Category: Book Reviews

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Some books are so badly written, you can hear the author’s fingers banging on the keyboard, pounding out clumsy phrase after clumsy phrase so loudly it distracts from, rather than reinforces, what the author is trying to say.

The Psychology of Money is not one of those books. Actually, the writing is acceptable enough to avoid being a major distraction. Not good, mind you, but acceptable. Instead I found myself distracted by something else: the complete lack of substance. I wondered how a book so short could still feel so padded out. It was peppered with unnecessary examples and anecdotes that tangentially supported the core point of the chapter – like when he takes you back a hundred years into some semi-famous financier’s boyhood in order to illustrate the point that it is good to leave your investments to ripen, instead of harvesting them too early.

For all the padding, what was missing were any profound insights into … the psychology of money. In fact, the title ought to have been A Few Obvious, Practical Ideas for Managing your Personal Finances. But what I wanted from the book was some deeper psychology. For example, one thing that always fascinates me about money management is what I’ll call the ‘scale paradox’. Back when I was a real estate agent, I observed more than a few times how people would fight and claw to avoid paying an extra 50 cents for a dozen eggs, yet fail to put in the same effort to add an extra ten thousand dollars to the sales price of their house.

Is this because large numbers are simply inconceivable to us?
Is it because we are preprogrammed to care more about tangible, basic transactions than intangible, complex ones?

I don’t really know, because this is one of many, many interesting aspects of the psychology of money Hausel had nothing to say about.

Instead, he informed me that investors are all different, so no single investment strategy can be considered ‘best’, and that he and his wife paid off their mortgage because they like the feeling of ‘owning’ their own home.

Maybe the deepest insight from The Psychology of Money has nothing to do with the content, and more to do with the psychology of book publishing and sales. I.e. how such a shallow, pointless collection of air could sell over six million copies. Figuring that one out – at least for authors like me – would be a true insight into making money.



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The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time is relative.

You don’t need a beautifully-bound, poetry-studded hardback book to tell you that. You need only compare two very different pieces of reading material to see the principle play out – a 500 page John Grisham paperback novel, versus this above-mentioned hardback: The Order of Time, a 150 page treatise on the meaning of time and the universe, written by one of the most famous physicists alive. The Grisham you will breeze through, barely noticing as the formulaic plot unfolds effortlessly. The day and a half of reading will seem like no time at all.

The Rovelli, on the other hand, you will labour and struggle through, slowly reading and re-reading whole paragraphs, with a mounting sense of desperation as everything you thought you knew about time is methodically picked apart, and you’re not even completely sure you understand why. The weeks it takes you to finish it will feel like months.

I take pride in the fact that I did, ultimately, finish The Order of Time while on holidays on a Grecian island. It was a place where the sun bleaches out of your brain the ability to comprehend anything weightier than a young, ambulance-chasing lawyer from Mississippi cracking his first big case against an evil corporation, while saving the trailer-trashy blonde from her alcoholic, abusive husband. And yet despite the tides, tsatsiki and tarama, I managed to read and, I think, gain insights into something that is nearly as compact and dense as was the universe at the moment of the Big Bang.

I don’t claim to have fully, deeply, understood everything Rovelli sets out, so I won’t do the injustice of attempting a thorough ‘plot’ summary. In rough terms, he begins by picking apart all of our preconceived notions of how time works. He starts with the simple observation that time moves faster the closer you are to a surface of the earth, and from there gets you to a place where time, whether past, present or future, does not really exist at all, except as a cognitive dysfunction of our limited brains, linked somehow to this vague concept called ‘thermal time’ that is in turn linked to the second law of thermodynamics. Much of the details are blurry to me already, but that is probably okay because at the end, Rovelli admits that much of it is blurry even to him.

His thoughts on time take you to the very intersection of physics and philosophy, where the answers are no more solid than the baseball bat that Grisham’s hero uses on page 425 to whack the drunken husband. (Despite the six beers he’s drunk, the bat feels ‘hard’ against his skull, but Rovelli reliably informs us that both the bat and his head are in fact nothing more than a coincidence of quantum events, at some primitive stage of entropy.)

