Michael Lewis: What I Read

Phew!! I am in very good company. Michael Lewis is also a big fan of David Brooks, loves behavioral economics and hates news!! (thanks)

"I don’t really have news-reading habits. My consumption of news is always configured around everything else going on in my life. In a normal work day, I won’t actually look at a newspaper until nighttime. I take the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to bed with me and I flip through them. I’m entranced with David Brooks—I always read his column.
I listen to NPR some, though I don’t watch any TV news. If I watch TV it’s either sports or HBO dramas. I subscribe to a lot of magazines: The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, The Believer, and Vanity Fair (well, I get Vanity Fair for free because I write for it). As a kid I used to read one book and if I started it, I finished it. Now, I bet I have 17 books piled on my bedside table. I’m currently two thirds of the way through Oliver Twist and am planning on picking up Don Quixote when I’m done with that. I’m reading  Kahneman and Tversky’s papers"

I have already reserved Michael Lewis's new book The Big Short at my library . Like all of his books, this one is also receiving raving reviews- here is the review (and excerpts here).

There aren't many reasons to be happy about the global financial crisis, but here's one: that it brought Michael Lewis back to his roots, to produce what is probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written."

And here's a typical Michael Lewis humor laden excerpt from his other book (thanks) where he re-counts his experience of travelling with then-vice president Dan Quayle during the election campaign of 1992:

"It wasn’t so much what Quayle had said that hooked me. It was what he had done—what the conventions of the campaign trail required him to do. Every few hours of every day, to take a tiny example, the vice president’s campaign plane, Air Force Two, came to rest on the tarmac of a military base on the outskirts of some medium-sized city, and Quayle appeared in the open door. He waved. It was not a natural gesture of greeting but a painfully enthusiastic window-washing motion. Like everyone else in America I had watched politicians do this on the evening news a thousand times. But I had always assumed there must be someone down below to wave at. Not so! Every few hours our vice president stood there at the top of the steps of Air Force Two waving to… nobody; waving, in fact, to a field in the middle distance over the heads of the cameramen, so that the people back home in their living rooms remained comfortably assured that a crowd had turned up to celebrate his arrival."