Book 24: The Guru Investor by John P. Reese

So this is one of those books which I own because of a friend. Usually in those situations it's because the friend is the recognized author, and in this case my friend is the ghostwriter of this book. I went into it a bit skeptical because it's a personal finance book about how ten money managers/investors have systems to do the thing that historically speaking almost no one manages to do in the long term (beat the market), but I was also curious about it because I am in personal finance fandom and so this stuff is of interest to me. I came out of it slightly less skeptical of the theory but even more firmly convinced that for the vast majority of people, investing in index funds rather than attempting to actively manage your portfolio (or paying someone else to do it) is the way to go.

The structure of the book is basically ten mini-biographies of investors who fall into three main categories, depending on what their investing focus is: value investors, growth investors, and quant investors. All of them managed to beat the market average gain over the lifespan of whatever their fund was/is, and essentially all of them have numbers-based (rather than impulse-based) reasons for holding or selling the particular stocks in their funds, and they make calls based on that. And whether or not their individual methods succeed basically depend on a person's ability to trust that a downturn in a particular fund is temporary, because there's science behind the method, and that the fund will bounce back up eventually.

All of that is fine; it's essentially the same theory as buy and hold in general, only more targeted. But the fundamental appeal of buy and hold in index funds, which track the S&P 500 and don't involve active management and so therefore have very low fees associated with them, is that you don't have to think about or worry whether your method is actually a successful one, or whether the numbers you have based your decisions on are an accurate reflection of how a company is likely to do in the future. Plus, the only way to actively manage picking stocks to buy and sell that isn't just based on hunches and emotions is to do so actively, i.e. spend time and energy managing those investments. And if you want to do that, more power to you! But for the vast majority of people who want to invest in the stock market as a form of saving for retirement, that is almost certainly going to demand more time and energy than you want to give, and cause more anxiety and stress in the process. And if you want to invest in a fund someone else is managing to achieve the same 'better than the market' results, you've got to trust that the additional fees you will pay to own those funds won't be more than the market beat the funds will have, and that the particular fund you pick is actually managed by someone who is following a system and whose system works.

This book was written in 2008, before the financial crisis really hit home, and before it became clear that a lot of the public information that was available about various companies was, in a word, unreliable. I don't doubt any of the information included in the book is accurate, in terms of how much the various funds and methodologies had earned in various points in the market. But I do wonder very much how many of the people invested in those funds were able to stop themselves from cashing out at the bottom of the market because they hadn't been saved from that downturn by the money men in charge. If they had stayed in, they would have made back their money and some. But so did anyone invested in index funds, without the additional fees or worries. The structure of the book and the sentence-level writing was as good as I would have expected from my friend's writing ability. But I can't say that I came away convinced by the central arguments of it, or inspired to do more active investing with my money.

Grade: C

Book 23: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

Man, I really wanted to like this book! But it did not work for me.

The protagonist of this story is Monty, the eldest child of a Lord in England in the early 18th century. He's seventeen and has been kicked out of Eton for love letters between him and another man, and his very mean father has told him that if he doesn't behave himself on his Grand Tour, he will disinherit him and leave the entire family estate to Monty's baby brother. So Monty is viewing his Grand Tour with his best friend Percy, who is biracial and was raised by his aunt and uncle after his father died, as his final adventure before he'll be forced to manage the family estate. Things immediately go wrong in Paris when he behaves badly at a ball and steals something from a Duke in service to the King of France and then there are highway robbers and alchemists in Spain and Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and a sinking island off of Venice with a treasure inside and all of this should be one hundred percent up my alley, and it's not, in large part because I don't like Monty at all. He's a rich spoiled brat, who has a terrible father, to be sure, but I know I'm supposed to sympathize with him and find him charming and I just don't. He likes drinking and he likes gambling and he likes sex with men and women, none of which I have a problem with in a character, but there's nothing else to him. I understand that running your terrible father's estate probably wouldn't be the most interesting career out there, but there's nothing else Monty wants to DO, other than be an idiot. He likes Percy, which is nice, and there's some decent pining there, but it's established in literally the first chapter that Monty is in love with Percy and yet there is no good reason for that to be a secret between them aside from the fact that the narrative demands it.

