Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Reading demanding history and fact driven books in the middle of a university semester seems to be a
long and tedious process. Niall Ferguson's Civilization is by no means a dull or ordinary book, and normally I would have devoted several hours a day to skip along to the end of what I kept telling myself was a brilliant book. Turns out that a seminar course and over 20 HBR articles on "Advanced Strategic Management" can really suck out the intellectual curiosity out of me, and I found myself dosing through a few pages each night before falling asleep with Civilization nestling uncomfortably on my forehead. There is only so much fact that one can take in.

Despite my trouble with finishing it, Civilization is a truly great piece of non-fiction summing up everything that the developed world (The West) has done right in the last five hundred years. There are the six different items that Ferguson has managed to identify as being crucial to our development and eventual rulership over the east and Africa (The Rest). He calls them the West's "Killer apps" as if the iPhone has something to do with the East India Company, but makes a great case to why, for example, the scientific method is far greater than whatever alternative you might concoct.

Civilization is, in many ways, a better and more useful read than the morning newspaper. It gives readers a much needed sense of scope by showing how humans have always had a "universal tendency to shoot the messenger" among so many other things. The narrative displays the ways in which our (western) method has been superior in creating an equal and functional society. I make it sound contestable, but the truth is that Ferguson leaves nothing to conjecture. There is no arguing with the facts.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Some books get by on wit, some on suspense. Gone Girl seems to do both. A book that kept me from sleep one night too many, does indeed seem like a fresh take on a traditional thriller formula. A fifth anniversary for Amy and Nick, but the wife soon goes missing and the husband gradually turns into a true creeper. What really did happen?

For the first three hundred pages, I was swearing that I already had everything figured out. I'm not going to indulge in details, but I was one hundred percent for a certain type of resolution to the story. And then, out of the blue, a huge turn of the tables, some very unreliable narrating and a jarring twist in plot.

It's true, I could not put it down. Despite one unnecessary lull in the action, Gone Girl is one of those rare books that keeps you hooked without making it feel like it's fooling you. There are twists, sure, but they are not the type that make you feel stupid, or cast previous plot elements in unflattering light (yes, I'm looking at you Inferno).

Overall, there are some wonderful details to the storytelling and characters. Unlike last time (in J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus), Gone Girl is a completely contemporary work that is happily rooted in the events and culture of post-2008 America. The loss of jobs, the downward spiral of both the economy and a couple, all have an impact, but so does the media. Gillian Flynn, an ex-journalist for Entertainment Weekly, is an expert at conjuring media frenzies and public outrage at a suspicous husband (and later on at something else).

The film rights for the novel have already been bought and I found names such as David Fincher, Ben Affleck and Rosamunda Pike being mentioned in connection. Let's just hope they are able to portray the tantalizing sense of foreboding that held me throughout.

The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee

Some stories are bigger than their origins. Sometimes it seems that instead of telling a tale of a specific boy and a specific father (or merely father figure) we are drawn into the basic realities of life; work, family and ambition. The last time I felt a primal, simple connection to a work of fiction was Cormac McCarthy's The Road. With Zen-like calmness it told of a desolate post-apocalyptic America from the point of view of a father and son. The Childhood of Jesus is from the same mold in many ways, including the Pulitzer prizes that both authors carry, and also concerns itself with a near future scenario, where a man and a boy travel from uncertain beginnings to an uncertain end.

The tone of the novel, however, is notably brighter than in The Road. It is almost a serene piece, with an easily distinguishable pace that walks instead of runs and promenades instead of races. Coetzee is almost as concerned with watching the scenery and letting his characters get their say as he is with advancing the plot. At times this is confusing, since there is no clear direction for the action, both a curse and a blessing. I had trouble anticipating the turns and their pacing and once I did feel the tempo to be too Andante. Who knows, this might be only me. I did spend most of my time this summer reading action packed thrillers like World War Z and Inferno.

