Posted by jasonzweig on Dec 9, 2017
By Jason Zweig | Dec. 9, 2017 10:43 a.m. ET
Image credit: Jan Davidszoon de Heem, “Still Life with Books and a Violin” (1628), Maurithuis
Almost every day, people ask me what I’ve been reading lately.
Here are a few books and other works I’ve especially enjoyed in the past few weeks.
Janet Browne (editor), The Quotable Darwin
What a thrill it is to read Darwin’s words in the raw, to observe him in the field much the way he himself tracked and noted everything meaningful about the natural world. In this collection of brief excerpts drawn from Darwin’s books, journals, letters, and other contemporary sources, we see one of the greatest scientific revolutionaries in history tearing his own theories apart and putting them back together again and again, full of self-doubt and second-guessing, throwing himself open to criticism, focusing relentlessly on doing his research with the utmost intellectual honesty, and critiquing his own writing with a ruthlessness that is almost shocking. By learning so intimately how Darwin went about the work of developing great ideas, I hope I can get ever so slightly better at thinking about much smaller ones. Perhaps my favorite passage of the many in this wonderful anthology:
“I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. Indeed, I have had no choice but to act in this manner, for…I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified.”
“Adam Smith,” The Money Game
Few books of any kind, and almost none about Wall Street, get better every time you read them. This one does. How many times have I read The Money Game from cover to cover? I don’t know; at least five. How many times have I re-read large parts of it? Probably at least 20. How many times a year do I open it looking for specific passages, then end up reading the entire chapter? Dozens. And there I was reading it again last week, laughing and shaking my head for the umpteenth time. Literate, numerate, with profound insight into how investing isn’t really about numbers or economics but about emotion, “Adam Smith” (the late journalist George J.W. Goodman) investigates such topics as technical analysis, momentum investing, quantitative models, and the race to beat the market. With his inimitable pitch-perfect tone — elegant, witty, and wise — he documents the human folly, the greed and fear, the need for hope and victory, that have always made the financial markets tick. A half-century after he wrote it, the book is fresher than ever.
Fred Schwed Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?
The other book that never gets old, Schwed’s little masterpiece is a cross between a brilliant stand-up comedy routine and an MBA-level finance class taught by the smartest and most eloquent professor you’ve ever encountered. Not a month goes by when I don’t pick it up again. I’ve often describedWhere Are the Customers’ Yachts? as the only book on investing that you can open to a random page and compel the attention of everyone within earshot just by reading from it aloud. The book is so funny, and the writing is so perfectly burnished, that people will drop what they’re doing and stare at you — not because you’re performing the peculiar act of reading out loud from a book they’ve never heard of, but because Schwed’s words make you sound like the funniest and most compelling prophet ever to preach on such a secular topic. I’m not alone in my opinion; Warren Buffett has told me he regards Schwed as the best writer about Wall Street who ever lived. Just consider Schwed’s definition of Wall Street: a thoroughfare with a river at one end, a graveyard at the other, and a “kindergarten in the middle.” Or his description of investment managers: “At the close of the day’s business they take all the money and throw it up in the air. Everything that sticks to the ceiling belongs to the clients.” If you can read this book without laughing out loud, there’s something wrong with you. And if you read it once without wanting to come back to it again and again, I don’t even want to know you. (Disclosure: I wrote the introduction to the latest edition of the book, although I receive no royalties from it.)
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Last month, I had the good fortune to see Shakespeare’s wonderful farce about mistaken identity performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. I’d read it in full the day before, so I experienced it on the page, and on the stage, almost simultaneously. Younger members of the audience see the play as an experiment in gender-bending, which of course it is. I interpret it, also, as a remarkable reminder that wealth and nobility don’t automatically confer wisdom. Feste the clown, or fool, flings his jests like daggers at the powerful, and Viola’s words to the countess Olivia can be shockingly insolent. As is so often the case in Shakespeare, those who should be wise are often foolish, and the authority figures are barely capable of opening their mouths without seeming ridiculous. The comedy comes close to sadism at some points, a reminder that powerful people who are smug about their authority have always been an irresistible target for mockery.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor
This chronicle of life at the court of Haile Selassie in the last days of the emperor of Ethiopia is vivid, disturbing, and unforgettable. Presented as a series of oral-history interviews collected by one of the great foreign correspondents of the 20th century, it may be partly fictionalized. No one is quite sure. But there’s no mistaking the power of these stories about what it is like to live in close proximity to an absolute monarch. The anecdotes of desperate people turning their lives upside down to please an arbitrary (and perhaps deranged) emperor are chilling. It’s a reminder that the real danger from authoritarianism comes not from the might of the dictator but from the weakness of those who truckle to him. How strange it is to read, in vivid detail, that in one of the poorest countries in the world people would sell their souls for nothing.