Monty's younger sister Felicity is a bit more interesting, but even there I don't understand why that relationship functions the way it does. They start off hating each other, and then as the book goes on they hate each other LESS but only when it seems convenient, and it just doesn't read like real people to me. And the overall story has the same problem a lot of historical romances can run into, which is that there's this big obstacle or issue preventing a couple's long-term happiness that makes them miserable for most of the book, and then the resolution is that...they're just going to do it anyway, and somehow it'll all work out. It doesn't feel believable, and it doesn't read like a happy ending to me, and it just doesn't make for a good story. Monty learns a bunch of valuable life lessons by the end of his misadventures, and I suppose that's good and all, but there's still no place waiting for him and Percy in the world, and the book doesn't do any of the work carving one out for them. I don't know. I expected to like this book a lot, and instead it was just not for me, I'm afraid.

Grade: C

Book 22: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Another book club book! Our theme for this month was books that had been adapted into movies recently, and I was really excited to read this one because I was intrigued by the movie and had heard from my brother (who has read the entire Southern Reach trilogy, of which Annihilation is the first book) that the movie was quite different from the book. So I wanted to read the series first and then see the movie, even though both aren't in my usual genre wheelhouse. The movie looks quite scary, and that's not normally my jam!

Well. I don't know if I would describe the book as being scary, exactly, but it definitely freaked me out. There is an Area X in this world, that is blocked off from the rest of the world, and periodically there are expeditions sent there to do...something. Observe and record and report on...something. It's never quite clear.

The current expedition is made up of the biologist, the psychologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor. We never learn any of their proper names, not even that of the biologist, who is our (fairly unreliable) narrator. The framing of the book is that she's telling the story of what happened to her after it happened, which is one part of what makes it unreliable--she is choosing when and how to reveal the information she does, and at times mentions casually that something will happen a day later in the narrative, but for the most part the structure of the story is chronological, with flashbacks or memories to her life before the expedition.

I had a sense of unease for the entire time I was reading the book. The reader is never certain what's going on, and it's unclear how certain the biologist is about what's going on, and how accurate her version of events is, for a number of reasons. Other members of my book club found it very frustrating that we rarely get clear cut answers to anything, but that wasn't my experience with it, I think in part because I didn't expect a first book of a trilogy to have a full explanation of anything. But I also thought that was missing the point, a bit. I think it's both a weirder and more subtle book than what they were hoping.

A comparison that kept coming up was the television show LOST, because there's a group of people in this strange place and no one knows where it is or what it is or why they're there, really, and there's definitely scary stuff out there but no one can explain what it is. But LOST ended up collapsing because the creators kept insisting that they knew where it was going and that there was a rational explanation for all of it. Annihilation never makes that promise, implicitly or explicitly. So the creeping dread of not understanding is part and parcel of the experience. I genuinely have no idea what will happen in the next two books, but I'm definitely going to read them now.

Grade: A

Book 21: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

In the midst of what feels like constant terrible political news and reports of the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in areas all around the world, what better kind of book is there to read than a novel about the arrest, imprisonment, unfair trial and execution of a political dissenter?

Darkness at Noon is one of those books that I've had since college and have no memory of reading, although I did find markings in the book that resemble my marginalia, so it's quite possible I did. Either way, it would have been twenty years since I had read it, so I was almost certainly due for a reread. The book was written by a man who had left the Soviet Union in the late thirties and was imprisoned and almost killed before he was able to flee to the U.K., and the story focuses on the story of a citizen of an unidentified country whose revolutionary party has now become the tyrants. It's a compelling read, even though it takes place almost entirely during his time in a prison cell, but the reader learns who he was before his imprisonment and can see the mechanics of his conviction and execution being carried out. I hesitate to calling it hopeful, or even worse a great warning for our own time, but it gave me a lot to think about specifically regarding the cycles of political and societal progress and regression that occur over time. The protagonist is not presented as a hero wrongly maligned; the reality is far more complicated than that. He is someone who was actively doing the right thing, until it became clear to him that it wasn't right at all, and that sort of reassessment simply wasn't acceptable. The system failed him, whereas they would say that he failed the system. I am glad I read this book, and if I did read it as a college student, I wish I knew what I thought of it then.