The name is both a clever marketing ploy aimed at turning gazes in bookstores and a central concept to Coetzee's character development. No one here is actually Jesus, thankfully, but there are certain connections that can be made and some clever quips and turns of phrase that allude to the title. It gives the novel a ghostly second meaning that seems to ask more questions than it answers. I won't go into plot details, you'll know enough by reading the back cover.

Off the top of my head, I had two main thoughts while reading The Childhood of Jesus. First of all, I was caught off guard by the old-times vibe and simple aspirations of the characters and scenes. In a world of super-high-speed everything, it is easy to forget the simple pleasures of physical labor, boredom and, alas, ordinary conversation. The world described does not exist anymore, at least for a vast majority of city-dwellers living in western countries. Machinery and robots operate everything, we are only puppet masters removed from the actual context of the work.

On the other hand, I'm wondering how traditional literature will survive in a world of clicking on electronic screens and thumbing text-messages on touch pads. Somehow it seems we lack the language and capabilities to describe the modern world in a meaningfully accurate way. How to describe a world of smartphones without resorting to visualizations? Is there any joy in describing people interacting with machines? I have no answers. Perhaps this is the reason for Coetzee's nostalgic ride into a non-modern society.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

It is fitting, in a way, to read Foucault's Pendulum after finishing a Dan Brown novel. After all, Umberto Eco represents the exact opposite of Brown's book: he is hyper-academical and dedicated to getting the smallest details absolutely right. Brown on the other hand is dedicated to creating misleading interpretations of pseudo-facts and weaving them into absurd thrillers. I'm guessing, however, that you already knew that.

Not everything is that simple. Dan Brown's novels typically do represent major topics of the 21st century and do take readers on imaginative journeys through the old world. They make for easy-reading summer blockbusters; don't think too much, just rush forward toward the inevitably disappointing ending. But what the hell, the ride is always worth the effort.

Foucault's Pendulum on the other hand is not a giddy summer read. I felt that it would have been better as a non-fiction piece or even an academic paper because a novel it is not, at least if measured in terms of actual story or character development. Just like The Name of the Rose, there are essentially no female characters. There seems to be a story in here somewhere, but it takes most of the book just to set the pieces moving. There is talk of Templars, Hospitalers and god knows what other secret societies, but the story itself is not about any particular conspiracy. The book's dust cover describes it as if it was a thriller, but there is barely anything actually happening.

The message of the novel is this: secret societies and conspiracies are made up by fraudsters, faux-priests and idiots. These characters are colorful, but at the end of the day feel empy. There is nothing to learn from a conspiracy. At times I felt lost in the exposition and could not help feeling stuck inside an encyclopedia. And just like encyclopedia, this book is an artifact of a not so long ago past. Foucault's Pendulum might have been cutting edge on publication, but now the references to computers and intellectual jibber-jabber felt old. It was only fitting that I happened to buy it from a used book shop.

Inferno by Dan Brown

Dan Brown's historical thrillers seem to be one of those fads, where everyone is talking about it and nobody is really sure why. Looking back on his previous novels, especially those featuring the mild-mannered Harvard professor Robert Langdon, it becomes increasingly unclear why Brown has been able to keep the blockbusters coming. The Da Vinci Code definitely captured the public imagination, but not with graceful storytelling and intrigue. Instead it boldly presented a bunch of outlandish old-wives tales as fact and dragged readers through exposition after exposition. After The Da Vinci Code (and it's insufferable yet inevitable film version) came The Lost Symbol, a novel with no particular plot other than what amounted to a mediocre treasure hunt.

As you would imagine, Robert Langdon is here for at least one more outing. Brown seems to have wanted to mix things up a little from previous works, mostly for the better. In the beginning, Langdon wakes up with a bullet wound and short term amnesia. A murderous sociopath is on his tail. A chase ensues. Most of this is very standard procedure, however some parts do seem to underline the writer's new found flair for comedy and witty quips.

