Fabrice Grinda

I have been hearing of George R.R. Martin for many years, but never checked out his books because he was always described to me as “the American J.R.R. Tolkien”, and I am not a fan of fantasy. From my perspective, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are too slow with uncompelling lead characters and fantasy elements that overwhelmed the story.

When I saw the ads for the HBO Series Game of Thrones, I expected more of the same and did not check the TV show out for the greater part of the year. The overwhelming critical acclaim ultimately swayed me and I decided to give Game of Thrones a shot. After the opening 15 minutes, I was worried that my fears would be proven right, but very rapidly the story shifted to complex intrigue between the characters and I came to appreciate its genius. Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire in general are a very rich and entertaining character driven story with fantasy elements. The fantasy elements accompany and support the story rather than distract from it.

In many ways, the TV show reminds me of the political intrigue in the HBO series Rome which I also adored. Game of Thrones was by far my favorite new TV show of 2011 and I felt compelled to read the entire A Book of Ice and Fire series. It took me a few weeks given that there are 5 books of 1,500 pages each (with 2 more books pending). The first three books are absolutely amazing. All of the characters were compelling. I loved understanding their motivations and how their personal destinies were affected by the greater forces sweeping through the realm. After the initial shock, I also came to appreciate how George Martin is willing to kill off lead characters. Unfortunately books 4 and 5 are slow, long, and frankly tedious. Worse too much of the books are written from the perspective of irrelevant or uninteresting characters. I really hope books 6 and 7 are much better when they come out!

In other words, read books 1-3, watch the TV show and if you must know what happens next read the summary on http://awoiaf.westeros.org/.

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By Anne Hamilton

If you are anything like me, when you first heard of The Hunger Games two years ago you pictured a group of hormonal teenage vampires playing paintball while eating attractive young coeds. I admit that is what I thought until someone forced me to watch the trailer for the movie and encouraged me to read the book. Unlike the teen soap operas on the market such as Twilight, Collins’ novel is Greek in form and scope: it is a sophisticated, well-structured story that delivers on its premise and leaves you feeling satisfied.

The action takes place in a dystopian future where teenage “tributes” are sacrificed by their communities in order to fight to the death in a reality T.V. show staged by a sadistic, tyrannical Capitol. Our hero, Katniss, volunteers to take the place of her sister, and makes choices that will ultimately destroy the games forever. This genre is that of the familiar Theseus and Minotaur plot from classical mythology updated for modern audiences. Any modern version of a story this embedded in the Western subconscious is bound to do well in print and at the box office. However, Collins takes this genre to a whole new level when she adds the voyeurism of reality T.V.

Aristotle said that the best stories are those that provide us with a surprise ending that makes sense, but that very few authors accomplish this. The fact that the hunger games are actually scripted reality television gives The Hunger Games a dual complexity that makes this book worth recommending to adult audiences. Katniss’ “play” in the games is a narrative within narrative of the capitol’s sadistic power. Collins deftly shows us that the staged television setting of the games is a more authentic reality than the “real” one outside of it, pacing the story nearly perfectly until she provides us with an unexpected climax exactly when the two worlds must converge.

You must not miss The Hunger Games. It may be the most delightful time you spend this reading season. Happy hunting.

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Ready Player One takes place in the mid-21st century. The world has essentially gone to hell and most of humanity spends its time working, playing and essentially living in OASIS which is an immersive massively multiplayer game.

On his death, James Halliday, the founder of the video game and the wealthiest man in the world, organizes a virtual treasure hunt giving away his fortune to the first individual lucky enough to find the “egg” he hid somewhere in OASIS. The catch is that each devilishly complex clue is rooted in an intimate knowledge of 1980s pop culture.

We follow Wade Watts (known by his handle Parzival) on an epic adventure where he faces powerful villains, has to overcome insurmountable obstacles and find his destiny.

As I was a teenager in the 1980s and played most of the games and saw most of the movies referenced in the book, Ready Player One was an amazing trip down memory lane wrapped in an epic quest.

If video games and 1980s pop culture speak to you in any way you owe it to yourself to check out this book!

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I loved How We Got Here, Andy Kessler’s last book. That book was essentially the entrepreneurship and capitalist equivalent of Bill Bryson’s A Short Story of Nearly Everything. I was really looking forward to reading Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs.

The book is essentially a cross between my 9 business selection criteria and an entrepreneurship and capitalist manifesto. Unfortunately the book is too preachy and angry to make the point that wealth creation comes from entrepreneurship and innovation very effectively. In many ways it falls prey to the same errors the zero sum anti-growth camp it tries to criticize.

It’s all the more sad as it is a topic that has to be covered and a book that has to be written. I am looking forward to someone writing the definite capitalist wealth creation manifesto!