It is this blend with philosophy that also allowed me to forgive Rovelli his indulgent inclusion of poetry quotes and many tangential references to the arts. He is Italian, after all.

My only significant disagreements came later in the book. First, where Rovelli goes head-to-head with Descartes on the ‘Cogito argument’. He does not like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” very much, since for him there is some distinction between doubting and thinking, which Descartes does not allow in his first principle. I’m with Descartes, because I see doubt as a subset of thought.

My second bone of contention is that his whole treatise on time does not allow for any discussion of probability and determinism. This seems to me a glaring omission, because the fundamental question – it’s also a question situated at the intersection of physics and philosophy – is whether the universe is deterministic or probabilistic. This has important implications for the separation of future from present. With probabilism, the future is uncertain and must always be considered distinct from the present or past, because ex ante it is ‘unknowable’. With determinism, the only thing that makes the future uncertain is the same veil of ignorance that, in Rovelli’s reckoning, makes the past ‘blurry’ and therefore meaningfully different to the present. In other words, in a deterministic universe it is theoretically possible to know exactly what will happen, everywhere and always, from now until the end of time. ‘Future’ exists only because the supercomputers in our brains are not ‘super’ enough to do all the necessary calculations.

There is of course a third philosophical possibility, which sits between probability and determinism. It is what theologians refer to as ‘free will’ – the idea that the human soul is something special precisely because, in an otherwise deterministic universe, we humans – having been made in the image of God – are the sole entities capable of making meaningful choices. Therefore the future, and time itself, exist because humans have souls, and souls allow for choices, and not even God can predetermine what those choices will be.

If you are still reading this review, my guess is it’s felt like a relatively long read. Grisham’s protagonist would probably already have called his third witness by now.







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Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Graham Greene is a desperately good writer. He can’t help but write well, even on an off day. Even when attempting a literary loop de loop that goes slightly wrong. And because he has that magic gift to turn even his stumbles into artistry, there is extra deliciousness in the very imperfections we observe.

So it is with Our Man in Havana. Having read other of Greene’s work, you start this one with a comfortable expectation that he will deliver scene and structure. He does not disappoint. Right away, we are plunged into pre-Castro Cuba, and become acquainted with a typical Greeneian underdog protagonist – an impoverished English vacuum cleaner salesman with a limp named Wormold, whose wife, we learn, has already left him for another man.

But as the plot accelerates, we realise this is not The Power and the Glory. Greene is giving us a rather comic tour of the brothels, bars and casinos. As Wormold becomes embroiled in a world of medium-stakes espionage, the novel veers close to farce.

It is here that he misses a step on the balance beam. Without revealing too much, a few of the plot elements fail to land on the fine line between comedy and hyperrealism that he so carefully treads for much of the story. There is also a missed opportunity late in the story to create a dramatic counterpoint around the death of one of the characters.

But for everything else this book achieves – laugh-out-loud comedy, incredible sense of place and masterfully crafted characters – Greene shows in Havana that he is, yet again, one of the 20th Century’s finest.



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Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero by Charles Sprawson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction. I find much of it to be clunky, badly organised and badly written. It favours substance over form, as if there were ever a trade-off between the two! Non-fiction tends to pay little attention to the beauty and flow of words and sentences or the cadence of ideas. Worst of all, it lacks kindness to the reader. As in, ‘if you want to know what happens, mate, you will be forced to suffer through my clunky prose’.
At first glance, Sprawson’s watery account of the literature and history of swimming and all things wet appears to be no exception. By page 100, you realise you have been thrown in at the deep end of a self-indulgent pool of random facts, written by a man whose sole purpose in authorship is to free his head of as much aquatic trivia as he can, so that he might go back to his preferred lake or river and have another dip. Sprawson doesn’t even attempt to adhere to his own loose chapter structure – to wit, a big chunk of the final chapter, which purports to tell us about the decade Japan dominated competitive swimming, veers off into an impossibly long tangent about the effeminate French writer André Gide’s favourite Gallic watering holes. The hook is that writer Yukio Mishima liked Gide’s work.
But beneath this eddied surface, Haunts of the Black Masseur has hidden depths. The very self-indulgence that defines his writing style, is mirrored in the book’s theme – the swimmer is submersed, alone, embraced by nature, without the lifeline that tethers us to bourgeois morality. The point is, he does not have to be coherent, sensible or clear. He is free. This is the Masseur’s common current; the love of swimming as subversive counterculture or escape, which binds Ancient Greece, the English classicists of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the German Romantics, the Americans and finally (if only briefly) the Japanese.
So if you are prepared to forgive Sprawson his contempt for good writing and allow yourself to be swept up in a riptide of delicious, random and sometimes surprising anecdotes, you may just reemerge from the experience refreshed.




