At the end of this very long book, a famous publisher asks an ex-novelist to write about Wall Street during the subprime fiasco. But the novelist can only write about the novelist. No characters, no plot, no events ever get beyond the “me” of this word dealer. Annoying, pizzicato reading by Kate Reading.
Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman read by Kimberly Farr
August 27th, 2010
Two mothers.
Iris, mother of the bride, is pushy, ambitious, Jewish, overpresent, and proud of her Red Hook genealogy, which can be traced back to the Battle of the Bulge. But Iris is not exactly a local. Yes, every summer Iris comes back to the oceanfront Queen Anne house, chats up the Red Hook Ladies, attending “every last bean supper and blueberry breakfast of the season,” where she tries to befriend the wives of lobstermen by feigning enthusiasm for rummage sales. But every Fall, Iris returns to New York, to art and to work, and will never, in the eyes of the locals, be anything but a “from away”.
Iris’ father, Mr Kimmelbroad, is indeed “from away”: a real gentleman, a refugee violinist from Prague who still smells of polished wood, rosin, violets and 4711 Kolnisch Wasser. The family are immigrants: bustling, displaced, well educated.
Jane, mother of the groom, is a local: by temperament, by income and by genealogy. Jane is strong from “clomping up and down stairs and hauling laundry and vacuum cleaners.” Jane has been taking care of houses for the “from aways” for a long long time, as had her mother before her. One of these houses is Iris’, which she cleans in the summers and tends all year long.
She [would get] the furnace and the propane tank filled, turn on the water, take down the storm windows and put up the screens, mow the meadow and lawn, replace the water filter, have the piano tuned, and replenish staples like flour, sugar and the fancy teas ….
The story begins in the middle of the wedding, detailing the profusions of fresh flowers, mismatched vases, white lace tablecloths, blues band, bar, hanging lanterns, crab-cakes and lobster puffs and champagne of the reception at Grange Hall, where the mothers find out that the bride and groom are dead. What becomes of the mothers and their other children is part of the story of the wedding, because the wedding joins not only the bride and groom but the mothers; makes them, in Yiddish, Machatainisteh.
The Taken by Inger Ash Wolf, read by Bernadette Dunne
August 25th, 2010
We find the troublesome, 62 year old Detective Inspector in bed after a back operation, popping Percocets and abusing the hospitality of her ex-husband’s new wife. Within a week she is thigh deep in a case of abduction, with a scene of crime and a bloody victim being broadcast live on line to her desktop. Within 2 weeks her wry, dry, black personality has generated several joyless encounters.
Consider Officer Childress from Toronto:
“Are you crazy!!? You don’t send the chief of the biggest division in Toronto a human hand to his desk!” (Hazel: “Where does he like to take delivery of such things??”)
Or Supervisor Ilunga: “Now he was looking at her as if trying to decide what part of her to rip off first.”
I told you to go home… ...We investigated this death. You arrived here with a foregone conclusion. What I’m doing is standing my ground against the devil, who appears before us in the form of an intuition. Every time someone walks in here with a feeling i want to reach for my gun. You know how much a hunch costs? A SOCO team with a vehicle big enough to get that boat and its oars back to a clean room, the hours to rephotograph the goddamn thing, the spectroscope, the refingerprinting of latents now 3 years old, I’ll start at $30,000 but I’m being optimistic. “(Hazel: “So its the cost that bothers you, or the revelation that you accepted a suicide wrap because its good for business?...”)
Or Sunderland, the editor of the Westmuir Record, hair plastered flat on his forehead by weather and stress:
Ah! Here she is: Shiva the Destroyer. And look! Here is her handiwork! ...You are feckless, power-hungry, thoughtless, arrogant and foolish… You think strong arming anyone you care to into doing your will is the way to run the Port Dundass PD…!? ” (Hazel: How was Atlanta? ...If you’re thinking of ruining me you better get in line; you have competitors.”)
By the end the whole affair has cost 30 grand plus one helicopter, but life in the Canadian provinces is back to normal, the “weekly B & E, the biweekly domestic, the monthly car theft.” (“It was so regular that the older cops joked they should have sign up sheets for perps to fill in before they committed the quota of small time offences” they were delegated in the county.)