Grade: B

Book 20: The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

What a delightful, bittersweet book.

This is a collection of works by Adams published after his sudden death in 2001. Most of the book consists of magazine essays and other short nonfiction, and introductions he wrote for other books, and short stories he had written that hadn't been published elsewhere, and one transcript of an absolutely incredible extemporaneous speech he gave on religion. The final part of it is the first nine or so chapters of the novel he had been working on (for almost a decade) when he died. 

This was the perfect book to read after finishing Ready Player One. What Douglas Adams did is everything that that depiction of geek culture doesn't understand about what can make geek culture fun and wonderful. The way Adams delighted in the world, and most importantly wanted to share what he found, and discuss it and play with it and reinvent it rather than just regurgitate it, made me want to engage with people and information and history like little else has in recent memory. He was so enthusiastic about so many things that it made me ache for how much he didn't get to see or do or experience, and it also made me feel (mostly in a good way) my own mortality in a way I don't always. I started to read this book the weekend after the 2016 General Election, but I didn't have the capacity for viewing his joy and delight in the world at that point. I do now, thankfully, and it's been a helpful if unintentional benchmark for my own outlook and emotional well-being to compare how much I struggled with this book then and how necessary it felt to read now. The world is so big and so vast and so absurd, as well as being tragic and brutal and sad, and Adams jumped into all of that, and now he is reminding me to do the same.

Grade: A 

Book 19: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Okay. I am going to put most of this post under a cut, less because of spoilers (because frankly if you've seen the movie trailer or read literally anything about this book, you already know what's important plot-wise), and more because this is gonna be more of a rant than a post. So uh, if you love this book or aren't interested in reading a bunch of paragraphs that basically start with an unsaid AND ANOTHER THING, you probably shouldn't click. Otherwise, WELCOME.

Book 18: The Women Who Wrote the War by Nancy Caldwell Sorel

This book examines the experiences and the reporting of women newspaper and magazine correspondents who covered World War II across the globe. It's a topic I had never really considered or thought about before reading the book, even though women entered many work forces during the war while so many men were off fighting, so it made perfect sense once I started reading it that war correspondent would be another kind of job women would step into. Journalism and nonfiction writing was also a field that women had begun entering during the 1920's when cultural expectations of a woman's role in the world had started to shift, and that meant there were experienced women journalists who were ready and able to fight for the opportunity to go cover the biggest stories of the times when war broke out.

The main difficulty with a book like this is just how broad a story it is. The book covers dozens of women working over a decade and in numerous locations, and at times it ends up feeling like a recitation of facts about what happened when without enough of a coherent thru-line. It would often highlight a writer doing work in Poland in 1938 and then return to her ten chapters and five years later working in England, and it was difficult at times to keep the stories straight or feel connected to any of the women as individuals. I also found it frustrating how every woman was described physically, and the attention given to their romantic lives. It wasn't irrelevant, since often they were traveling with their husbands who were also journalists, or had left husbands behind who were often quite unenthusiastic about having a woman correspondent for a wife, but it felt like a shorthand that was used to differentiate the women, rather than their work. I understand why the book was written in a chronological format, but I think it might have been a better book if it had focused on fewer women and gone further in-depth with each of them individually, rather than trying to give a broad overview of everything at once. Basically, this book attempts to be a biography of about thirty women all at once, while also giving an overview of the war as a whole, and it ends up feeling slightly shallow and disjointed as a result.

Still, I'm really glad that I read the book. While I do think that attempting to cover so many women weakens the overall narrative, it did a great job of making clear just how wide-ranging and far-flung the war (and therefore the people covering the war) was. Most of the books or movies I've read or watched about WWII are understandably narrower in scope, but that makes it easy not to appreciate what it really meant that the entire world was at war. This book definitely made me want to read more in-depth history books about specific events and locations that are only touched on in this one, and the depiction of just one of the roles that women played during that time was also very interesting and worth exploring.