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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


We all remember the pain of reading Shakespearean plays in school. Sadistic English teachers with shattered dreams of being something better forcing us to learn whole passages by rote …the quality of mercy is not strained…, without once reflecting on the irony of their own lack of mercy.
If you had intellectually snobby parents like mine, the closest to sympathy their innate veneration of the Bard would allow, would be the grudging admission that, “well, really Shakespeare is not meant to be read. It’s meant to be performed.”
Actually, during the later years in which my own intellectual snobbery got me reading his plays autonomously, I never found this to be true. Unless you’d already studied Henry CXXII part VI, live performances went too fast; you missed too much of the subtle word play or the historical context. Idem for Ibsen. As for my favourite playwright Miller, I always found the dialogue to be so supremely evocative of the scene that if anything a live performance introduced risks of spoiling the perfect acting I imagined in my own head.
However, for Tennessee Williams, I don’t think this is the case – at least not as far as ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof‘ is concerned. I read the play, never having seen it staged nor having watched the film. My first impression was the dialogue came across as hammy, overdone and at times (needlessly and repetitively) redundant, (such that the point could have been made with fewer lines and more subtext). To wit, the titular feline metaphor is hammered into the reader’s ears in Act I. Not once, but twice.
Moreover, if you are looking for an entertaining plot or clever character arcs, you have come to the wrong place. Williams is writing as an American realist – he sees little scope for moral progression, at least not in a story that takes place over one steamy night in the big house of a Southern plantation. This left me wondering what the big deal with Cat might be, whether it wasn’t just a mediocre script that benefited unduly from good timing and a nascent American Empire, hungry to grow cultural roots in the fertile soil of its burgeoning economy.
On reflection, though, it occurs to me that these shortcomings would be somewhat attenuated in a live performance. There, we can imagine how strong performances might make the Southern nouveaux riches sparkle: the droll alcoholism in the fallen favourite son Brick, the desperate aching of womanhood in his wife Margaret. The bellicose, base honesty in his father, Big Daddy.
Indeed, Cat might be as much about the atmosphere as the story. It evokes a particular mood and feeling; which perforce comes alive not in the words themselves, but in how they are spoken and in the silences that can unshroud a deeper meaning. This is not a finished piece of literature. Rather, it is a set of instructions to the actors and director, and should perhaps be read by them and them alone.



