Fabrice Grinda

I was in the market for a good thriller or detective story when I came across a glowing review of The Sherlockian in Entertainment Weekly. The concept of a dual track detective story one taking place in Arthur Conan Doyle’s time and one in the present appealed to me and the book did not disappoint.

The book covers a modern day fictional search for Arthur Conan Doyle’s lost diary which may explain why he chose to resurrect Sherlock Holmes from the dead after a multi-year hiatus. In parallel, the book imagines Conan Doyle’s life during the time period covered by the lost diary.

The book won’t enter the pantheon of all-time great detective books, but I loved its cameos and clever twists. In other words, The Sherlockian is a good historical suspense novel worthy of your time!

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Ron Chernow is one of my favorite authors. He wrote amazing epic biographies on Alexander Hamilton and Rockefeller amongst others. He recently released a biography on George Washington called Washington: A Life. He spoke with Jon Meacham at the New York Public Library last September about his new book.

My good friend Joyce Pustilnik recently pointed me to the fascinating podcast of that discussion which I am attaching for your listening pleasure.

I have not bought his new book yet, but it’s definitely on my to-read list!

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I had not come across a great fun thriller since The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons a few years ago. The Garden of Betrayal was a welcome surprise. I had read the review in The Economist and was intrigued.

Lee Vance, the author, is a former trader at Goldman Sachs. His insider’s perspective felt real and compelling. I was all the more engrossed as the material Mark Wallace, the protagonist, enters in possession of on Saudi oil reserves was very reminiscent of a Peak Oil article published by Clarium Capital that I had recently come across.

The multi-layered story with Mark’s investigation into the disappearance of his child, his family difficulties and the complicated geopolitical machinations all happening simultaneously had me engrossed and struggling to keep up. I got so into the story that I ended reading the book in one go on my Kindle, finishing it at 4:30 am this morning!

If you are up for a fun autumn read, definitely check this book out!

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I had read that The Passage by Justin Cronin was the must read beach book of the summer. After one too many raving review, I downloaded it in the Kindle store to read on my iPad during my crazy business trip.

I expected the book to be a dark, gritty and personal version of World War Z, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. In other words, I expected the book to be in the same style, but written from the perspective of a few individuals with all the lack of information and fear of the unknown that that entails.

The Passage definitely had the potential to be that book and displays flashes of it. Unfortunately, it is so full of pace killing religious and spiritual mumbo jumbo that I could not even get through it. It’s even worse than Stephen King’s The Stand from that perspective, another book I could not finish and that would have been infinitely better and shorter if you removed all the religious allegory.

I hope the next end of the world virus/vampire/zombie outbreak book just focuses on the action, character development and storytelling!

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I grew up loving Jeffrey Archer’s epic books – Kane & Able, A Mater of Honor, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, As the Crow Flies… I read all of his books including all of his fantastic short stories. However, during the past few years I have found his books wanting – cardboard characters, simplistic plots and mundane stories.

Fortunately, A Prisoner of Birth reads much more like Jeffrey Archer’s earlier works and is highly entertaining! It’s a modern retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Like in most Jeffrey Archer books the story is utterly predictable and the characters very black and white. I did not know what the book was about, but within a few pages I could have told you everything that going to happen at every point of the story. Interestingly enough, neither limitation hindered my enjoyment of the book. I knew what was going to happen, but I really wanted to know how it was going to happen!

The first hundred pages which set the stage for the rest of the story were too long and predictable for my taste, but don’t let them fool you. The minute Danny ends up in jail the story really picks up.

Pick up the book this summer, it is perfect beach reading. It will also serve its purpose well if, like me, you are waiting a few days for the volcanic ashes to clear to go back home!

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Michael Lewis’ books have been hit or miss for me. Liar’s Poker provided a great social commentary on the insanity of Wall Street and was a great introduction, in my teens, to the world of high finance. Moneyball’s description of how statistical analysis helped Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland As, to defy conventional wisdom and win so much with the lowest payroll in Baseball was engrossing! The New New Thing, while attempting to portray the crazy “can do” ethos of Silicon Valley, somehow felt short probably because Michael Lewis chose the wrong role model in Jim Clark and spent too much time describing Clark’s building of his sailboat Hyperion.

The Big Short represents Michael Lewis at his best – it’s a nonfiction book that reads like a thriller! It’s very similar to The Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckerman, but instead of focusing on John Paulson’s trade, it focuses on the stories of the other crazy cast of characters who saw the crisis coming in subprime mortgages and what they did about it.

The stories of Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, Greg Lippmann and the others are every bit as compelling as the story of John Paulson’s trade. What is even more remarkable is that The Big Short does a better job at explaining what actually happened. You finish the book understanding how AIG, Citigroup and others lost those tens of billions of dollars.

As I sat reading the book, I could not shake the feeling that the story was far from being played out. The global government bailouts of their banks and economies suggest that the financial crisis will be followed by a fiscal crisis. The deleveraging event that was supposed to occur has not occurred: leverage has just been transferred to the government balance sheets and those have since been levered up even more. As more money is leant to governments with unsustainable future spending commitments and non-productive current consumption, one is left to wonder if the entire Ponzi scheme of lending money to subprime borrowers hoping house values would rise and they would be refinanced to repay their debts has not been replaced by a Ponzi scheme of lending to governments hoping they can refinance their debts to repay them. Eventually someone will realize that many governments are not in a position to repay and all hell will break lose. Michael Lewis will have a great sequel to write. Now I just need to find out a way to make the trade that will make me one of the central casts of characters :)

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As a self styled Roman history buff, I should have loved Robert Harris’ Conspirata. It tells the story of Cicero’s year as Consul written from the perspective of Tiro, his slave secretary. The book does a good job at immersing us in the politics of Republican Rome which foreshadows Caesar’s rise and fall and the Republic’s ultimate demise, but falls short of being great.

