here which led to my Kelly criterion side-quests in Moontower. (book highlights)
Advanced Portfolio Management by Giuseppe Paleologo
High recommend for pro or prosumer investors. A serious intro to the machinery of isolating alpha. (my notes)
Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagen
Recommend and would also buy for teens. It’s a quick read that animates the principles of entrepreneurship while using modern examples.
It’s the kind of book a survivor writes but it repeats banal ideas in a memorable way. This is actually high praise because “banal” and “timeless for a reason” are interchangeable. To make the banal fresh or fun is actually a great service and Noah delivers. Some of the tactics are interesting but the motivational phrases are best.I’d also guess that listening to pods where Noah explains the book would be a suitable substitute. That might not sound like a generous thing to say but I doubt such a pod would be half as good if he didn’t go through the effort to write the book. In a sense, a great podcast synopsis makes the book a victim of its own success. I bought several copies of it to give it away (I gave one to a kid in the class I hosted 2 weeks ago). I hope Noah agrees to call it even.
My notes on the book — I think one of my favorite observations is how his immigrant father who was a door-to-door copier salesperson just didn’t care about US norms about embarrassment and rejection — this was a superpower and reminds me of my mother. I wanted to fit in as a kid and my pleas at home were often met with “I don’t care what the American kids do, if they jumped off a bridge would you?”.
Making your kids cringe is love (except when it’s trolling like when I ask the boys if my drip got rizz on god or when Yinh parodies the “cool mom” from Mean Girls).
Games: Agency As Art by C Thi Nguyen
Only recommended for tedious overanalyzers.
This is a tough one for me because I really like Nguyen — his interview with Sean Carroll is one of my all-time favorites. I recommended proposed this book for the club and about 1/3 through it started getting nervous. It was a possible abandon.
This book is an ambitious attempt to reframe games along some provocative and abstract dimensions.
And I think it succeeds.
It even inspired Khe’s recent writing about how we approach what we do with our lives. But this book is written with the care and caveat you might expect from an academic philosopher (Nguyen is a professor) but overkill for a mass audience. My expectations were probably miscalibrated since the pop cover belies the logical rigor buried in the pages, replete with references to arcane theorists and theories about games (to be contrasted with game theory which this book is not about).
The book’s highs are high and it shines most when the discourse details specific games (I immediately bought a few of them and wishlisted others) but the abstract arguments invite skimming for the casual game hobbyist.
Nguyen comes off as a kindred spirit and someone I’d like to be friends with but the audience for this feels not much wider than the one that reads philosophy or gaming journals. That nobody abandoned the book means it likely benefitted from our unspoken fears of being quitters just after the Karamazov-ditching.
World For Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Best book I’ve read in a long time. So many people recommended this to me and they couldn’t have oversold it. A thrilling journey through the last 50 years through the lens of global commodity trading.
So many facets to chew on. Shocking trivia. Complicated deals. Tradecraft. Spycraft. This book is a (blood) diamond with facets to see the same idea from meta-lenses of business, politics, risk, power, wealth, technological innovation, rationalization, and morality. The pages turn fast. Here’s a review if you want more than breathless cheerleading.
More books recs:
I’m currently reading this and it goes down easy. Hard to see this book fumbling at the goaline, every page has been good.
- gives The Trading Game a glowing review. Notably the audiobook.
☮️
Stay Groovy
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Every Dostoevsky book I’ve read drags for the first half until the main event happens and then suddenly it’s gripping. You’ve spent half a book getting into the characters’ heads and it’s fascinating seeing how they deal with the fallout. But yeah hard work at times to get there.
This is too funny ...I started a book club in NYC in 1998 we survived nearly all the macro events until Covid eventually ended our monthly meetings. However the greatest risk to our longevity was Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Due to objections that are and were inexplicable to me. Basically we had one loosely applied rule you pick the book we read it. The thought was to expand your horizons as with out the club you tend to read books that interest you. Some quick favs.
The Sell Out by Paul Beatty
MiddleSex by Jeff Eugenides
Buck v Bell by Paul Lombardo
William