The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (5 stars)

1980s GREED in New York! The main character in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman McCoy, is a brilliant depiction of 1980s greed: he has a multimillion-dollar income as a bond salesman at Pierce and Pierce on Wall street, a huge apartment on Park Avenue featured in Architectural Digest, a complete inability to describe what he actually does for a living, and a stupendous ego and arrogance as a self-described 'Master of the Universe'.

Sherman comes to strife in the Bronx with his deliciously evil mistress, and the reader follows as his life unravels and he rides the rollercoaster down into the territory of the downtrodden Bronx legal system. This arc brings him into contact with great characters like sleazy criminal defense attorney Thomas Killian, and Larry Kramer who believes his best chance at getting chicks is to impress female jurors with a showy TV-style trial manner and strong sternocleidomastoid muscles.

As Sherman's star falls, Peter Fallow, the epitome of unethical tabloid journalism, rides his story to success with the help of the morally dubious Reverend Bacon. I loved the description of Fallow's life before his big story, and his attempt to bury the monster of his shame in alcohol (preferably paid for by someone else):

Something had happened last night. These days he often woke up like this, poisonously hung over, afraid to move an inch and filled with an abstract feeling of despair and shame. Whatever he had done was submerged like a monster at the bottom of a cold dark lake. His memory had drowned in the night, and he could feel only the icy despair. He had to look for the monster deductively, fathom by fathom.

Wolfe's writing is masterful. I enjoyed his depiction of Sherman's social failure, 'a social light of no wattage whatsoever', at the high-society Bavardages' dinner party amidst the 'hock-hock-hock' and 'haw-haw-haw' of fake laughter from the society automatons. The description of Sherman and his wife's transport to the party captures the ridiculous lifestyle of New York's extremely rich. Having discounted taking a cab as too low-brow, and not even considered walking, the McCoys (remember this is 1980s dollars):

...had hired this car and this driver...who would drive them six blocks, wait three and a half or four hours, then drive them six blocks and depart. Including 15 percent tip and the sales tax, the cost would be $197.20 or $246.50...

I loved this book. I was going to complain about the abrupt ending, but somehow it seemed fitting to have Sherman 'dressed for jail' and completely embracing the loss of everything in the midst of the mob.

5 stars.

Seabiscuit: an American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand (5 stars)

I came to this true story with a fair degree of skepticism, since I have a complete disinterest in horses and horse racing. So how did I come across this book? Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit is at number 11 on Amazon when you rank all books by average customer review. This is pretty amazing, considering Harry Potter is at #1 and #2, followed by some self-help books.

At the start of the book, Laura Hillenbrand delivers you into the early 1900s to witness the first troubled steps of the auto industry, led, in San Francisco, by Seabiscuit's future owner Charles Howard. Automobiles were considered such a menace to horse traffic that:

The laws of at least one town required automobile drivers to stop, get out, and fire off Roman candles every time horse-drawn vehicles came into view.

You follow Seabiscuit through the atmosphere of the 1920s and 30s and learn lots about horses, jockeys, and racing along the way. I have much more respect for jockeys as sports-people, and really had no idea of what they put themselves through to make weight:

To make weight in anything but high-class stakes races [where imposts were higher so jockeys could weigh more], jockeys had to keep their weight to no more than 114 pounds [52 kg]...Red Pollard went as long as a year eating nothing but eggs. Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons confessed that during his riding days a typical dinner consisted of a leaf or two of lettuce, and he would eat them only after placing them on a windowsill to dry the water out of them. Water, because of its weight, was the prime enemy, and jockeys went to absurd lengths to keep it out of their systems...For jockeys who were truly desperate, there was one last resort...you could get a hold of a special capsule, a simple pill guaranteed to take off all the weight you wanted. In it was the egg of a tapeworm.

I also found the on-track racing tactics and strategies fascinating: the need for split-second timing, positioning, and an innate feel for the horse and its capabilities.

Seabiscuit's story is one of the classic underdog: he was short, knobby-kneed, and totally underrated by the news media and racing professionals, but adored by the public. At the height of his fame after his classic battle with War Admiral (the race of the century), and before finally claiming the Santa Anita Handicap, Seabiscuit was drawing crowds of 40,000 just to see his training sessions. Seabiscuit was more than a household name, he was a superstar in a great East-coast vs. West-coast battle with War Admiral:

A study of news outlets revealed that the little horse had drawn more newspaper coverage in 1938 than Roosevelt, who was second, Hitler (third), Mussolini (fourth), or any other newsmaker.