Grade: B

Book 17: Unfit to Print by KJ Charles

What a delightful little novella. This story takes us on a journey through the pornography trade in Victorian England, something I'd never really thought about existing before but makes perfect sense once I did. There has always been pornographic writings and drawings and sculptures, but for the first time people had the ability to take pictures of nude bodies and sexual acts, and of course the flipside of the rigid outward morality of that era would be the vice underneath.

The story focuses on Gilbert Lawless, the illegitimate biracial son of a Lord who became a pornographic book seller and author after he was cast out of his family following his father's death. After the cousin who inherited the estate from his father also dies, his relatives invite him back to request he dispose of his cousin's extensive pornography collection. Meanwhile, Vikram, an old friend from school who Gil hasn't seen since he had to leave suddenly when his father died, is searching for clues about the disappearance of a young Indian man. He shows up at Gil's bookstore looking for help finding the photographer who took a particular picture. Friendship and romance is rekindled after many years as they go on an adventure together to track down the young man.

I read on the author's blog that a version of this story had originally been the starting point of her Sins in the City trilogy, and I have to say that I would have liked to have seen what a full length novel focusing on these two characters would have been like. It's definitely an enjoyable read and I found it compelling, but the plot was almost too straightforward. I would have liked to have seen how they could have been woven into a more complex universe of characters and events.

Grade: B

Book 16: Talk Sweetly to Me by Courtney Milan

Another excellent read! Often when I read a novella in a romance series I end up wishing it was a full length novel, but this was that perfect kind which had a story arc that didn't require any more time than it got.

Rose Sweetly is the younger daughter of a black shop owner in London, who moves in with her pregnant older sister Patricia to help while her husband is away. While in Greenwich, she has the opportunity to be a computer (i.e., mathematician) for an astronomer, work she deeply loves. But Stephen Shaughnessy, a known rake and writer, is also in Greenwich, and has developed quite an interest in Rose, even arranging for lessons with Rose to ostensibly learn about astronomy for a character he's writing, but really he just wants to spend time with her.

Part of what I liked so much about this book being a novella rather than a full length novel is that at its heart there's only one major conflict or question, once it's established that Stephen is actually serious in his intentions toward Rose (which he has to be in order to be a likable character). The story comes down to whether Stephen and Rose are willing to deal with the realities of being in a mixed race marriage, and more specifically whether Stephen is ready to be the husband of a black woman and all that will entail, even for an Irishman who is used to poor treatment from the English. It's not a conflict that can reasonably withstand too much equivocation, because either it will be deemed worth it or not, and nothing within the timeframe of the novel can change outside of their relationship to shift their decision. The way it's handled neither minimizes the realities to the point of handwaving, nor does it make you think it's a relationship that's doomed to failure. And the progression of their attraction and love is really lovely, with just the right small and big moments. Milan writes historical romances so well it feels effortless and it makes me wish every book read so well.

Grade: A

    

Book 15: The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

For the last month or so I had been stuck in a bit of a reading rut, where everything I read was okay or sometimes even better than okay, but not quite as good as I had been hoping. I am very pleased to report that with this book, that curse has been broken, because boy did I love this book.

Jude is the daughter of two mortals who had met in Faerieland and escaped to the mortal world together. She, her twin sister Taryn, and their older half-sister Vivienne are brought back to Faerieland by Vivienne's father, Madoc, who kills both of their parents. Madoc raises his former wife's children along with Vivienne, even though they aren't his and aren't Faerie. Because he's the general for one of the sons of the Faerie King and a very high ranking warrior, Jude and Taryn are raised along with the elite of the Court of Faerie. This does not go particularly well for either Jude or Taryn, as one might expect.

