The Big Short - Michael Lewis

 The Big short is another story based on how we hit the period during the great recession in 2008-2009 and the system failures that caused that effort. Michael Lewis is well known financial industry turned outsider and author that exposes the gaps on wall street.

I went into this book thinking I would be able to predict whats going on happen, given that I actually lived during this time as a business student and I've also already seen the movie, but I was wrong. The story starts somewhere before the turn of the century right before the tech bubble got formed and how certain systemic cracks in the financial system were starting to take shape. I enjoyed the fact the author did not take the route of humanizing the story from one persons perspective and focus on just the emotional aspect of the credit crisis. Instead he establishes three consecutive, seemingly disconnected, stories of teams originating from completely different industries but the one thing they had in common was that they saw the crisis coming almost half a decade before it actually happened. 

The rest of the story goes into a lot of facts and details of how the financial system is structured for trading and insuring Bonds, also how predisposed we are as a market to be optimistic and neglect all the signs of a catastrophic failure. I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to get a good glimpse of what actually happened during the great recession, the reasons that caused it and also get a few laughs from the peculiar subjects he chooses to tell the story with.

 

Deaths end - Cixin Liu

  

The final chapter of the Remembrance of earth's past trilogy, which started with the Three Body problem is finally closed in this book. Ratings and reviews aside, I had to pick it up to get closure on the story line.

This book is a direct continuation of the The Dark Forest, which was an excellent follow up to the Three Body problem. There was certainly something satisfying in picking up the story where the last one left off but there are even some overlaps with the previous story to build up to the ending. The author builds up the new characters in this story line as well, very well I might add and the story starts to get a little, I want to say, confusing? towards the end. Granted this is a science fiction novel but lets just say that a lot more liberty's were taken in the writing of this one than the previous two.

Overall I wouldn't rate this as high as the first two books in the series, and primarily due to the sheer length and unsatisfying ending but very interesting read that explores new concepts in science fiction that, even after reading the previous two books, I did not see coming.

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh

 

I had this book lying on the bookshelf for quite some time and for some reason had not picked it up to get started. This is the story of Zappos but it goes further back than Zappos. The author and CEO of Zappos wrote this as a business biography of Zappos but starts off much sooner speaking about his roots and his previous endeavors.  

The whole book is written in first person and is written by the author himself, without the use of a Ghostwriter. Its almost like reading a really long email from a tech CEO and the trials of being an entrepreneur in silicon valley starting in the late nineties. Its probably his own personality coming out but he takes a hilarious approach to telling the story but also offers some very valuable guidance in how to develop a company and root the core values in something that he is passionate about.

This is a very quick read, once I picked it up I was able to finish this off in a day and walked away very satisfied. I'd recommend this to anyone looking to get a view into the mind of a tech mogul while learning some valuable lessons about finding happiness.