The plot revolves around Dante's famous Divine Comedy and Inferno, which are being used by an unhinged scientist as... well nothing really. Inferno is mostly Langdon's guide to solving the series of mysteries separating him from whatever mad invention Zobrist, the scientist, had left hidden before his suicide. As I mentioned, there is nothing new here for people familiar with either Florence or the original Inferno, at least in terms historical background and literature. If you want to acquaint yourself with Dante in a more meaningful (but just as fictional) way, I would suggest Dante Club by Matthew Pearl.

The best part here is seeing Mr. Brown warp our expectations towards the end of the second act. Much of the intrigue at the end is more about things that seemed mundane in the beginning. There are quite a few clever twists that do keep the pace up even towards the end, when I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the encyclopedean expose. Oh, and the ending did catch me off guard. Consider yourself warned, it may not be good literature, but Inferno does sometimes surprise and excite.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I've been reading a lot of Vonnegut lately, it seems. For the last few months, every time I've been to a bookstore, I've inexplicably found myself pouring through whatever novels they happened to have from the great American. Ooh, Slapstick, the impossible sci-fi madness that Vonnegut himself dispised. Ah, a new print of Slaughterhouse-five with the original hard-cover jacket and illustrations. Breakfast of Champions seems like the most logical thing to read after Timequake, a semibiographical work that a friend of mine said was "like Breakfast of Champions, only written twenty years later".

My curiosity aroused, I decided to take a look at Breakfast of Champions, and was definitely not underwhelmed. It is a beautiful tale of madness, Americana and authorship, and is laced in Vonnegut's sharp observations and witty humor, however black that may be at times. The book itself seems to be a sort of 50 year birthday present to the aging author (not unlike Timequake) and once again Vonnegut features prominently both as himself and as his long-time alter ego Kilgore Trout. All in all, Breakfast of Champions is not a departure from his style, and fans of his other work will immediately recognize some of the same characters that appear in his other novels.

Here I do have to admit that Breakfast of Champions is not an easy book to describe (especially since I'm writing this a few weeks after having finished it). It's one of those things that you need to see for yourself to believe. To Vonnegut fans, everything will seem familiar from page one, but to everyone else, it will seem confusing or unfocused. As a novel, it is strangely unconfined by most typical settings and almost seems to be in a category of its own. As for future readers, I recommend a healthy dose of other Vonnegut novels before reading this one. Those with little taste for black humor need not even bother.

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

I'm not one to give up on epic quests, and one of the first things I did after reading A Storm of Swords, the third book in the fantastical series A Song of Ice and Fire, was to download the next book on my Kindle. I had been warned, however, that unlike the brilliant third instalment in the series, A Feast for Crows was too long, too slow and clearly not as much fun. I'm not going to dabble in the series of events going on in Westeros, however, I will warn anyone who has gotten this far through the 1k-pages-per-volume saga that A Feast for Crows will disappoint in terms of excitement, characters and action.

The reason I liked  A Storm of Swords in the first place was that it seemed to be going somewhere. And then at the end it truly wrapped up its plots in satisfying and surprising ways. All characters had enticing arcs and I felt a sense of purpose in the prose; Martin was going somewhere with the intricate explanations of a fantasy world in turmoil. A Feast for Crows seems to be a polar opposite of all this. The plot advances at a truly glacial pace during some parts of the book, and the ending seems for nought.

A pet peeve of mine is present here as well. I've read too many novels and seen too many movies, where the main character goes through an exaggeratedly complex series of events, fighting to prevent whatever disaster is currently imminent, only to be outdone at the very last moment. It seems to be some kind of contemporary twist on the Deus Ex Machina ("it was only a dream", etc.) made for a world of zombie apocalypses and The Da Vinci Code. It was also present in Dan Brown's Inferno (more on that later), and now it is here in A Feast for Crows.