One of the things I love about this book is that instead of the now-standard YA girl character who's an average jane thrust into the middle of intrigue she's ill-equipped to deal with and doesn't want to deal with, Jude is determined to find her role and shape her life in whatever ways she can. She's a mortal, which means she's vulnerable in ways that Vivi and other faeries aren't: she's susceptible to glamours and faerie fruits and the like. But she spends all of her time trying to figure out how she can be effective, in both very openly confrontational ways and in secrecy.

She's incredibly confrontational at school with the cool faerie folk, especially the youngest prince of the Court, Cardan. He and his friends are the perfect supernatural version of every popular high school clique, and one of the ways this book works so well is by blending the standard tropes of being the odd girl out who fights back against the cool kids but also wishes that she had their power with all of the magic intrigue of the Faerie Court. And there is plenty of intrigue! The other aspect of this book that I loved is how many classic tropes and storylines it works with that zig when you expect them to zag. It's not that everything is a shock reveal; in fact, most of the plot points feel very consistent with the world that's built. But the specifics--how the characters get there, or who knows what when, or the explanations for why characters behave in certain ways--all feel genuinely fresh and interesting. The end of the book feels perfect for where the first book of a trilogy should end, and it's both not a cliffhanger and also left me totally unsure of what would happen in book 2. It's just a really satisfying, extremely well written YA faerie romp, that happens to have a couple of my favorite tropes in it, and I'm very much looking forward to the next one.

Grade: A

Book 14: All I Am by Nicole Helm

Sometimes I wonder if I find contemporary straight romance novels baffling, or if I just find straight culture itself baffling. Who can say?  Not this book.

There are elements about this story I like. I'm a sucker for a romanticized version of the country, with a farmer's market and artisan everything and a loner in a cabin up in the woods. Wes is a combat veteran who had to give up his dream of becoming a veterinarian after being injured in Afghanistan and now makes his own organic dog treats. Cara is the flighty middle sister of a family that owns a farm and has a stand at the same farmer's market as Wes does. They're a fairly classic opposites attract and make each other better set up, and the story is fine for what it is, but there's no depth to any of the characters or their relationships, and all of the conflict and decision making exists to create plot rather than because it feels remotely real. It wasn't the worst way to spend an afternoon, but there are better versions of this kind of book.

Grade: C 

Book 13: Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian

Man, it's always a bummer when you hit the first book by an author you really like that just doesn't work for you. There's so much to like about this story, too, but it's a classic unsuccessful romance novel where the characters spend 90% of the book discussing all of the reasons why their love can never work and you're nodding along the whole time thinking 'yes, they really are in a pickle, how will they resolve this???' and then they get to the end and are like jk who cares about social mores and the realities of the world this story takes place in, love should be enough! And ugh.

The story centers on Robert Selby, the older brother of the beautiful Louisa, who goes to Alistair de Lacey, the Marquess of Pembroke, for assistance in the Ton. The reason he needs this assistance is because Robin is actually Charity Church, a female servant for the Selbys who assumed Robert's identity with his knowledge in order to attend Cambridge and then assumed his identity permanently when he died in order to prevent the estate from being entailed away from Louisa and leaving her destitute. So they're in London in order to find an acceptable match for Louisa.

Alistair is a very straight-laced Marquess who is only interested in restoring his family's good name and financial well-being after his father had long-running affairs and spent too much money too often. He's kind of a Darcy-esque figure who softens and learns valuable lessons about himself when he falls for Selby (whom he calls Robin), first when he thinks he's a man and then for a second time when she confesses that she's a woman. There are all sorts of misunderstandings about Alistair's intentions and the cousin whom Louisa and Charity prevented from inheriting by concealing Selby's death plus an ill-advised elopement attempt and all that, but the main conflict is how can Alistair and Selby aka Charity aka Robin be together given everything?

There are a bunch of different answers to that question that could theoretically work, but for me the one the book goes with doesn't at all. I'm glad that queer historical romances are expanding the idea of what a queer romance can be, and I'm here for happy endings for those characters and an examination of how people lived non-cisgender heterosexual lives back in the day. But the resolution here feels both so ahistorical and out of character for basically everyone in the book that it just reads like utter fantasy. I think a happy ending was possible for Robin and Alistair, but this one wasn't it.

