The August Reading List

 Hello to all my regular readers. Below I present the August reading list (sorry it's two days late). Once again, this month I had to drop down to including just three books so apologies for that, and there were also a few changes to the line-up, but hopefully it's a diverse set of books once again. 

In the September reading list, I can almost promise that normal service will resume, as spare time has once again become an ample commodity of mine. The targeted list for next month is at the end of this article. 

Jordan Peterson - 12 Rules for Life: 

Everybody who knows about Jordan Peterson has an opinion on him, some people think he talks a lot of sense and some people mark him up as a hateful person determined to challenge every viewpoint for the sake of an argument. The clip which always gets shared around (ok clip is the wrong word at 30 minutes) is the one on the gender pay gap, where he prods and challenges typical assumptions in quite a fiery debate with Cathy Newman. I probably sit somewhere in the middle. 

Nonetheless, park your opinions of Mr. Peterson aside and just go out and buy the book. Many of the rules for life are pretty common sense - stuff like "Tell the truth", "be precise in your speech" and, my personal favourite,  "pet a cat when you see one" - but that doesn't mean that the book is a waste of time, and many of the arguments presented behind these rationales are quite interesting and clear. 

Of course, there is now also "12 More Rules for Life", but that will be a book for another reading list. 

Carlo M Cippola - The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity: 

This is a short and snappy read (at just 70 pages or so), but well worth reading several times. In fact, I've tried to commit many of these maxims to heart and read the book through 3 times or so just for amusement. Essentially, the key takeaway from this book is that "always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation". 

Cippola then goes on to extend this rule and draw some conclusions from it. This book is slightly in jest, and should be taken that way, but it is still interesting nonetheless - particularly the discussions on how the  proportion of stupid people in any given profession, discipline, or country is largely constant. 

Nate Silver - The Signal and the Noise: 

Definitely my favourite book of the month due to its analysis of how to consider prediction. Brought to you from the creator of fivethirtyeight.com the book goes through a broad range of scenarios and explains how to bring some element of probability toward them. 

For finance people, there is extensive discussion of various market theorems such as "The Efficient Market Hypothesis" which claims that it is impossible to beat the market over the longer-term. Clearly, this is is incorrect, otherwise the basis of my blog is pointless :) 

I particularly enjoyed some of the analysis of disasters such as terrorism within the book. For example, Silver looks extensively at 9/11 and the claim that it was indeed an unpredictable event. Taking from the famous Rumsfeld line of "Unknown unknowns", he shows how we can almost ascribe probabilities to events like 9/11 even without knowing by looking at curves logarithmically. Now, yes to many of my readers that last sentence made no sense, but to find out more go buy the book. 

So a relatively short reading list for August, but I can assure you that September will be more voluminous (pun intended). 

Next month, I will be reading Ron Chernow's immense biography of George Washington, James Baar's Lords of the Desert on Britain's Struggles with America to Dominate the Middle East (regular readers may remember I read A Line in the Sand on Israel a couple of months back), Return of a King - The Battle for Afghanistan, The Premonition by Michael Lewis, and Joseph Heller's Catch 22.

This month, I promise to actually stick by what I say I'm going to read... ok well promise is a bit strong so we'll see. 

Have a great September all.