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Peter Heather has managed the inconceivable: to displace Gibbons (for me at least) as the reference when it comes to explaining the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He very convincingly argues that the rise of the Huns and Goths brought down the Roman Empire rather than internal conflicts and moral decline. He disputes that the Christianization of the Empire had a real impact on the running of the Empire. It brought about a cultural revolution, but did not impact the running of the Empire: “only the nomenclature was different.” Likewise, he argues that splitting the Empire in Western and Eastern parts was necessary to spread patronage throughout a very large population and avoid usurpation.

After thoroughly rejecting the internal causes of collapse, Heather argues that exogenous shocks weakened then led to the fall of the Empire. First the rise of Persia in the East as a competing super power required a mobilization of large troop numbers which left the frontier poorly defended. Then the arrival of the Huns to the borders of the Empire displaced huge numbers of “Barbarians” into the Empire. They became unified in the process. Even when the Romans temporarily contained them, the continuing Western advance of the Huns pressed new waves of invaders into its borders. The more these invaders occupied land and decreased the Empire’s ability to raise taxes to field an army, the weaker it became and the more attractive a target it became.

The loss of Africa to the Vandals was probably the coup de grace as it was the bread basket of the Western Empire and was the source of much of its wealth. Had the Romans succeeded in recapturing it in 468, the outcome might have been different. Their inability to recapture their most productive regions explains why even the collapse of the Hunnic Empire after the death of Attila did not benefit the Western Empire much.

The book is not perfect. The pacing varies dramatically and the book can be a bit tedious at times when it is too detailed or repetitive. Fortunately those parts are far and few between and the book more than makes up for it with its compelling narrative and rich description of its engaging cast of historical characters.

If you have an interest in the Roman Empire, you owe it to yourself to read this book!

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Given my blog post on How to minimize human misery in recessions or the macroeconomic implications to hedonic adaptation, this review should not come as too much of a surprise. I had loved Dan Ariely’s original book Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality is a worthy successor.

In this book Dan analyzes a wide range of counter-intuitive results in diverse subject matters ranging from our innate desire to revenge to the market failure in online dating to why bonuses can be counterproductive. As usual in behavioral economics books the anecdotes make the story. In this book many of them were very personal as Dan covers the personal impact of a youthful accident which left him badly scarred and required him to accept temporary pain for long-term benefit, trade-offs which we are particularly bad at dealing with.

My one quibble might be with the title as the book does not really cover the upside of irrationality as much as the fact that we are irrational, but that there are ways of dealing with it when we are aware of our limitations. Regardless, read the book!

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As a self-styled Roman history buff who has always considered Augustus to be my role model because he essentially singlehandedly created the Roman Empire, I had to read his biography to get the detailed backstory.

I had learned a lot on the topic from Edward Champlin’s fantastic lectures on the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire while at Princeton and had enjoyed HBO’s fantastic TV show Rome and was looking forward to learning more.

The book is not nearly as well written or as enjoyable as Ron Chernow’s brilliant biographies, but I loved both learning more about Augustus’ life and the social and cultural mores of the time.

If you are a fan of Roman history, you owe it to yourself to check it out!

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I am a bit at a loss for words when it comes to describing my liking of The Metropolis Case. I am not a huge fan of music, dislike opera and don’t particularly care for gay male leads. Yet, somehow, the intertwining tale of four characters connected by music over a period spanning from 1860s Paris to New York after 9/11, becomes slowly engrossing.

I am not quite sure why the characters are so compelling. Their coming of age is predictable. More likely, the underlying, if secondary, issue of aging and its consequences resonated with me. I share the characters’ fears and annoyances at the prospect of aging and lust for the fountain of youth. I suspect the beautiful prose also played a large part in keeping me captivated. As I have mostly been reading non-fiction books and a few thrillers, I have not come across a book as beautifully written in a long time. I also appreciated the whiff of magic realism towards the end of the book (even though it was highly predictable).

If you are looking for a beautifully written novel definitely check out The Metropolis Case.

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I had heard great things about The 4-Hour Workweek and actually met its author, Tim Ferriss, a few times, but the gimmicky title always kept me from reading it. Rave reviews for his new book The 4-Hour Body, with yet another annoying gimmicky title, convinced me to start at the beginning to see what all the fuss was about.

Funnily enough the entire raison d’être of the book, to reduce the amount spent working because it is boring and meaningless, does not apply to me. I love being an entrepreneur and angel investor and thus fall more in the “love what you do and you will never work again a day in your life” category, especially since I can work from anywhere and can thus go on fun mini-vacations all the time.

