What books are you currently reading?

[Tsotne]

Hi.
P.S. If I study "Rebonato, volatility and correlation" and "Gatheral, the volatility surface" wiil I be still a newbie?

You need strong of mathematical background to study the above books. I have the second one "Gatheral, the volatility surface" and haven't read it yet. You must have a strong statistical knowledge along with PDEs, Linear algebra to understand the concepts. Since there is a heavy mathematics involved and it means you are already aware of the stats, PDEs, Linear algebra, etc, I think that one who learns this book definitely cannot be considered as newbie.

 

[SYau]

Well, I'll take a look at it. Most of the fantasy I see these days is poor quality compared to Tolkien's LOTR, Zelazny's Amber series, and the Conan novels and short stories.

For contemporary fantasy, I like Erikson the best. The series, as a whole, have the most diverse and interesting characters (Icarium, Anomander Rakes, Karsa Oolong). Some of the events are pretty insane (Orbital laser built from jade). It is pretty impressive that he can keep (for the most part) his characters and plot from spinning out of control. It is not an easy read though as he drops you in the middle of the things in the first book and doesn't bother to explain anything (for example, his magic system (warrens) aren't explained until book 5 or 6, by which point you have a good idea on how it works anyway). If you can get past it though, you will love it and rereading them is a lot more enjoyable.

 

[Andy D.]

I love Tolkien's books, they really are in a world of their own (excuse the pun).

For Sci-Fi I have been reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books. They really come across as ahead of their time when you consider they were written in the late 80's early 90's.

 

[bigbadwolf]

I love Tolkien's books, they really are in a world of their own (excuse the pun).

Tolkien painstakingly created the world of Middle Earth over decades. LOTR is halfway between the children's fairy tale titled "The Hobbit" and the epic "Silmarillion." The only thing that comes close are the short stories and novels of that great Hyborean hero, Conan. But several writers have contributed to that legend.

For Sci-Fi I have been reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books. They really come across as ahead of their time when you consider they were written in the late 80's early 90's.

Mostly I find myself disappointed when I scour the bookshops. The last good thing I saw was Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy -- "Altered Carbon, "Broken Angels", and "Woken Furies."

 

[JasonH]

Linux in a Nutshell
Learning the BASH Shell

Just finished The Quants, nice fun read.

 

[Andy D.]

Tolkien painstakingly created the world of Middle Earth over decades. LOTR is halfway between the children's fairy tale titled "The Hobbit" and the epic "Silmarillion." The only thing that comes close are the short stories and novels of that great Hyborean hero, Conan. But several writers have contributed to that legend.

Agreed on Tolkien. I studied a fair bit about him when I was taking a course in Old English. Tolkien was an incredibly accomplished linguist, folklorist and historian. I believe he spoke around 12/13 languages and familiar with a further 12. These ranged from Welsh to Middle English. Fantastic scholar really.
Many of his character names are compositions of two words from various langauges. Gandalf being an example of :

Gandr - Lappish for a shape shifting spirit
Alf - Old English/Icelandic for Elf.

Mostly I find myself disappointed when I scour the bookshops.

If you haven't read any of K. S. Robinson's work I'd recommend the Mars trilogy.

 

[Alexei]

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

 

[GoalSeeker]

Confessions of an economic hitman,
Mahabharta (its mythology)..
Closing of the American mind.. just bought it

and lastly getting back to some calculus books... basic stuff

 

[bigbadwolf]

Confessions of an economic hitman,
Mahabharta (its mythology)..
Closing of the American mind.. just bought it

The Perkins book is interesting -- though so vague in places as to cast doubt on his credibility. The Bloom book still resonates with me, and my interpretation of it has been that it's (inadvertently) a commentary on the lack of a national culture.

 

[Alexei]

Bond Markets, Analysis, and Strategies

 

[rajanS]

Confessions of an economic hitman,
Mahabharta (its mythology)..
Closing of the American mind.. just bought it

and lastly getting back to some calculus books... basic stuff

Mahabharta? good luck getting it done. Its a never ending journey

 

[Tsotne]

I have seen some documentaries about Economic Hitman long ago but didn't know it was a book TBH. There are interesting points raised in such critical books, documentaries but very hard to read. Automatically gives bad mood.

 

[Andy D.]