If you previously loved A Song of Ice and Fire for its intricate plotting, enormous family trees and minute details of a fantasy world, you will be right at home with A Feast of Crows as well. Alas, if you previously enjoyed the feeling of unstoppable machinery stirring into motion and taking characters from remote parts of the world together to an epic ending, you will sorely miss the action, drama and irreversibility of the previous novel. A Feast for Crows, a surprisingly accurate name, is great pickings, but only for a certain breed.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

According to my conservative estimate, I've read over 200 books during my 20-something years. Most of them leave little to remember afterwards, even if the reading the book itself was pleasant enough, and some disappear completely from my memory only weeks after returning the book to the library. In many ways, this seems to be the case for a lot of things in the world today. Media is made for single consumption and for quick thrills that leave readers (or listeners or watchers) satisfied for only short periods of time. Our attention spans shorten, our minds focus on quantity over quality as we jump through links on our laptops, and skip over songs on Spotify.

In a world of throw away, good-enough objects and less-than-useful information, Freedom stands high over all else. Simultaneously, it is unlike anything that I have ever read and still encompasses everything that I've ever learned. It's a novel that makes sense of the world around us without being preachy and manages somehow to feel so humane and sincere while also showing us how we as people are hypocritical, satirical and outright mean. It made me feel sad, it made me laugh and felt real like my own life and for a while, I felt contented to live a double life inside its world.

Not a lot of books feel so powerful even after a second read, only Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 come to mind, however Freedom is something completely different. It is an American novel through and through (perhaps even a Great American Novel), yet it has none of the mystery of The Great Gatsby or the heartland bigotry of To Kill a Mocking Bird. It is rooted in the banalities of daily life; the loves, the laughs and the envies. Its characters are struggling to find their places in a constantly changing world that doesn't always reward good deeds and almost never punishes bad ones.

Freedoms only problem might lie in its absolute fidelity to year 2010 America. Name dropping Conor Oberst felt unnecessary and fake coming from an author in his mid 50s. The world is full of young superstars vying for fame in the music world and there is no particular reason why this specific musician should be remembered decades later. However, complaining about something as beautiful as Freedom seems completely unfair; nobody would fault the Mona Lisa or Hamlet.

Freedom is a novel that made me see my life from a completely new perspective. For some that might seem like faint praise, but believe me, it is not. Too many times, I've noticed a snippet on a book's cover saying something along the lines of "This book will change your life". Normally I would skip those lines with the slight annoyance that comes with repeated appreciation. However, Freedom is almost deserving of that title. For a small moment or even a longer one, Freedom has changed my life.

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

It's been a long while since I last read a fantasy novel. It might even be something I left behind as early as middle school after exhausting the Lord of the Rings and all the associated appendices, Hobbits and Silmarillions. The appeal of fantasy is evident, but it also comes with a price: the vast worlds, bloodlines and histories of high fantasy are brought together through elaborate storytelling that sometimes leaves readers exhausted. This exhaustion makes readers wary of searching new worlds and opening the next saga.

A Song of Fire and Ice (the book series that's the source for the brilliant HBO adaptation) is nothing if not humongous. A total of five books have been published with at least two more to come. The books themselves rarely settle for under 1000 pages, and rival LOTR in both depth and scope. A Storm of Swords is the third instalment in the series, and it is where I decided to start my new quest into the world of fantasy literature. I left the first two books alone, since I already had a good grasp of things thanks to the TV show.

A Storm of Swords is a brilliant book that takes its time to get going (as fantasy always has) but really delivers in terms of content and plot. At the end, most of story archs have come to satisfying (or gruesome) ends that almost felt that there was no serious need to read any of the further works. What Martin does best is grow characters gradually and deliver satisfaction in terms of outcome. I don't want to go into specifics, since the plot points would only interest those who should not see them; the television series is currently only half way through the this book, which means that some significant plot points have yet to be revealed.