Too Close To Home by Linwood Barclay read by Christopher Lane
August 21st, 2010
It could be any small college town and any next door neighbor. But the town is Promise Falls and the neighbors next door are The Langleys. The story begins when they are murdered. Bert the policeman investigates the neighborhood, starting with Jim Cutter’s house.
Jim has been many things: a painter, a salesman, a chauffeur. Now he is the guy who mows the lawn. The story moves quickly, in and out of the private indiscretions of a mayor, a driver, an ex-con, a hooker, husbands, wives, cuckolds.The pace of discovery is faster than the pace of ordinary life: the difference is what we call “a thrill”.
The Wildwater Walking Club by Claire Cook read by Kimberly Dakin
July 11th, 2010
Fiction that doubles as a helpful manual for out of work women, full of unemployment management tips and personality re-development exercises. Noreen, for example, is asked to say something about herself without reference to her job. She cannot. She can, however, use the fancy sneakers which she purchased at an ex-employee discount to find herself. Noreen is a very sensible girl, so it is not surprising that she spends the next month walking.
First she walks by herself. Then she meets up with a neighbor, and then with another neighbor. Each day, they walk and talk and learn about and from each other. Each day they count their steps.
The Wildwater Walking Club thus embarks upon a curious sort of benchmarking, with the footstep of an 8 1/2 inch sneaker as the only unit of measure. At the end of the month, they add up their miles and ‘trade them in’ for a trip to the Lavender Festival.
The Gatecrasher by Madeleine Wickham read by Katherine Kellgren
July 10th, 2010
Like Grace in Warren Adler’s Mourning Glory, Fleur seduces very wealthy widowers at funerals. Fashionable, flamboyant and sexually gifted, she moves in to Richard Favour’s estate, charms his family, and plays out her usual scam. First, she borrows an American Express Platinum Card which draws on the widower’s bank account, but has her name on it. Then she buys lots of lovely elegant presents for everyone. Then she withdraws larger and larger amounts of cash, which she re-deposits; withdraws and re-deposits, establishing a credibility so that she can eventually withdraw a very large sum of money, without a re-deposit. But this time, things are different.
Phillip Margolin, Fugitive, read by Jonathan Davis
July 10th, 2010
Charlie has been a guest and a prisoner of the dictator of Batanga for 12 years when he has an affair with the dictator’s favorite wife. After the wife is tortured, Charlie extradites himself to America, and stands trial for an old murder. The crime is investigated, reconstructed and solved, with a twist.
The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Arielly
June 30th, 2010
How is it possible to account for irrationality in a scientific way? What kind of a science, what kind of a scientist studies the the irrational side of human behavior? How, moreover, can irrational decisions be measured, explained and controlled? Arielly describes experiments which do just this.
A parrot is put in a cage with two sources of food, one takes time and effort, the other is instantaneous. The parrot prefers the food on which it has spent a bit of time. “Contra-freeloading” describes this very phenomenon: many animals prefer to work (or play) for food, rather than eating freely accessible food. Read this against standard economic theory, which holds that rational economic agents always prefer to minimize their effort to produce maximal rewards. Yet we humans, (like parrots) are not always and already rational; we play, we interact with our environment, although our interactions ‘cost’ us more in effort and may not produce higher returns..Arielly describes experiments which demonstrate how and how much human beings are motivated by meaning, over and above immediate rewards. Some of these experiments point to “the Ikea effect” and explain why we feel better when we own things that we assemble ourselves. Some point to “the egg theory” which explains why Mrs. Baker will buy a cake mix to which she must add some ingredients, rather than a mix which requires no effort at all. Some experiments point to the “Not Invented Here” bias, which is the bias against solutions or goods which we ourselves did not invent. (Also called The Toothbrush Theory because we only want to use our own.) The notion that a personal investment of labour results in an increase in value is not new; what is new is a science that can quantify this revaluation, or ‘over-valuation’. Behavioural economics concerns itself with how systems and institutions and designs make room for the irrational, and what happens when they don’t.
Information has an emotional weight, it is not free of its distribution method or its owner, or the order in which it is presented. Some information can be “primed”—preceded by a particular emotional charge—so as to control its impact. Arielly’s life story, for example. Arielly introduces his work by telling us about his traumatic, disfiguring, painful accident and his prolonged convalescence and rehabilitation. Is this information intended to influence our apprehension of his work? Does it?
