Review: The Witch Elm

The Witch Elm by Tana French
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It doesn’t seem that this book was a good choice to be the first Tana French mystery to read. The book does carry a mood throughout, but it’s entirely due to the narrator being unlikeable but in a bad situation. French does a nice job putting you in the shoes of someone with recent brain damage, but that’s really not an enjoyable place to be. There were long stretches of repetitive thoughts while we inhabit narrator Toby’s mind, but again, it’s part the brain damage and part that he’s always been a bit oblivious. This plays big here as it is a mystery from the past. My summary – French is excellent at setting a mood but this story won’t leave you in a good place.

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Review: Unstoppable Confidence: How to Use the Power of NLP to Be More Dynamic and Successful

Unstoppable Confidence: How to Use the Power of NLP to Be More Dynamic and Successful by Kent Sayre
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

So, do you need a book to tell you how to repeat affirmations? Probably not, but if you do, this is one of them. Having read a number of books on the concept of influence recently, I wasn’t surprised to see what is discussed here are really a number of basic influence techniques, but where the influencer is also the influencee. Kinda interesting, but also very obvious. This has some new-age overtones that made this sound more spiritual than scientific.

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Review: Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing

Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing by Joel Tillinghast
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

About 2/3 of the way through listening to this audiobook, I thought about what I had learned. The author talks about evaluating companies and their stocks, generally using a great deal of research and spreadsheet work. As you listen to the “case studies” of the companies that he has evaluated and how he architected the evaluations, you are left with the feeling that it takes a special person to do this, one that is single-mindedly dedicated to tracing down the numbers behind the numbers, the forecasts that the company uses but don’t repeat to analysts, and information from sometimes obscure sources. While I originally assumed this was a how-to book, it is far from it. It was more a “here’s why you leave this to professionals” book that is pretending to be a how-to book. I also noticed, about 2/3 of the way through the book, that this would be a perfect book to explain why active fund management could be beneficial compared to index funds in raising return or lowering risk. And then, the author flips a switch and calls this out in the remainder of the book. As a defense of active fund investing, this does a good job. The author writes in a friendly way, and you understand that through his focus he’s able to tell stories about stocks and companies based on evaluation of numbers that are enlightening. What he doesn’t do is give you the belief that you can do these evaluations yourself without a lot of experience. Well written.

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Review: Libra

Libra by Don DeLillo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the audiobook, this story based on the Kennedy assassination had a dreamlike quality. Part of the reason for that is DeLillo’s writing. He is talking about some of the most consequential actions in a person’s life, even in recent history, and he will sometimes stop to describe the way a person is smoking a cigarette, as if it might be a tip-off to why a person acted a certain way. You expect that when you get into conspiracy theories, and this story is really that at its base – the story leading to the action. We follow Lee Harvey Oswald, and all his aliases, from childhood through defection to Russia and return, and we follow him as he’s groomed to be a patsy. While Oswald is the central character in the book, we also spend time in the eyes of his wife and mother, Jack Ruby, and in the CIA mastermind who plots the assassination attempt, including Cubans and mafia figures. I found the storyline with Oswald and the CIA operative to get quite confusing over time, as the author I believe intended, such that the story gets changed and you can’t tell how it happened. Was there a doublecross? DeLillo ends with Oswald’s mother’s lament, which felt quite Shakesperian in tone to close out the story. DeLillo says in an afterward that this was a novel, not non-fiction, and intended to get people to think. But it’s a novelization of a conspiracy theory, interesting and well written, so I can see myself remembering this more than any official version of the story as time goes on. Fact becomes fiction becomes fact, though modified in the process. Hopefully this story is one that readers will be willing to remember over time.

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Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found myself laughing quite a lot while listening to this audiobook. I also found myself saying “gross” a lot, too. Sedaris has a tendency to slip into what I’d consider adult-level gross-out humor, usually dragging out the story when he knows the listener will be most squeamish. Think “lancing boils” here. He seems to tell more stories about his rebel, drug-using, younger years here than in his other books I’ve listened to, and they tend to the quite humorous. I found this one of his better collections of stories.

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Review: Your Complete Guide to a Successful & Secure Retirement

Your Complete Guide to a Successful & Secure Retirement by Larry Swedroe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This felt like two different investment books. The first was closer to what I look for than the last. The book begins with some suggestions of the issues faced by retirees, such as worrying about spouses and sequence of returns risk. The author then provides some advice on thinking through these issues and determining your own path. This was a pretty common start. Where the book shines was the next few chapters, focused on asset allocation research and personal investment policies. The author provides some specific fund examples to plan around, and some specific advice that I hadn’t run across before based on the author’s research – in effect advice to step back from the efficient frontier to trade off a little return for some measure of risk reduction. The bulk of the rest of the book were a series of chapters on topics of interest in retirement, including the normal topics of Medicare, Social Security, and annuities, but also including lesser covered topics like women’s unique retirement issues, elder financial abuse, and preparing your heirs. I found these chapters to be hit and miss, some bits very familiar and some bits providing a new take on topics. Very good, even for someone who reads a lot of these kinds of books.

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Review: The Lincoln Highway Across Illinois

The Lincoln Highway Across Illinois by David A. Belden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another in the series of historic snapshots books with sepia-tone photo covers. This one focuses on the Lincoln Highway through Illinois. The book generally follows the original generation of the road, passing through the Southern suburbs of Chicago, meandering Northwest to the Western suburbs, then heading along a number of state highways toward the Mississippi, where it rejoins US 30. I'm very familiar with the drive on US 30 in Illinois where it isn't called the Lincoln Highway, so this was a learning experience - I've mistakenly assumed I was driving on the Lincoln Highway for decades. But I'm also familiar with the actual route. I enjoyed the pictures and some of the description, but I found two issues. First, the descriptions were very repetitive. There were three or four places where the authors added descriptions of motor courts to go along with vintage photos of motor courts and tourist camps. The thing is that the description is almost identical. Same with some other descriptions - it seems like an editor was not involved. The second issue was the prevalence of photos from the South suburbs. The rest of the route seemed hit or miss in terms of the quantity of photos. I assume this is because the authors focused on sources local to them, and made few trips to remote locations to gather info. Nevertheless, an interesting set of photos for people interested in the history of the road and its businesses. My favorite parts were the photos and stories about the unpaved, rutted, muddy roads that made up the early highway. Some of those photos were from about 100 years ago, really not that long ago.

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