Hillenbrand has done a fantastic job in bringing Seabiscuit's story to life. I'll skip the Shirley Temple film The Story of Seabiscuit, described by Hillenbrand:

Hollywood took the tale of Seabiscuit's life, deleted everything interesting, and made an inexcusably bad movie..

in favour of the 2003 version, but I don't expect it will be able to hold a candle to this book.

5 stars.

Best of 2010 as read by G

The best (5 stars):

• Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• The Stand by Stephen King
• John Dies @ the End by David Wong
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
• Magician by Raymond E. Feist
• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (3 stars)

I saw this book reviewed on the First Tuesday Book Club, and was intrigued, as the comments were positively glowing from all the reviewers. 'Fantastic' and 'genius' were thrown around! I have to say I was a little disappointed, but I'm glad I read this 274-page stream-of-consciousness rant. The fictional definition of Portnoy's complaint at the start of the book sums things up quite nicely:

A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.

The book begins with a sex-obsessed Jewish boy living with his overbearing parents and using every possible opportunity to masturbate. He even pretends he has diarrhea, so as to visit the toilet more often to 'pull his putz', all while his mother stands outside the door screaming that she wants to see his stool! From there the reader follows Portnoy's complaint through a series of terrible relationships and graphic sexual encounters. I can imagine this book was fairly controversial when it was published in 1969.

The writing is impressive, but also quite irritating. It feels like you are being yelled at by a narcissistic arsehole who loves the 'C-word'. Having said that, Roth does a great job of creating Portnoy and building his character.

3 stars.

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore (2.5 stars)

This book has an interesting premise - two boys share the same name and grow up in the same rough neighbourhood in Baltimore. One becomes a Rhodes scholar and works on wall street, the other goes to gaol for shooting a cop in a jewellery robbery. Why?

Moore examines his early childhood, and that of his namesake. Some of the early passages were cringe-worthy with Moore giving a Brady-bunch portrayal of arguments between his parents:

"Wes, he needs to learn what is acceptable and what is not!" My father agreed, but with a gentle laugh, reminded her that cursing at a young boy wasn't the most effective way of making a point.

But for the most part, Moore describes both upbringings, their choices and key events, well. The author claims to not know what made the difference between his life and the other Wes, but it is fairly obvious - the upbringing, education, and (relative) wealth of his mother. When author-Wes was heading down the drugs/gangland path his mother moved neighbourhoods, worked two jobs, and eventually pooled together enough money to send him to an expensive military academy. After some initial rebellion author-Wes settled into academy life, and excelled.

In contrast, the other Wes looked up to his drug dealer half-brother, and his mother was powerless to stop his slide into dealing and violence.

An interesting book, and a pretty good first book, but it felt a little lacklustre. The author also put me off side with a self-centered brag about his travels and achievements at the end of the book:

I've climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and felt how quickly the dense Kenyan heat at the base of the mountain transforms into the chill of its snowcapped peak, where deep breaths are hard to find. I've worshiped with thousands of other Christians in the Yoido Full Gospel Church, the world's largest Christian congregation, in Seoul, Korea. And I've...

2.5 stars

What They Teach You at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton (3.5 stars)

Harvard MBAs are everywhere - working as CEOs of Silicon Valley startups, at the highest levels of government (George W. Bush has a Harvard MBA!?!), and at the head of some of the wealthiest companies in the world. Having been to Harvard and gotten the tourist tour, I was interested to hear about how the MBA works, and about what goes on behind the closed doors.

Broughton takes you inside the privileged world of the MBA, and he does a great job. Before chucking in the towel for a $170,000 2-year trip through MBA-land he was the Paris bureau chief for the UK Daily Telegraph.

Being a Harvard MBA is certainly interesting - they get amazing speakers (Al Gore, Bill Gates, Kofi Annan, various heads of state and fortune 500 companies), and the case-driven education that uses real-world scenarios seems effective and challenging.