Doomed.
June 17th, 2010
I am reading three books, disrespectfully, carelessly, unthinkingly.
After finishing The Girl Who Kicked A Hornet’s Nest I decided that there was nothing more to read. Nothing else to read. Nothing to satisfy the specific hunger for more Girl. Nothing to rejoin the amorous journalist and the girl. What a pity. Out of all those beautiful, lithe, mythically wise women the journalist ends up with a weight lifter. Disappointing. Like all men, really.
Maybe it wasn’t really Larsson who wrote the whole thing. Maybe it was his girlfriend. Which would explain why the rest of the world is reading “Men Who Hate Women” and Americans, fat, hypocritical and prudish are reading about hornet’s nests. But now we have run out of hornets nests. What remains?Something named “The Assassins of Athens” which rhymes, ridiculously. We stopped after three rich schoolboys bragged to a homicide inspector about the routine they routinely used to pick upgirls at bars which they were not old enough to drink in…..
The second begins with a Jewish wedding and progresses intellectually to a classic old fashioned domination of a good Jewish girl from Scarsdale by a cold English cad. She loves it. Then the plot turns limp and the Englishmen confesses his impotence, and the book dooms itself to the whining chic lit bin.
Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilting Series narrated by Christina Moore
June 2nd, 2010
It is not unusual for women’s books to lay out women in groups, like a plate of madeleines, a silver tray of cream cakes. But this circle of quilters is not a dainty or delicate array.
Chiaverini quilts stories about a dozen or so women who quilt, whose separate lives come together accidentally and on purpose at Elm Creek quilting camp, where women welcome women into an American tradition. Chiaverini’s women are full-bodied, irregular, problematic. Each one has stories full of children or mothers; Diane, for example, who shows up at the police station to bail out her son:
Well. it certainly does my heart good to know that the citizens of Waterford are being protected so heroically from skateboarders. Now if only you could do something about all those thieves and murderers and terrorists running loose, now I would be really impressed.
Diane is smart and sarcastic and argumentative, Sylvia is a grand old dame and a master quilter, Summer is a sleek hippy daughter of a single feminist academic, Judy is a practical, organized, rational type, Bonnie industrious and busy shopowner-housewife, Sarah, the bitchy domestic manager and co founder of the quilting camp. After eight quilting books, these characters are solid evidentiary structures and Elm Creek is a well elaborated structure of the imagination: safe, supportive, creative, cozy. It is problematic and fun. As fun as a summer camp for big girls who love little pieces of cloth.
It is of course the problems of everyday life that are shared among the quilters, not just the piecing and sewing and binding and basting.Perhaps there is a kinship between these ladies and the medieval craftswomen or ‘spinsters’ who (like the wife of Bath) were good at ‘deceit, weeping and spinning’. Somehow, this medieval picture of women and textiles and discourse is comforting to female readers in 2010.
For whom?
May 27th, 2010
5. Be careful with puns, innuendo and double meanings. Search engines, spiders and robots have no sense of humor. Keep this in mind when trying to attract their attention.
So states SEO “tip” number 5 of Berkshire Hathaway’s BusinessWire.com, a neat new on-line press release engine, as clean as Google’s home page, with no ads. It is all business, and that means it is wired, well connected, and engineered to distribute and deliver text to multiple news wire services, stock markets, media.
And when it tells us how to write, it tells us to write for the search engines, the spiders and the robots.
How sad.
Money To Burn by James Grippando, narrated by Jonathan Davis
May 26th, 2010
Michael Cantela is the youngest winner of the Investment Advisor of the Year at the elite investment firm of Saxton Silvers. He has a knack for making rich people richer, an apartment on Sutton Place, an unemployed wife, and an eight or nine figure personal portfolio. That is, until he checks his balance. Which is zero.
Imagine it: a hotel room at the Pierre, your wife is newly undressed and waiting for you who are on line looking at a zero balance. Your portfolio has been liquidated. All your stocks sold, and the total transferred to somebody else’s account on the Cayman Islands.
A short look at the short success of a straight man among the crooked and the greedy, with a little torture thrown in, for spice.
Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie read by Rosemary Leach
May 19th, 2010
Gwenda gets off the boat at Plymouth, hires a car, looks for village to live in. And finds one: a perfectly charming cottage with aga, a kitchen garden and flowered wallpaper. Gwenda moves in with her rosewood, her mahogany, her papermache, her chintz and all the fabrics of domesticity. She feels from the start that the house and the garden are familiar; she knows in advance where the doors are and where they ought to be, she imagines the wallpaper of a room and then discovers the very same wallpaper in a boarded up cupboard. There is something uncannily familiar about the house from the start.
By the end of the first week she has had one or two hallucinations, and thinks perhaps that she is going mad. She meets Miss Marple who suggests that there may be another way to explain her familiarity with the house. Perhaps she has lived in the house before. Which is of course a perfectly sensible English alternative to Freud: “You are not mad; your house is old, your ancestors are ugly, your hallucinations are memories and best avoided.” But this is impossible. Gwenda is from New Zealand, and she is curious.
What she finds unsurprisingly is murder.
Warren Buffet’s Management Secrets by Mary Buffett & David Clark. Performed by Mary Buffett.
May 17th, 2010
A catholic tailor used his life savings to go to the Vatican. When he returned his parish gathered to find out what he had seen. “What kind of a fellow is the Pope?” they asked him. “44 Medium,” he said.
This is the kind of obsession Buffet is looking for in his managers. “In Warren’s world it is not so much about how smart we are, but how obsessed we are,” says Mary Buffet, in her sweet voice. Find an obsessive with ‘recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses or images which cannot be ignored or suppressed’ (DSM 300.3). And make sure that he is obsessed with your business.
This is a sweet book read by a sweet voice, easy to hear and easy to understand. Indeed, sometimes it reads like a recipe book, with generous margins for adding ingredients. Sometimes it reads like the ROMPER ROOM list of Do-bees and Don’t-bees. DON’T be greedy when choosing a job. DON’T borrow money. DO delegate. DON’T criticize your employees. Do what you love to do and hire people who love what they do. DO be obsessed. DO choose the right company.
When a company owns a piece of the consumer’s mind, it never has to change its products. That means more profits, and more managerial bonuses. It is good to work for such a company.
When a company sells a unique service, like H & R Block, it doesn’t have to worry about falling demand: “There is never a recession in the tax filing business.” It also doesn’t have to worry about spending lots of money on capital. It is good to work for such a company.
Below-cost buyers and sellers like Walmart’s and Costco also have a competitive advantage; but beware—the stress on keeping prices low puts a great deal of pressure on managers. Still, these chains offer good managerial opportunities.
Sometimes it reads like a macroeconomics textbook, and sometimes like a handbook in human psychology (We all have a deep and honest need to be appreciated.). Or etiquette (When meeting someone for the first time, behave in a friendly way. ).
But mostly this is a manual of common sense with instructions on how to be a good human being, not only a good manager.
Meet the Giants: An Interview with Ziad Abdelnour
May 15th, 2010
Schumpeter once wrote that the Stock market is a poor substitute for the holy grail. In other words, capitalism is more or less incapable of producing belief in itself. And yet, there are people who do believe in it. Ziad Abdelnour is one of them.
For Ziad, business is war. And what is at stake in this war is the creation and destruction of worlds.
“The lifeblood of capitalism are the entrepreneurs, the financiers who make things happen.”The drive to make things happen is not inherited, is not taught, is not capable of being transmitted by a propaganda machine. “It has to be in your DNA” says Ziad. Because of this, the profile of Blackhawk Partners has not changed for years:
I don’t back industries. I don’t back ideas. I back people.
These people—these capitalists, the billionaires who change the world—are rebels. Only by backing rebels, can you re-create the world.
This is what Ziad’s capital does: it empowers the rebels (re-bellare) to start the war all over again .
Crash Proof 2.0 by Peter Schiff read by Sean Pratt
April 24th, 2010
Don’t buy anything. Don’t borrow anything. Don’t open any kind of e-trade account, or invest in any kinds of funds, or buy any kinds of currencies, or pay any kind of broker. Read this book, cover to cover. Then write a letter of praise to Peter Schiff for his clarity of thought, his easy to understand explanations of economic realities, and his ability to map out alternatives for Americans with a little bit of good sense.
