More Money Than God, Sebastian Mallaby

Excellent. Far too many general audience finance books are written at what I think of as a newspaper reading level. (Defining even the most basic terms, assuming the reader is intimidated by any math as complicated as calculating a percentage, feeling the need to frame everything in a protagonist/antagonist arrangement, etc.) This is way, way better than that. There's an appropriate mix of the human element in there. The more factual stuff is covered well without needing resorting to lots of technicalities. (I have other books for that.)

It's hard to draw large conclusions from this book. One that comes to mind is that hedge funds seem to fail (either catastrophically, or in the more prosaic sense of failing to deliver the expected alpha) when they stop being hedge funds, where "hedge" is the operative word.

This book also made me start thinking more about the connection between financial risk and ecological monoculture. Trading strategies seem to have a discrete lifespan. Traders seem to underestimate how their strategies will be affected by being in a crowded field of other people with the same strategy. LTCM is a good example. Their system worked very well for a while and then crashed and burned. Is it that the system was actually bad all along, or was it great when they were the only ones doing it, and terrible when everyone else in the market was copying them and putting on the same trades? I don't think you can judge a strategy in isolation; you need to consider it's utility in both crowded and sparse niches.

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, Michael Lewis

Very well curated. File under: "nihil sub sole novum," "the more things change," etc.

I think the only piece I would have left out, IIRC, was the Paul Krugman one. But that has more to do with being utterly exhausted at trying to reconcile vintage 1990s Krugman-the-Scholar with late model Krugman-the-Demogogue.

Saga, Volume Two, Brian K Vaughn + Fiona Staples

Saga is still absolutely brilliant. The story and art are both outstanding. Comics needs more Space Opera. The genre cries out for a visual medium, but the budget required to do something like this in film would be off the charts. Only James Cameron gets the opportunity to try something like that. (Although after Pacific Rim maybe del Toro will get the chance too. Or perhaps Neill Blomkamp if Elysium rakes in enough. Sign me up for some widescreen baroque space opera directed by either of them.)

Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham

I read most of these essays back in undergrad but it's great to revisit them. It's interesting how the things that have stuck in my mind aren't the major theses of the essays, but little asides and trivialities. Every CS student and programmer should read this. I think it would also make a good read for the family members, managers, etc. of those people too: anyone who wants to understand how we think and see would benefit. Even when I read Graham discussing completely non-technical subjects (e.g. adolescents and popularity) there's something in his method of analysis which resonates with me as distinctly hackerish. On the flip side, it's nice to have someone else in the computing community who is interested in Art. I would need a whole Paul Graham-level essay to unpack this, but I think there's an unfortunate degree of antagonism between the geek and art tribes.

Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett

This is one of my favorite Discworld books so far. I didn't realize going in that the focus of Pratchett's satire here is not just academia but also soccer/football culture.

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

Too superstitious and mystical, but I think there are a lot of overlaps between the way scientists (and especially doctoral students) work and the way writers and artists work. Learning about how various writers (e.g. Neal Stephenson, DFW) work has helped me to be a better researcher.

A Red Mass for Mars, Jonathan Hickman + Ryan Bodenheim

A little hard to follow the plot, but absolutely gorgeous. Hickman consistently turns out books that are so visually different from most comics. Here there's a great contrast, similar to what he did in Pax Romana, between the stark black inking and the luminous aquarelle of the backgrounds.