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The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is often said of writers that they must first read, and that if you want any hope of being a great writer, you must be a great reader. I don’t know if that’s true – I have known very gifted writers who read very little, and voracious readers who could not string a sentence together. One thing, though, I can say: certain books are so brilliant that they inspire me to want to be a better writer. There is no particular genre, or subject or period in history that these books belong to. What they all have in common is that they touch upon some ‘essential truth’, something that the writer himself knows to be true, and the force of his conviction leads me to be intrigued by his truth, to accept it into my own canon.
Graham Greene’s ‘The Power and the Glory’ reeks of exactly this kind of essential truth. A devout Catholic, Greene naturally questioned the shortcomings of his own Church. Like all thinking members of the Church of Rome, he must have been deeply frustrated with its contradictions, pettiness and displays of pomp and pride. In ‘The Power and the Glory’ he lays bare this frustration, by showing the Catholic Church at its most essential.
No, this essence has nothing to do with the Pope in Rome, or any great bishops, or the inner machinations of Opus Dei. Rather, it is a disgraced Mexican cleric of low rank – the ‘Whiskey Priest’ – on the run from the communists who control that state. These communists have a fiercely atheistic zealotry; one that is deliberately reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.
The priest’s persecution is set up to be deliberately Christ-like, in that he must endure hardship, insults and deprivation. And yet, just as deliberately, we are given ample reminders of the fact that the Whiskey Priest is no Christ figure. He is a grievous sinner, guilty of all seven of the deadly variety. His life before the Communist revolution was one of pride; of lust leading to the fathering and abandonment of a bastard child; the sins of gluttony and sloth; and all of this seasoned with an unhealthy dose of envy of those of his peers who had risen higher in the Church than he.
Now a fugitive, every policeman in the state hunts him. Yet he manages to elude justice for weeks. The pious peasants respect his office even if he no longer does, and they pay a huge price to hide him from the Communists. His fugitive status is not even a form of martyrdom, because he fails to uphold even the most basic offices of the Church with any remaining shred of dignity, despite the people’s need for his spiritual guidance. Rather, he flees because he is a coward.
The story is made gripping by the detailed, gritty descriptions of the scenery (beetles exploding against the walls, swamping hot rivers with lazy, rusted boats anchored) and the people (the odd-ball ex-pats, the corrupt police lieutenant, the indolent villagers). But its true appeal lies deeper. We want to know the Whiskey-Priest’s faith precisely because his whole persecution amounts to a deeply religious confession – a path to God and the religion he had never truly known, all through the glory days of his priestly reign. His path to God only opened up the day he was tested.
Yet Greene is too good an author to allow his Whiskey-Priest moral redemption on earth. In the brief moment in which he achieves safety and a degree of comfort, we see our anti-hero quickly revert to his old, sinful habits. The message from Greene is clear: there is no path out of sin except the unconditional acceptance of God and belief in His divine mercy.
As a religious person, I relate to this story on many levels. But though its essential truth resonates with me, I cannot say how it would strike someone with different philosophical leanings.
Would the power of Greene’s faith, exposed through this wonderfully crafted tale, ring as true in the ears of a 21st Century atheist, an adherent of the cult of The Science? I somehow believe it would.
But then again, I’m the sort who believes lots of things – like the only son of God dying on a cross outside Jerusalem, two thousand years ago.



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The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Before starting Christie’s The ABC Murders, I made the mistake of opening another book, Win, by the much overrated Harlen Corben. I abandoned after only 20 pages, and frankly only got that far because I was intrigued to know if a bestselling author could sustain that incredibly low level of writing beyond one ill-conceived chapter. So it’s probable that my high opinion of The ABC Murders is somewhat flattered by this comparison.
Still, the contrast between what sells today and what sold 70 years ago could not have been more apparent. Both Christie’s and Corben’s protagonists are cliched and superficial. Yet whereas Hercule Poirot’s arrogant self-importance is tongue-in-cheek (the reader is in on the joke), Win is simply insufferable. Christie’s characters lack depth because they are clever and deliberate illustrations – line art that indicates form rather than creating true texture. Corben’s characters, on the other hand, lack depth because they are badly painted hyperreal portraits, a poor likeness of actual human beings.
But where Christie really shows her mastery is in the pacing of the plot. I’m curious to know if she mapped out the sequence of murders and events carefully, the way an animator plans his drawings from pose to pose. Or did she just let it flow – frame by frame – and was so adept at feeling her way that the result was perfect timing – landing on the beats without the aid of a metronome?
Whether deliberate and practiced; or innate and lucky, the effect is that the reader feels loved by every page. Christie knows how to write with her readers in mind. You cannot hear the pounding of her fingers on the typewriter. There are no painfully obvious sequences of the otherwise cynical title character funding a shelter for battered women, sardine-packed in there by an editor because someone felt the protagonist had to be made more ‘likeable’. With the Queen of Crime, there is a simple love of the story, and a flair for sketching human beings – not perhaps as they really are, but with enough truthful lines that we, the reader, can fill in the gritty details with our imagination.
Hercule Poirot remains in The ABC Murders as he always is – larger than life. Preposterous, even. A shared joke between Christie and the reader. And yet he is as alive as any hero.
Agatha Christie will never be the Rembrandt of literature. But she is perhaps the Norman Rockwell, and that is a wonderful thing in itself.

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