Welcome to Litsy!

For those still trying to understand the crazy world of high finance, Michael Lewis is still the best guide. Not an easy read (synthetic collateralised debt obligations, anyone?), but what carries it is Lewis's cast of eccentric characters who saw the 2008 crash coming, and it's these lively pen portraits that are as intriguing as the crash itself. TL;DR: you think there's someone at the wheel? There's not - or they're drunk.

Truth is like poetry. And most people hate poetry.

“Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

1. Yes! I‘m trying to be more practical - if it‘s not a favorite or not special for any other reason, I‘ll move it forward (“Trying” is the operative word)
2. Depends on length, genre, how much I‘m enjoying it. I‘ve read 500+ page fiction books in a couple weeks, 300 page memoirs in days, 250 page non-fiction books in 6+ months
3. Tagged: see #2 about some non-fiction). If I didn‘t call it and bail, it‘d probably still be a “current read”

The story behind the 2007/8 financial crisis, is so outrageous it is at times hard to believe it is true. The detail with which Lewis dissects the mechanics of this crisis, is both fascinating and horrifying. It makes clear exactly how real it is. Built on greed, lies, and a healthy dose of wilful ignorance, this is a story that has to be read to be believed, and should be read to be understood by everyone taking on debt in our capitalist economy.

A business book #readharder2019

Currently reading (listening?)

I asked my niece to pick out a scary movie to watch together....it was. But seriously, I need some good Halloween movies to watch- besides Hocus Pocus and Practical Magic, not Saw or torture themed. Please and Thank-you.

⭐⭐⭐⭐
An excellent analysis of the '08 #financial collapse by one of my favorite authors. A little drier & slower paced than I expected.
Now it's time to check out the movie adaptation.
#GreenvilleSC #Nonfiction

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Leo Tolstoy, 1897 from The Big Short by Michael Lewis

He makes it easy to read despite my unfamiliarity with the subject

A bit confusing and I even learned about the great recession and its causes when I was in business school, but from what I gather from this book, many professionals in trading and finance don't even understand the market all that well. So I feel better. Entertaining to learn about a handful of people who were being dismissed for thinking Wall Street was wrong and decided to go against what everyone else was doing.

I read this book for my IRL book group a few years ago. The first few chapters did my head in, but once I started to understand it I found it equal parts fascinating and horrifying. I haven't seen the film, maybe one day.
#AbbaInAugust #MoneyMoneyMoney

1. Going to Ann Arbor
2. The week before vacation is always a little odd
3. San Francisco
4. Sloth
5. 87 degrees Fahrenheit

#friyayintro @jesshowbooks

My mom & I had tickets to see Patti LuPone in Gypsy, prompting our first trip to NYC. We just happened to be in town on September 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers collapsed. I am at the oldest end of the "Millenials." At the time I was 25, working my first jobs after college, figuring out what I wanted to do. I didn't know that the train was about to come off the rails, that the job market would collapse, that pay would plateau.

Lines like that make me feel queasy. "Waiting for homeowners to default". Really? Betting on people's lives. No wonder the system crashed....

Saw the movie first but absolutely loved this book! Gives incredibly detailed information that the movie fails to go into. A must read for anyone interested in what happened within our banking system in the past years! It really makes you question our global economic system as a whole.

Amazing, sad, scary, true, prophetic story about #moneygrabber. I saw the movie and it was just as brilliant - note the ending...

Really interesting. Lewis explores the financial crisis through the stories of the outliers who saw it coming. Recommend.

Started looking back at what I read in January 2016. Always interesting to see how my reading taste has changed in some ways, not so much in others. 😊Also, it appears I go for Michael Lewis in Januarys - I finished The Undoing Project a few weeks ago! #flashback #whatiread

Meh. Finance, Wall Street, and rich people are some of my least favorite topics. Mostly, this book just made me mad and took me back to a terrible time of trying to sell a condo right as the housing market collapsed - thanks to these jerks, my property value tanked over $50K and made it impossible to sell. What a nightmare. On to better books!

Today's #labsoundtrack for examining and cutting evidence. I've got a lot of nonfiction queued up lately on OverDrive - wonder what's up with that.

This should be required reading in either high school or college. Fantastic book so far. I don't know why I've waited so long to read it!

A pile of books, a cozy fire, a mug of tea ... and me. 🙂

#currentreads These are all so great I have a hard time deciding which one to read at any given moment!

2008-present financial world perfectly described in one quote by Steve Eisman in Michael Lewis' The Big Short. Like, "Hey, you guys had a huge role, whether through incompetence or avarice, in making this catastrophe....now tell us what to do next!" As an accountant and former employee of a major WS firm, [information redacted ?] I believe EVERYone should read this book.

So bummed to watch This Week Tonight and see that what we've really learned from the sub-prime lending & bundling, was how to apply it to other industries.

http://www.newsweek.com/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-auto-lending-490429

Well, I learned enough from this book for this to worry me so, yay good book!

Like Taleb's The Black Swan, this book isn't only about money, it's about the way things happen, about expectations and people's willingness to be deluded and about the system's unlimited appetite for preying on the deluded. It's not sexy or fun but it is genuinely enlightening.

Watched the movie twice and now I'm ready for the book. (Pic is a screen shot from a Guardian review that matches character names to real ones.) I enjoyed Moneyball and learned a lot. . . Though I couldn't ever watch baseball the same way after that . . .

5/5 stars. Looking at buying my own copy (read this from a library loan). Very different from the movie - I love both, but some may find the movie easier to understand. You definitely need to know a lot finance lingo and concepts to understand this book - it's not a textbook in the slightest.

Picked this up from the base library today. Summer bingo square filler for "book adapted to the screen". I already love the movie, so this should be a slam dunk.

Read it & finally got to watch the movie today. They did a great job portraying this eclectic group of eccentric geniuses who figured it out in advance, and the horrible derision they suffered trying to warn & speak the truth to power. Still a complicated subject to explain though, even on film.

Financial journalism meets thriller in brilliant expose of Wall Street greed and ineptitude. Stellar book; highly recommended.

Very good book about a complicated subject. Amazing & disheartening all rolled up together. If you thought you understood what happened in hindsight, you don't even know the tip of the iceberg, let alone realize how deep under the surface it went, or how sharp those parts under the surface remain.

The more you listen to this one, the more you realize that no matter how much you thought you understood what happened in retrospect, you don't know the half of it. Truly, insanely, crazy. This one falls under the..."You know nothing, Jon Snow"

Amie: "I loved the film but didn't understand most of it, so I thought I'd read the book. The author managed to make an incredibly boring subject fascinating because he‘s so captivated by people. He's taken a topic like the financial crisis and made it about human stories."

Way better than the movie.

A big congrats to Charles Randolph for winning the Oscar last night for best adapted screenplay. I'm lucky enough to be working with Charles on the adaptation of my book Ugly Americans :)

Best Adapted Screenplay for The Big Short... I'll have to read it!

This book not only taught me so much I didn't know or understand about the housing market crash, but also was incredibly entertaining with captivating characters. Great way to combining a confusing topic with an accessible way of reading.

I love this Michael Lewis quote from VF on the movie biz: "I had come to think of the movie business as a place that spent huge sums of money with incredible enthusiasm to ensure the movies of books were never made."

Also a big congrats to Charles Randolph, who is nominated for an Oscar for co-adapting The Big Short. Charles is adapting my book Ugly Americans for tv (im exec producing with Jerry Bruckheimer) and I feel very lucky to be working with him!