Broughton also details a fair bit of ugliness, this passage made me sad:

Once you get accepted by HBS, you want to clear out your bank account so that you get more financial aid.
I'm sorry, I'm not getting this. You buy a BMW to get financial aid?
When you list your assets in the financial aid application, you don't have to mention your car, but you do have to list any savings or property. So you buy a car for twenty thousand dollars, maybe you get an extra twenty thousand dollars in financial aid, so basically HBS buys you a BMW. If you hadn't bought the car, you'd have to pay the twenty thousand dollars out of your savings.
...
This is unbelieveable. How many people do this?
Everyone coming from Wall Street knows about this. And the consulting firms. It doesn't always work. But lots of people try it.

Broughton counts among his MBA peers some amazingly motivated and bright students. For many, but not all, the motivation is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow:

New MBAs joining a top private equity firm such as Blackstone, KKR, Texas Pacific Group, or Bain Capital, could expect to earn $400,000 in their first year. First-year investment bankers, by contrast, could expect maybe half of that, provided everything went well. To exacerbate the bankers' inferiority, they knew they would probably have to spend most of their time raising money and pitching ideas for their friends in private equity...You could earn $200,000 a year straight out of school, and your peers would still think you had failed.

The counterbalance to the vast sums of money is the tails of woe from a personal perspective - crushing workloads, ridiculous hours, and terrible family lives. Broughton meditates on this theme for much of the book, especially as he attempts to get a job at the end of the second year, and finds himself applying for jobs he doesn't really want. Towards the end of the book the bitterness of not being able to find a job with a newly minted MBA seeps in.

The book ends with a postscript the author added when the financial crisis hit in 2008, just as the book was published. I thought this section was a terrible, sore-loser rant against HBS, its culture, and its methods. There may be a fair chunk of blame to be laid with Harvard MBAs, but this was a poor way to do it.

I'll leave you with one final quote. Bureaucrats everywhere, listen up to Toyota, king of Just-In-Time:

To implement jidoka, Toyota had to eliminate any sense of stigma for an employee who halted the production process. Above each station along the production line, the company installed a pull, an andon, which the worker was encouraged to pull whenever he spotted a problem...After diagnosing the problem, the [team] leader would then lead his team in the Five Whys, a means of getting to the root of any problem. If you just asked why, you would get the immediate cause of a problem. If you asked it four more times, you would get to the bottom of the problem. The company encouraged workers never to assume any process was set in stone and to seek constant improvement...Toyota was such a success because it considered nothing too small. The company was constantly seeking to improve even the minutest details of its operation, and every employee was involved.

3.5 stars

The Stand by Stephen King (4.5 stars)

I have to admit to picking this book up because it was really long. I got it at a tiny English-language section in a book store in Lima, Peru. I knew I wasn't going to find English books again for some weeks and didn't want to be caught with nothing to read. At 1320 dense-font pages it certainly served me well in that regard. Unfortunately it has meant my reading numbers are down a bit from last year :(

I really enjoyed this book, and despite the length I was engaged for the entire story and didn't find it a drag. Not many books attempt to cover pre-apocalypse, apocalypse, and post-apocalypse in any detail, but this one succeeds at the task. I haven't read any other King novels, apart from The Green Mile, and was pleasantly surprised to find this one wasn't a horror story, but a novel about a germ-warfare outbreak apocalypse, with a creepy supernatural good vs. evil flavour.

The original edition was published in 1975, and the one I read was the extended version published in 1990. I found it interesting to think how much the world has changed since 75. There is a large chunk of the book at the start of the Captain Trips outbreak where the government effectively controls the media through force, presumably to stop mass panic but also to cover up their colossal screw-up. That sort of action would just not be effective these days, with so much information available so quickly via the Internet.

I liked a number of the characters in the book, but I think Harold Lauder's character was brilliant. He reminded me of Ignatius J. Reilly, in his verbose high-minded criticism of the world and his extremely awkward attempts at seducing Frannie.

I thought King's portrayal of the struggles of the survivors post-apocalypse was fantastic. I have to admit to being a little disappointed by the ending, after such an amazing build-up it seemed too obvious and neat, with a smell of deus ex machina.

A long ride, but a good one.

4.5 stars.

Update: I finally got around to watching the 1994 four-part miniseries with Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald. It is terrible - Randall is an 80s cowboy with big hair and is a completely implausible bad guy, lacking all of the sinister presence Randall has in the book. I'd love to see the Cohen Brothers take a crack at a really dark re-make of this series.