Time for more books!  (In addition to Feel Better Little Buddy)

Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
Written by the founder and owner of Patagonia,  this book takes you on a brief tour through the childhood of Chouinard, his early interest in rock climbing (and the subculture surrounding the sport long before it became mainstream), and how his desire to create good climbing tools for himself eventually led to a business that is consistently listed on Fortune Magazine’s top 100 companies to work for.  Aside from just being a good story, Chouinard’s philosophies regarding the company’s role as a steward of the environment and the unconventional policies adopted by Patagonia are both inspiring and a case study of how, in an industry where the bottom line usually means everything, maintaining your integrity and a clear vision of mission can pay off in much bigger ways.  Plus the book has pictures.  Great read.

Swimming to Antarctica by Lynne Cox
Lynne Cox is a pioneer in cold water marathon swimming.  This is her story, from swimming summer league as a kid to being the first person to swim across a number of increasingly freezing (literally) bodies of water.  Don’t go in expecting a literary masterpiece (the woman is an athlete, not a novelist), but the accounts of her actual swims and training make the book worthwhile.  Good read.

photo via

I haven’t said much about books in a while, but the two I’ve read in the past few weeks deserve mentioning.

• Stiff by Mary Roach.  A book about cadavers.  I know, sounds a little morbid and not awesome, but it is.  It’s short, really interesting, and will give you a new appreciation for all that those who donate their bodies to science do for the living.  Read it.
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck.  I am one of the few college grads in the country that never read this book (or seen the movie).   A 600+ page classic, I had no idea what it was about and was a little wary going in.  But I like Steinbeck and decided to give it a shot. Verdict?  I LOVED IT.  I loved every second of this book.  It took me about 5 days to read (thanks largely to the fact that I was stuck in the Chicago airport for 24 hours with nothing else to do.)   I’m sorry I didn’t read it sooner.

He never fell, he never slipped back, he never flew.

~East of Eden

This novel looks at the quantitative methods used to build some of the largest funds on the financial markets, and the managers that ran them, through the 1990s and early 2000s.   The nature of these funds and their enigmatic leaders will make this an interesting read for people who follow Wall Street culture.  For those who don’t, way less captivating.  This book also touches lightly on theories behind the quant funds and, in true Wall Street novel fashion, is written like a thriller.  But unless you find CODs, the Gaussian copula, and statistical arbitrage riveting, the word “thrilling” might be a stretch.

The size of the collapse and way that the system imploded on itself really is fascinating, and for that reason alone the book is worth taking a look at.

Rating: worth reading / meh

I started this book like a year and a half ago, maybe more.  I then loaned it to my brother in law  (I was about 50 pages in) who graciously sent it back to me, where I picked up where I left off…and lost the book for about 6 months.  FINALLY, about 3 weeks ago, I found it!  I picked it back up and started the from the beginning.  And now, 200 pages in, it’s missing.  Again.  This is just not meant to happen.

With about 100 or so pages left in the book, here is my review (until I can find it, finish it, and update):

A partner at work told me to read this book.  Combine that with the fact that I don’t follow (or really even like) baseball, and I expected this to be a painful experience.  I was pleasantly surprised.

This book is an interesting, relatively easy read (or at least the part that I got through was).  Despite the blahness of the general plot (a baseball franchise short on funds battles the machine that is major league baseball recruitment and, through statistical analysis, beats the draft), Michael Lewis makes this into a story that can be read by someone with minimal (or no) background in stats.  Or baseball.  He doesn’t delve too deeply into the methods of data collection or analysis, but emphasizes the value in stepping back and re-approaching a problem from a completely different angle, even (or especially) in the face of mainstream criticism.

As a sidenote, it still blows me away that people so completely removed from sports in their daily lives would devote years, even decades, studying baseball stats in such detail.  Ugh.

But in a time where the amount of money flowing through the world of professional sports gives a bitter aftertaste to being the biggest, strongest, or fastest, the story of this underdog team gives you hope that dedication and innovation can still win out over the big guys.  Warm fuzzies.

Highly recommend.

This book came very highly recommended to me.   It is the story of two half-brothers in post-1960s France.  The brothers share a mother; a free-love, New Age hippie, who abandons both boys early in life as she runs off to join some utopian enclave in California.  The brothers are sent to live with their paternal grandparents, and don’t meet until their adult life.  One brother grows up obsessed with sex but struggles to find consensual partners, the other is completely devoid of any sort of sexual drive or real human emotion but excels in the field of science and DNA sequencing.  Both suffer.  The entire book.

Bottom line: this is not an easy read.  I can appreciate the points the book is trying to make, but I had trouble getting through the pages and pages of sex clubs and orgies and public masturbation on which this story so heavily relies.  I know this was intentional, the story is supposed to be a “raw, bleak, unredemptive, unfliching review of humanity and existence”, and many have described the book as “difficult but necessary.”   But with one part philosophy, one part storyline, and eighteen parts crude, graphic sex scenes…it just wasn’t really my cup of genetically modified tea.

Rating: meh

Winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, I picked this up at Green Apple Books (one of my favorite favorite FAVORITE places to hang out in SF) totally on a whim.  It’s a relatively short, quick, and very depressing story about a university professor who goes to live with his daughter in rural South Africa following a scandalous affair with one of his students and subsequent release from a prominent university.  It is there, wouldn’t you know it, he’s met by even more tragedy.  The back of the book references racial complexities in the new South Africa, so I was kind of expecting it to revolve around the social politics of post-apartheid SA, but that turned out to not be the case.  It is more the story of one lonely man’s journey to find a meaningful relationship in a family and community struggling to recover from a violent, complex history…blah blah…you know.  Depressing.

Rating: meh