Notes from Eve Abbey ~ March 2017

A new book from Michael Lewis is always a thrill.

His energetic dissection of financial booms and busts, always peopled with eccentric characters and amazing costs have all been bestsellers. Wall Street workers are usually anxious to know what he will write about next! This time prepare to be surprised – for The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World is about psychology (and of course mathematics). I am beginning to believe that all the problems of the world could be solved with an algorithm! It is a pity we don’t all speak that language.

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This time Lewis is writing about two seemingly disparate Israeli scholars, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who together worked on how we make decisions, especially in uncertain conditions. Eventually, after the death of Amos, Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences (which he says was mostly for work he had done with Amos). This is not a book to be dipped into at bedtime – pay attention and work it out!

In typical Michael Lewis style, it is filled with anecdotes and character assessments, and somehow you can manage to understand the developments in cognitive psychology and how we make decisions, how we spend, how mistakes can be made in medicine or in basketball even.

Michael Lewis has thirteen other titles to his name, beginning with Liar’s Poker and including Flash Boys, The Big Short, Moneyball and The New New Thing as some of the books which have been made into movies. Terrific, entertaining reading, but this time you’ll have to work at it.

Here are two recommendations for readers interested in Literary Fiction. If your interest is in the writers of the thirties such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway you will of course be interested to read about their legendary editor at Scribers. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A Scott Berg is full of fascinating and useful information, not only about these famous authors but also about the world of literature generally. Hendrix Willem van Loon even gets a mention. Who has heard of him these days? (He wrote The Story of Mankind and other popular treatises).

The second book is by Elizabeth Strout and is called My Name is Lucy Barton. The novels by Elizabeth Strout are the sort of steady sellers which are usually recommended by one reader to another. If you don’t remember her name perhaps you remember the name Olive Kitteridge, which was the title of one of her earlier remarkable books and which won the Pulitzer Prize. Don’t miss this new one. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and I think it should win.

The story concerns a young woman whose rural childhood is indeed poverty-stricken, both emotionally and financially, but who later becomes a successful writer, wife and mother although, as her mother-in-law says, “she comes from nothing”. Heartbreakingly true writing. Two more of her books are Amy & Isabelle and The Burgess Boys. I’m going to read them now.

If you’ve been an Abbey’s customer for a long time you probably know we didn’t have a Sports section, despite intermittent calls for such stock. This has changed now and there is a Sports section near the information counter at the front of the store. I became aware of this when I wanted a book given a terrific review by Michael Heyward, the publisher at Text Publishing. It is called String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It is a very nice edition, green hardback with a fantastic photo of a tennis ball for the end papers - it would make a lovely gift for tennis fiends. There are five essays including a very funny one on David Foster Wallace’s own junior tennis career in the windy state of Illinois. Judging angles comes into it, so once again mathematics is useful. The final essay on Roger Federer is a gem, as is Roger Federer.

David Foster Wallace was famous for his novel Infinite Jest, set in a drug rehabilitation centre in Boston, but he became more famous for his essays as a cultural critic. Two we have in stock are A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again or Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments!

You might find some other surprising titles in the Sports section such as a book on Australian Rules by Chip le Grand called The Straight Dope: The Inside Story of Sports Biggest Drug Scandal or The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup by Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert. I think there will be many people who would enjoy The Meaning of Cricket: or How to Waste Your Life on an Inconsequential Sport written by Jon Hotten, who is a rather famous cricket blogger. I liked this quote from the blurb: “Cricket is a team game entirely dependent on individual performance.”

I’m now going to read Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush by Jon Meacham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times bestseller. This looks fascinating. Lots of photographs, index, bibliography and 169 pages of notes. The blurb says “this is an affecting portrait of a man who, driven by destiny and duty, forever sought, ultimately, to put the country first” and goes on to say “should be required reading for every president-elect”. I don’t suppose it is much use offering it to Donald Trump.

Keep well,

Eve

Since 1968 ~ Abbey's 131 York Street Sydney ~ An Aladdin's cave for readers

Notes from Eve Abbey ~ May 2014

It’s good to have the First Tuesday Book Club back on air.

