Books And Books

The books I like to read may not always be the books I like to write. I like to read Michael Lewis but I am not sure I would like to write those type of books. It´s great to read story-telling, but perhaps not so great to write story-telling. There´s no philosophy, no critique, no praise, no recommendations, no idealism in plain story-telling. I mean Liars´Poker and The Big Short are great masterpieces but all they do is entertain. They don´t provoke too much thought, they don´t aspire to stir the pot, to change things, or to keep them as they are. They don´t have a viewpoint, they don´t make you want to join a battle. They don´t impact the world (nor do they seem to want to).

No one gets angry (bar perhaps Salomon´s bigwigs and that Wing Chao guy who´s suing ML) after reading those tomes. No one gets elated. No one gets excited. No one gets moved. No one is inspired. There are no calls for revolution or for counter-revolution. The status quo is neither lambasted nor defended. It´s all very plain vanilla. In a very pleasant way, but no tutti frutti.

That´s not to say I wouldn´t love to do a story-bio kind of book (or that I wouldn´t kill to have ML´s talents), but in that case I would try very hard to be normative as well as positive. Not mere describing, a bit of extra meat too. Some stirring of the pot. More Niall Fergusonish or Paul Kennedyish. There´s got to be some profound conclusion, even if the rest of the book is just narrating things that happened. A look towards the future, too. A book that creates loyal friends and terrible foes.

Having said all this, the written English I´ve enjoyed most to this day is ML´s collections of uber-descriptive essays assembled under "The Money Culture".