{"id":3787,"date":"2024-01-31T19:52:21","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T00:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=3787"},"modified":"2024-03-31T12:05:17","modified_gmt":"2024-03-31T16:05:17","slug":"january-2024-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2024\/01\/january-2024-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"January 2024 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>The Book of Form and Emptiness<\/em> &#8211; Ruth Ozeki, 2021. Quotes marked, TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Whalefall<\/em> &#8211; Daniel Kraus, 2023. Liked but didn&#8217;t love this &#8220;<em>The Martian<\/em> inside a whale&#8221; science thriller. Cool ideas, but the writing was just way, way too purple, and the peril\/damage so over the top. The premise (scuba diver trapped inside a sperm whale) would have worked on its own without daddy issues and reputational repair.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing<\/em> &#8211; K.C. Davis, 2022. I would have gotten a lot out of this several decades go; it was really cheering\/amazing to reflect how I&#8217;ve come so far with my ADHD that this was mostly second nature already, although most credit goes to Jonathan for doing the bulk of the stuff I struggle with.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career<\/em> &#8211; L.M. Montgomery, 1917. Reading <em>The Blue Castle<\/em> last month got me thinking about which Montgomerys I hadn&#8217;t read yet; I started <em>The Story Girl<\/em> but am not loving it, so I turned to this memoir partly because I adore Frances Hodgson Burnett&#8217;s <em>The One I Knew the Best of All<\/em>, which I must have neglected to record because I&#8217;ve certainly read it in the past six or seven years. Anyway, this was a little interesting but not very insightful and a bit disjointed.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2024\/01\/finding-the-mother-tree-discovering-the-wisdom-of-the-forest-suzanne-simard-2021\/\">Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest<\/a><\/em> &#8211; Suzanne Simard, 2021. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2024\/01\/tom-browns-schooldays-thomas-hughes-1857\/\">Tom Brown&#8217;s Schooldays<\/a><\/em> &#8211; Thomas Hughes, 1857.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2024\/01\/the-fellowship-of-the-ring-j-r-r-tolkien-1954\/\">The Fellowship of the Ring<\/a><\/em> &#8211; J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Didn&#8217;t finish<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor<\/em> &#8211; Howard Marks, 2011. This came up because I was searching for a copy of Charlie Munger&#8217;s <em>Poor Charlie&#8217;s Almanack<\/em>, which doesn&#8217;t seem to be available in library systems (because out of print now, and was originally too expensive, and\/or self-published and not available through distributors?) But wait, now a copy has shown up on order through CW Mars &#8211; people must have been asking since his death gave a spurt of publicity. But wait again, now an abridged version <a href=\"https:\/\/www.stripe.press\/poor-charlies-almanack\/\">is online<\/a>? Anyway, somewhere a version of this book came up in association with that one (it&#8217;s blurbed by Warren Buffett, but I thought there was more to it) and it was available through the public library. It basically emphasized to me, for the umpteenth time, that individual stock investing is a mug&#8217;s game. &#8220;The most important thing&#8221; is actually 19 different things &#8211; &#8220;they&#8217;re <em>all<\/em> important,&#8221; says Marks &#8211; most of which are outside a regular person&#8217;s control. However, I got a couple of quotes before abandoning the book:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;Experience is what you got when you didn&#8217;t get what you wanted.&#8221; (And just recently I heard a similar saying from a relative who&#8217;s a ski guide: &#8220;Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.&#8221;)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;In basketball they say, &#8216;You can&#8217;t coach height.'&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Marks attributes this to Yogi Berra, but per <a href=\"https:\/\/quoteinvestigator.com\/2018\/04\/14\/theory\/\">QI<\/a> it was first written by a Yale student in 1882: &#8220;In theory, there&#8217;s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Marks calls this an adage: &#8220;Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.&#8221; Interestingly, the Internet now mostly attributes it to him!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Marks attributes to John Maynard Keynes, but <a href=\"https:\/\/quoteinvestigator.com\/2011\/08\/09\/remain-solvent\/\">QI<\/a> traces to Gary Shilling: &#8220;The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wow, that&#8217;s a bad &#8211; but typical! &#8211; ratio on the attribution accuracy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Didn&#8217;t finish The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor &#8211; Howard Marks, 2011. This came up because I was searching for a copy of Charlie Munger&#8217;s Poor Charlie&#8217;s Almanack, which doesn&#8217;t seem to be available in library systems (because out of print now, and was originally too expensive, and\/or self-published and not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3787"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3914,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3787\/revisions\/3914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}