It was especially good to hear those lovely people talk about David Marr’s choice, which was Graham Greene’s The Quiet American - a book which qualifies as a Little Gem. And you can almost always be certain to find such back-list titles at Abbey’s. I checked Abbey’s website after the programme and found sixteen Graham Greene titles available ex-stock and almost all of them at the excellent price of $12.95 or $12.99. What more can you ask? We even offer The Third Man in Persian or Short Stories / Nouvelles in French. Of course this means you must go upstairs to the First Floor but remember, if you are in a hurry or your legs are not so good, you can now go up in the lift from the lobby. Just ask one of the staff.

Also upstairs is GALAXY Bookshop. I read a nice piece of trivia about Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. This classic film was not initially met with great acclaim. For a year, while sales were hard in London, John Lennon bought two seats to every performance and gave them away. Is that called Bums on Seats or Word of Mouth? They both work.

10% OFF Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman during May when you use the Promotion Code EVESMAYBLOG when you order.

I went, with much expectation, to see a preview of Ralph Fiennes’ new film The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, as this is one of my favourite books. It is a scholarly and exciting investigation into the rumour that Charles Dickens, that supreme icon of domestic bliss, had a young mistress for thirteen years before his death. Claire Tomalin, the author, is an excellent biographer and she makes a more than positive case. It is amusing that the male reviewers of the film find it hard to admit the rumour might be true! Just as the early biographers of Dickens, usually his friends, made no mention at all of Ellen Ternan, yet must have met her sometime, if not regularly. I was disappointed that the new edition of The Invisible Woman was not mentioned in the opening remarks. Some knowledge of the story would be very helpful as the film goes forwards and backwards often. The film wisely concentrates on the single story line of Ellen and Dickens but read the book for further stories. Ellen’s sister, Fanny, married Thomas Trollope, the brother of Anthony and thus became a second Fanny Trollope. To confuse you even further the second Fanny Trollope also wrote novels, not very good ones, but she was well-known, although nowhere near as famous as his mother.

Of course Dickens’ life is as entertaining as his famous novels and if you know a little of this you will enjoy the film even more. A recent addition to the list is by Claire Tomalin. It is called Charles Dickens: A Life. All Tomalin’s biographies are wonderfully readable. Jane Austen: A Life is a standard text. There is a new edition due of Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life
 while other titles are Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, or The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft and most importantly, Mrs. Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King. This is a terrific story. Mrs. Jordan was not only a hugely popular actress but also the mother of ten children to the son of George III. This is part of the story of how Victoria became Queen.

While I was thinking about how useful it is to read Invisible Woman when you see the film I remembered the film of The Go-Between. When this was showing, years ago, people were so puzzled about what was actually happening in the film that eventually Abbey’s took copies of the book by L.P. Hartley over to the cinema and people bought it on their way out! Very thankfully!   Some films are spoilt if you have read the book and some people really demand that you read the book. Have fun! I’ve heard from the shop that Invisible Woman is reprinting but stock is due next month. Maybe try your library.

10% OFF Michael Lewis' Flash Boys during May when you use the Promotion Code EVESMAYBLOG when you order.

It is surprising how exciting non-fiction can be. I was absolutely enthralled when I read the latest expose of the financial world from Michael Lewis. His first book Liar's Poker, published in 1989, about the deals on Wall Street, was an enormous bestseller and since then he has written many other books with an emphasis on the financial world. He has an Economics Degree and did once work on Wall Street, before he wrote Liar's Poker. His latest book, Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code is really a thriller and it has caused a few important people to look again at the most recent improvements on Wall Street. The story concerns the effect of the activities of High Frequency Traders who are able to make enormous amounts of money buying and selling because they have first look at incoming trades. It all comes down to micro-seconds.

A manager with Royal Canadian Bank first began looking into this (and the “dark pools” where trades were kept hidden until the right moment) and gradually he gathered around him a team of exceedingly unusual (read that as nerds, crackpots and genius) but all interested in remaking the Exchange as a place of fairness for everyone. It won’t spoil the story to know that they did indeed succeed in this – by starting a new exchange called IEX which stands for Investor Exchange. Lewis admits this would not have been possible without last minute support from newly appointed managers at Goldman Sachs. The whole story is fascinating and the writing superb. Don’t miss it, even if you have never bought a share.

Keep well.

Eve


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