Grade: C

Book 12: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

I read this graphic novel for my book club. It's got a story structure that I enjoy very much and is a good fit for the storytelling flexibility that graphic novels can provide: there are three separate yet connected stories that are being told in alternating chapters, and each of them is compelling on its own but come together in a satisfying way. The first story is a fable about the Monkey King, who loves dinner parties and is rejected from one for being a monkey. So he goes back to his kingdom and does everything he can not to be a monkey, to the point where his actions cause him to lose everything rather than gain everything and he must make a choice and all that.

The second story is the primary story, and it's the one that makes the book read the most like a memoir (which I think it is). It's about a Chinese-American boy named Jin Wang whose family moves from Chinatown in San Francisco to an unnamed very white suburb and struggles to find his way. He has one friend, a boy from Taiwan who blends in even less, and in middle school he develops a crush on a white girl.

The third story is about a white teenager named Danny who has a cousin who visits him from China every year. His cousin is a pretty dramatic and clearly satirical version of a Chinese caricature, and this third tale feels even less strictly realistic than the Monkey King fable.

I really enjoyed this book right up until the end, which didn't quite land for me. It felt very abrupt, and left a number of threads unresolved in ways that weakened the entire book for me. Jin Wang's experiences felt so true to life, and the details of being a child in the eighties in particular were so specific and grounding, that the ending was almost too metaphorical and didn't end up satisfying me as a result. The book as a whole is still worth reading, but I expected it to nail the ending after such a solid build up, and it didn't.

Grade: B 

Book 11: The Henchmen of Zenda by KJ Charles

I spent a lot of time while reading this book attempting to figure out exactly what it is. It's definitely fanfic, in that the story is based on another novel from the late 19th century (The Prisoner of Zenda) only told from a different perspective. But it's also a bit of a backstage comedy, because while the reader's focus is always on the characters and events that the narrator cares about, the "main" story is on the other side of the wall, so to speak. It's also a fanfic that doesn't expect or even require the reader to know the original story at all, the details of which are more or less hand-waved away. There's a bit of the novel The Princess Bride to it, in that the version of the story we're getting is told as being the "good parts" or at the very less the true account of what actually happened, with all the built-in commentary that how a story goes depends almost entirely on who's doing the telling.

So, the story here is that there are these henchmen, and from the outside they're all evil, but we learn through following the tale of Jasper Detchard that most of the henchmen are in fact evil but that he and Rupert von Hentzau in particular are not. They both work for Michael, a Duke and the brother of the future king of Ruritania, and Michael is in fact quite evil. However, both Jasper and Hentzau have other plans in play: Detchard is there at the request of Antoinette de Mauban, Michael's mistress and Detchard's longtime friend. Michael wants the throne, Antoinette wants to escape Michael and find her daughter, Detchard wants to help her do that and escape with his own life, and Hentzau's motives are unclear at the start of the story but are revealed over time. What is never unclear is his interest in Detchard sexually, and the developing relationship between the two of them is entertaining if not particularly passionate.

The book does a pretty compelling job of explaining the actual motives for lots of things that happen in the original story which change how that story is perceived, even for those readers who don't actually know the original story. The one odd thing though is that I as a reader never actually cared what the result of the overall narrative would be, because Jasper clearly survives in this telling since he's the one writing it. It's another way in which it's obviously fanfic, except that it's also a story that doesn't expect anyone to know the original story, so as a result the actual plot to the story is more or less irrelevant. It's cleverly done, and I am somewhat curious about how the original novel told the story, but it never made me fully invested in the tale. I'm always here for gay hi jinx and adventures and things not being what they seem and all that, but I could never quite lose the feeling of being behind the scenes and not in the central narrative, which of course we're not, but it should feel like the main narrative to the characters themselves, at least. It felt like a story that was weighed down a bit too much by its own narrative framing, in the end. I was happy enough while reading it, but it never flowed on its own as a story, for me.

Grade: B