I appreciated the struggle between Cicero and Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. The intrigue, full of riots, murder, civil unrest, corruption, treachery, and betrayal is interesting, but somehow something was missing from the story. It did not quite resonate with me the way Edward Champlin’s fantastic lectures on the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire resonated at Princeton or the way HBO’s fantastic TV show Rome did.

I am not sure to what extent the writing is at fault. I might just be disappointed with Cicero’s cowardice at various points of the story, his willingness to corrupt his ideals to pay for his dream house and his pompous arrogance about his accomplishments as consul. All those make him a much less compelling hero.

If you want to immerse yourself in the politics of Republican Rome you could do worse, but if you want a fantastic historical thriller look elsewhere.

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It’s rare for nonfiction books to read like thrillers, but Gregory Zuckerman manages the feat in The Greatest Trade Ever. The book tell the story of how John Paulson realized the real estate and subprime markets were grossly inflated and how he made $15 billion in 1 year betting on a blowup, a difficult feat given how many other celebrated investors had failed trying to short bubbles.

It reads partly like a thriller, a race against the clock and other potential investors, and partly as a detective story, as John Paulson and his team work to identify when the real estate and finance bubbles will burst and how best to trade them.

Once I started the book, I could not stop reading it and spent hours after I finished it thinking about its lessons. The story resonated all the more as I also believed that real estate was inflated, had moved to renting and encouraged all my friends to sell their houses and rent instead. However, I never thought of trading my beliefs – I don’t particularly care about investing and was not exposed to real estate. The idea to use Credit Default Swaps (CDS) to limit the downside and maximize the upside was brilliant, so was the idea of shorting the financial institutions that were on the other side of the trade!

This begs the question of whether I could use CDS as some form of hedge against the world economy falling apart given my extremely bearish outlook. Food for thought…

Regardless, read the book, it’s informative and tons of fun!

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Open is not only the best sports autobiography I ever read, it’s one of the best biographies I ever read and one of the best books I read in the past few years!

As I am in Buenos Aires for three weeks on business, I am on a book reading binge. Open was the third book I read in three days, but the moment I started, I knew this book was going to be different and I could not put it down.

Autobiographies of famous people, mostly written by ghost writers, are usually terrible. What first struck me about Open is how well written it is! In addition, it has a raw honesty that draws you in. You feel what Andre is feeling at various points in his life – the highs and the many lows.

I am a huge tennis fan and have always been an Agassi fan and clearly remembered many of the matches he recounts which made the story even more poignant. It’s shocking to learn what it was like for him – it’s so different from what I imagined it would be. I could not fathom someone hating tennis as much as he does succeeding at it as much as he did. It’s also interesting to see how little input he had in creating his public image. He did not participate in elaborating the “Image is everything” campaign. He just said the words for the ad, not imagining the campaign would come to define him. Likewise, none of the image changes perceived by the press were orchestrated; they were just what reporters thought they noticed from the outside.

I loved every part of his book: his childhood obeying his father while fighting the “dragon”, his matches, his courtship of Stefanie, his charter school, the humbling meeting with Mandela… You don’t need to be a tennis fan to enjoy the book as his struggles are all too human with a positive wrinkle as we know the story has a happy ending.

The story is inspiring and a tribute to perseverance. Read it, you won’t be disappointed.

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I have a confession to make: I love chick lit and chick flicks! I suppose that beneath the hardened exterior of the busy Internet entrepreneur, I am a big softy on the inside and easily fall for cheesy, unbelievable stories of romance.

In terms of movies LOVED Serendipity, As Good as it Gets, Something’s Gotta Give, How to lose a guy in 10 days, Wedding Crashers, An Ideal Husband, Definitely, Maybe, The Devil Wears Prada, Ghost, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry met Sally, Notting Hill, Love Actually, Shakespeare in Love, Jerry Maguire, You’ve Got Mail, The American President… I even liked more mediocre movies like The Holiday, A Knight’s Tale, It’s Complicated, Made of Honor, 27 Dresses, P.S. I Love You, Must Love Dogs, In Her Shoes, Under the Tuscan Sun…

In terms of books, I loved the original The Nanny Diaries (I did not see the movies, the reviews were just too awful), Bridget Jones Diary (including the sequel), Sex and the City (I love the TV show even more: saw every episode in order and went to the movie’s opening night!) and countless others.

As such, I was really looking forward to revisiting the The Nanny Diaries characters: Nan, the Harvard Hottie and the crazy dysfunctional Xs. The story had potential: it’s set 12 years after the original and I was looking forward to seeing how the characters have grown up and what new challenges they are facing. Unfortunately, Grayer, the little kid I adored in the original is distant and aloof, Nan has no backbone and is willing to stand and watch as bad things happen to good people and makes a dislikable heroine. Worse, the book is so poorly written that it gets in the way of enjoying the parts of the story that could resonate with me. It’s possible that the original was also poorly written (I don’t remember as it was a long time ago), but for some reason it did not bother me.

Such a disappointment. Pass!

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