Having read the Big Short, I made a B-line for Liar’s Poker when I saw it on Amazon’s Lending Library.  This was his first book, and in some ways it shows: it’s not quite as polished or well structured as his later work, which isn’t surprising given a twenty year gap between the two.

Liar’s Poker deals with the author’s experience at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980s.  It’s interesting to see the many parallels between those crises and the ones that have happened recently.  While the text does get a bit dry at points, it focuses largely on the personalities and the feeling of the business.  To sum it up in a few words, there was gross mis-management and a poor set of incentives which generally hurt everyone associated.

Lewis doesn’t describe all the financial systems with quite enough detail, though the broad strokes are there.  It’s worth a read, though if you’re going to read one book on these topics then I’d suggest another one in its place.

Amazon unleashed a new offering today: a “Lending Library” for Kindle owners who subscribe to Amazon Prime.  The gist is that you can have one book out at a time, and at most one book per month.  It is not available on Kindle reading applications, just the Kindle devices themselves.

On the whole, it’s a brilliant move.  One book a month isn’t all that much, which is good for content providers, and good for consumers.  There’s no expiration date, too, so if you want to hang onto a book for a while you won’t be too poorly off.

Browsing for books which satisfy this agreement is currently a bit tricky.  There’s no search capability from the website, from what I can currently find, but going into the Kindle Store on your device, there’s a section in Browse -> See all.. -> Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.  I already found a few that I’d like to read, and hopefully they’ll add some more to the collection in the near future.

Six books in, it’s safe to say that I enjoy the Amber series by Zelazny. The first five books follow a character named Corwin, and the next five, of which Trumps of Doom is the first, follow another, named Merlin.

In all, the Merlin cycle already has a different feel from the first five books, though I do like it.  Where the Corwin cycle was more a fantasy that dabbled in Earth in a somewhat 60s style and then some Middle Ages lore.  Merlin is a younger character in a newer Earth, with references to computers and even the Apple corporation, while still retaining the previously established other worlds.

If you are going to dive in, I would recommend starting at the first book, the Nine Princes of Amber.  It’s all rather easy reading, and the Amber world is developed very slowly over the course of all the books.

This book was flippin’ awesome.  It takes a lot for me to say that about a business book, but I got a lot out of it and enjoyed it a lot.  What’s good about it is that it can apply for anyone working with any number of other people.  It identifies problem points, and has suggestions as to how to resolve each of them.

Most of the pages to the book are in sort of a funny format: it’s a story of a hypothetical company with set characters, and catalogs their interactions and progress.  It seems a bit hokey at the outset, though the format works and it allows for the theory to seep in rather than getting hit by a brick of heavy structure.  At the end of the book, there’s then a more concise analysis of the underlying theories.

Read it, hand it to your boss and to your coworkers.  It’ll save everyone a lot of grief and make the world a happier place.  Seriously.