I am not even sure that I bought his analysis that the opposite of happiness is boredom and that thus we should keep ourselves active. Hyperactivity, be it from working for work’s sake or finding personal activities, seems like an escape from finding deeper contentment with ourselves and the lives we lead. That said, as an escape, pursuing personal projects trumps slogging through hours of mind numbing and boring work. To be fair, later chapters of the book espouse doing things slowly and seeking the activities that speak to us.

Regardless, it’s less the book’s life philosophy that struck me (since it mostly eschews one), than its extremely practical productivity improving advice. In many cases, I had already reached similar conclusions to Tim’s and had already put them into action in my own life. The difference is that I got there through lifelong trial and error while you can get there by reading the book.

I know most of my friends will make fun of me for recommending this book given the number of hours that I “work”, but ultimately it’s about being as productive as you can be and really getting meaningful things done. You can choose to spend your increased productivity by doing the same amount of work in less time, thus freeing time for other activities, or you can choose to just do a lot more. It’s up to you to find your Pareto optimal life/work balance.

In the meantime, if you ever wondered how I am able to get so much done, here are a few of Tim’s recommendations that I had already implemented in my life that could work for you too:

• I don’t read daily newspapers, watch daily news, etc. For the most part the news is sensationalist and irrelevant dribble. I prefer to get the relevant news in a more analyzed and digested format and thus only read The Economist and New Scientist every week. I also check a few tech blogs (Techmeme, Techcrunch, Engadget) once a day more for entertainment (I love tech and gadgets) and a bit to see what’s going on but that takes less than 10 minutes per day.
• It is critical to live in the present and provide attention. Leave work at work and don’t think about it in other environments. Don’t take your cell phone with you or turn it off after you meet whomever you are having dinner or drinks with. Don’t answer the phone during meetings. Shut off your cell phone at night and don’t use it as an alarm clock (because most need to be on for that), especially when traveling internationally.
• I mostly work from home on Mondays and Fridays, if only to save on commuting time and to spend more time with my dogs. It’s also great how much you can get done when you are not distracted by noise, questions, etc. To the extent possible don’t schedule phone calls and meetings for those days either! This setup makes it easy to take lots of 4 day week-ends. From NY I often whisk myself away to Cabarete or Snowbird/Alta for long week-ends either to kite board or ski.
• Do not do work for work’s sake. Outsource or delegate all repetitive, low value creating activities that you get no enjoyment from. It can be very inexpensive to have a smart personal assistant pay your bills, go through your mail, etc. The 4-Hour Workweek walks you through a few smart and inexpensive examples of how you can set it up. I also apply it to my personal life. I don’t do laundry (the cleaner next door does it for $1 per pound!), cook, clean, etc. because I don’t get any enjoyment out of these activities. I would rather be playing video games or tennis :)
• Take few meetings, limit them to less than 30 minutes and make sure they have a clear agenda.
• Learn from Parkinson’s law: you will fill whatever time you allocate to a task. Self-impose short deadlines to get things done fast with just as much quality.
• Take decisions quickly. Agonizing over the decision does not improve its quality and just reduces your happiness. Most wrong decisions are easy to correct once you realize they were wrong.
• Travel light! It’s shocking how little you can take. I just came back from a 12 day trip to India. I had so little with me (a backpack with my notebook and Kindle weighing in at much less than 10 pounds) and a small suitcase weighing in at 18 pounds full, that I kept thinking I must have forgotten something. The reality is that for $50 or less you can buy locally whatever you need. Don’t pack toiletries for instance, they force you to check luggage, and are easy to buy anywhere!
• Material goods should be there to serve you and not you them. Follow the 80/20 rule (keep the 20% of things that you use 80% of the time) and sell or give away most of the rest -> clothes, books, etc. You won’t miss them (otherwise you would be using them more) and if you do, you can always buy whatever has left a gaping hole in your life rather inexpensively.
• Don’t burden yourself with large expenses such as mortgages and cars when you can get much more bang for your buck from a life enjoyment perspective by spending that money on travel and life experiences. Many such experiences can be had incredibly inexpensively (and many are detailed in the book).
• Work in batch mode once enough work has accumulated. To prevent interruptions remove email notifications from Facebook, Linkedin and the like. You will see the activity when you choose to logon.
• Ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
• Don’t take no for an answer. As Samuel Beckett said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The book gives great examples of how to do this.

As most personal stories written from a first person perspective, the book can feel self-aggrandizing at times, a weakness this blog post and my blog in general also share. Despite that, I truly loved the book and found lots of great tips that I look forward to implementing in my life in the coming weeks.

Read the book, it might very well change your life!

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Non-Fiction:

• Why the West Rules–for Now by Ian Morris
• The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo
• The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely
• Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor by Anthony Everitt
• The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Taleb
• How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
• The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss

Fiction:

• The Metropolis Case by Matthew Gallaw

I will let you know what I think of them!

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