The Perkins book is interesting -- though so vague in places as to cast doubt on his credibility.

To be honest BBW that is the same conclusion I came too. And when Perkins started doing the conspiracy circuit, and appearing on Alex Jones type shows he kind of shot his credibility in my eyes.

I've read a couple of his books and they are interesting, but it is difficult to tell what is embellished and what is fact.

Next on my list is "Real England - Battle against the bland".

 

[Tsotne]

Zeitgeist and Alex Jones's Obama deception and Endgame mention something about Economic Hitman. I don't like those documentaries though.

 

[bigbadwolf]

To be honest BBW that is the same conclusion I came too. And when Perkins started doing the conspiracy circuit, and appearing on Alex Jones type shows he kind of shot his credibility in my eyes.

He came here to a local Barnes and Noble a few years ago to give a talk. Mostly a crowd of middle-brow wishy-washy liberals with no idea of realpolitik, and who substitute moral outrage for real arguments. Anyway, I couldn't take more than five minutes of the talk.

A book on my to-buy list is Mob Rules: What the Mafia can Teach the Legitimate Businessman, which has just come out. No Amazon reviews so don't know if it's any good.

 

[kuberkhan]

Reminiscences of a Stock operator
The Buddha, Geoff and Me

 

[bigbadwolf]

I've ordered a copy of Paul Mattick's "Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism." Here is an interview with the author:

What’s going on now is the reappearance of the crisis that should have happened in the mid-1970s. The key idea in my book is that this crisis was put off by the creation of debt in all these forms: private debt, public debt, government debt. This was a historical novelty. There was a Keynesian idea during World War II that you could borrow money and then stop. But after the war, they were so afraid there would be a new crisis that they started to maintain, at all times, some low level of government spending. When the Golden Age ended in 1975, they got scared. There was an enormous outpouring of credit—and the invention of new credit instruments. And they managed in one way or another to put off the crisis for forty years. But there was a limit.

Finally it came in 2008—they just couldn’t keep the whole thing going any more. The apparatus of debt had been erected on a foundation of IOUs, which became so great that it couldn’t be sustained with respect to the actual production of value. I think this is a major event. I might be wrong—economics is not an exact science—but I think this is a deep depression. Some might compare it to the depression of the 1930s, but governments today don’t have the money they had in 1930. There is no repetition in history—that’s why you can’t learn from the past—so this is an absolutely unique situation: a major depression, but one in which the Keynesian apparatus is no longer available because the money has already been spent. The US has 14 trillion dollars in national debt. So now they just don’t know what to do.

And a synopsis of the book is here:

... As a result, although today's capitalism is in many ways a much-transformed version of its 19th-century self, this transformation has not brought an abatement of the systemic problems diagnosed by its critics in that century. It presents them, instead, in new forms. In fact, the crisis looming before us is likely to be, if anything, more terrible than the Great Depressions of 1873-93 and 1929-39. The continuing industrialization of agriculture and urbanization of population—by 2010, it is estimated, more than half the earth's inhabitants lived in cities—has made more and more people dependent upon the market to supply them with food and other necessities of life. The existence on or over the edge of survival experienced today by the urban masses of Cairo, Dhaka, São Paulo, and Mexico City will be echoed in the capitalistically advanced nations, as unemployment and government-dictated austerity afflict more and more people, not just in the developed world's Rust Belts but in New York, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Prague.

Left to its own devices, capitalism promises economic difficulties for decades to come, with increased assaults on the earnings and working conditions of those who are still lucky enough to be wage earners around the world, waves of bankruptcies and business consolidations for capitalist firms, and increasingly serious conflicts among economic entities and even nations over just who is going to pay for all this. Which automobile companies, in which countries, will survive, while others take over their assets and markets? Which financial institutions will be crushed by uncollectible debts, and which will survive to take over larger chunks of the world market for money? What struggles will develop for control of raw materials, such as oil or water for irrigation and drinking, or agricultural land?

 

[AWilliams]

WPF 4 Unleashed.

 

[swapnilchristian]

"Thank You For Smoking" by Christopher Buckley
"Fortune's Formula" by William Poundstone
"Data Structures and Algorithms in C++" by Adam Drozdek

 

[Brad Warren]

A Primer for the Mathematics of Financial Engineering
My Life as a Quant