The Red Hat Society’s Domestic Goddess by Regina Hale Sutherland read by Cynthia Darlow
April 23rd, 2010
Millie is a happy widow who is a member of the Red Hat Club. She has just dyed her hair cinnamon. She wants to travel and step down from her job as ‘domestic goddess’, but she has two sons who are slobs. One has moved into her basement apartment after being kicked out by his wife, and one expects her to clean his apartment and do his laundry until he gets married. This is the story about how Millie organizes a home economics course to teach her two sons how to boil an egg. Sweet, warm cozy book read by the sweet warm cozy voice of Cynthia Darlow.
The Traffickers by W.E.B. Griffin read by Scott Brick
April 20th, 2010
Matt Payne is back, attracting bullets and bad guys and the failed sons and daughters of old Philadelphian society, and WEB Griffin is in fine form in the digital age, as romantic and jolly as always. But instead of showing us into the salons and bedrooms and backbenches of a secret world, he tells us about a city disfigured by Mexican cruelty, flooded by illegal Hispanic labourers and monetized by Meth and underaged vaguely Central American sex slaves. Instead of histories lived out among captains and sailors and adventurers he reads the plaques of unread public monuments, walking through a live city but seeing a museum. WEB Griffin’s huge heroes are missing, as are his lovely, laughing women, and his young apprentices and hearty institutional bosses. I miss them all.
The Anglo Saxon World by M.C.D. Drout
April 8th, 2010
In between rolling translations of Anglo-Saxon chronicles, poems, histories, M.C.D. Drout hawks 566 years of kings, pirates, popes, monks, wars, buildings and battles. But most and first of all, he hooks us with language, giving us bits of Anglo-Saxon poems, lists of Old English words (some, siton, foton), Old English websites, including kingalfred.com, where he has written a free Anglo Saxon grammar called “King Alfred’s Grammar” named after his (and soon to be yours) best and biggest hero : King Alfred; and anglosaxon.com where he serves up his recordings of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Whew!
Then he gives us, cut up into nice round 100 year sizes, the history of a “people who lived in a place full of Celtic place-names, surrounded by Roman ruins, bringing with them Germanic legends, and building Christian Churches”. Organized by the MaCGyVr principle, it is a history of 6 ages: Migration, Conversion, Golden, Viking, Reform and Fall.
Throughout, he tells us marvelous stories of the marvelous, noting what historians know, what they fight about, what they hate each other for, and how to read historical interpretations as interpretations, how to consider what makes sense, what doesn’t, and how to fall in love with the material of Anglo-Saxon history, its indeterminacy, its scarcity, its ongoing reconstruction.
In between he does stand-up:
Jefferson came up with the idea that the front of the [great] seal should have a picture of Hengist and Horsa …. and that the backside of the seal … would picture Pharoah, sitting in a chariot, as he road through the parted red sea … with the Israelites on the other side, following the pillar of fire that led them to the promised land. You know, I have to say, the eagle was probably the safe way to go here….
The Bull Hunter by Dan Denning
April 6th, 2010
Within the first minute and 34 seconds you know you are going to understand this book because Denning quotes James Dyson:
“Of the world’s ten largest corporations by revenue, 9 make big, heavy things, like cars.”
This is easy to follow, sensible stuff – and just the kind of obviousness that industrial strength money market manuals pass over.
Give him time, and Denning will explain a lot of “obvious” things. For example, that you can’t automatically grow rich by buying stocks. Or that you can’t automatically stay rich by being an American. Or that just because you live in America doesn’t mean you can’t invest in anything but fictional (paper) assets. Or that a bear is called a bear because once upon a time when traders were also hunters, bear skin jobbers sold skins from bears they had not yet caught. By entering into these early futures contracts, the hunters were guaranteed a fixed price. By “selling short” they lost out on the possibility of getting a higher price for their bear skins in the future. The practice came to describe those who sold short on a stock or commodity.
In fact, within the first 13 minutes, the ‘obvious’ no longer is.
Home ownership, Denning writes in 2005, is “the new serfdom” and paints a picture of a housing bubble where no equity is built and no real ownership is achieved. Combine falling home prices with increases in monthly payments AND a flat income, writes Denning, and you get trouble. In other words, you get 2008.
I am reading
Red Hook Road