If you’ve noticed that I haven’t been blogging, it’s because I went off the grid for my Q4 vacation with Amy. As is our habit, we checked out completely, spent a week at the beautiful Palmilla One & Only in Cabo, and did our normal quarterly vacation thing, which includes reading a bunch of books.
I started off with William Gibson’s latest – Spook Country. It started off slow – possibly because I kept comparing it to his last book, Pattern Recognition, which was amazing. I almost gave up but Amy encouraged me to stick with it. After 100 pages Gibson clearly established three parallel stories that clearly were going to converge at some point and I got sucked in. Around this point, the amazingness of Gibson also kicked in. The end result – great book, highly recommended, but be patient with the set up.
As is my way, I switched to non-fiction next. King of the Club – the story of Dick Grasso’s rise and fall at the NYSE – was recommended to me by someone so I picked it up. It’s a well written and detailed account of the whole Grasso thing, albeit from the perspective of the author playing investigative reporter. I don’t really care much about the public markets, investment banking, and the omnipresent backroom politics, but I learned a lot from this book and developed a different impression than I previous had. If Grasso’s story and/or the history of the NYSE interests you, this is well worth the time. If you prefer simple gossip, stick with BusinessWeek or People Magazine.
After Spook Country and King of the Club, I needed a small, short book. During the commercials on Monday night football I read The Tao of Warren Buffett. I’m a huge Buffett fan and this was a juicy little morsel of his aphorisms with a brief explanation by his ex-daughter-in-law Mary Buffett. Yum.
It was 80 degrees in Cabo and sunny. It’s 15 degrees in Boulder today with a foot of snow on the ground. I’m procrastinating going on my 10m+ run. Shocking.