For some reason, watching the TV series really brings more depth to the books as well. After reading the book, I realized just how brilliantly the actors had been chosen, and how the source material had been changed slightly and each and every time for the better. One of the only problems with A Storm of Swords, for me at least, was the lack of stable or reliable female characters. The series has deftly changed the dynamics of the story so that certain elements feel more deep and sincere, among them an additional depth to most of the main female cast.

In the end, these two parts of the puzzle create something better than the sum of their parts. In a way, this is probably one of the reasons why Game of Thrones seems to be on everyones lips: a multi-media approach to storytelling combined with a beautiful fantasy world.

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

After spending a few weeks in China, I am finally free of " The Great Firewall" and able to update. China is a wonderful, surprising country, at least for a Finn like me who had never been there before. Funny enough, I couldn't help but remember Kurt Vonneguts impressions of the Chinese in his otherwise unfortunate novel Slapstick. A huge country with a huge populace, China is indeed unlike anything you would have seen before; a good time to also remember that it is already the biggest country in terms GDP.

Putting aside China and moving on to Vonnegut, unlike the aforementioned Slapstick, I was very taken with Timequake. It is perhaps not as coherent as I would have liked, or as serious, but it is definitely a book with a purpose. During the years Vonnegut's voice has not so much changed but matured. The wit is still there, as is the insight but it is delivered in a more carefree way than before. As an ageing artist, he doesn't need to please anyone (not that he has ever specifically tried), and it shows. However, he also alludes to Hemingway's later years and implies that writers are not unlike the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea; sometimes they are forced to give up on a catch (or a project).

Timequake moves between autobiography and novel with surprising ease, for the most part. It is partly devoted to Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter-ego, and partly to the great man himself. This makes for wonderful reading but also feels a bit unfinished or slapdash at times. There is no real plot to speak of but don't let that fool you. The narrative arch is well employed and overall the book doesn't feel like a minor work in the least.

All in all, I was very fond of Timequake. However, it is hard to recommended it to friends, since I am quite well aware of the nature of the humour. Vonnegut has always been a cult more than a movement. The appeal may not be evident to everyone, but those who do enjoy a good farce will be extremely pleased. And perhaps that is the pleasure of a Vonnegut novel; it's a niche, and such a brilliant one too.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is something of a non-fiction classic, or so I've heard. Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology and psychiatry, delivers exactly what the title promises: it's a story about people with serious neurological diseases, tumours or deficiencies. On the outside, it might seem like a boring, scientific work with long discussions of lesions and cancers. Professors are known to rattle on about their favorite subjects, with little regard to the reader.

The Man Who is nothing of the sort. It is written with wry wit and fresh academic humour that is aimed at pleasing audiences that have no previous contact with the neurosciences. The book is split into different "cases" that not only tell the stories of different patients, but also show the reader the different effects that problems in our brains can cause. At times it's sad (a man really does mistake his wife for a hat), but mostly its stirring in a slightly comical way.

The most important point for me, however, was to see the problems that ordinary people face (like forgetting where you put your keys) exagerated to the point where those characteristics are all that is left of your personality. The next time you have trouble recognizing someones face, remember the man who was so bad at it that he mistook his wife for a hat.

The other book that I skipped through was not as funny, but it did elicit as much serious thinking. Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? by William Poundstone is a straightforward book about today's job interviews, especially those where interviewees are asked crazy or abstract questions like "Estimate how many golf balls could fit into this room?" and "Design an emergency evacuation plan for San Francisco." For some these questions might seem unlikely, but it appears that companies like Google, Microsoft and many of the top banks and consulting companies use these questions daily.

Not much else is on offer here though. You get a lot of quirky, difficult questions with good answers that walk you through the key logics involved. Its a nice read for someone nervous about an upcoming job interview, but for other there might not be a lot to go on here. The actual "reading" part makes up only half of the book, and the rest is devoted to discussion of the best answering methods for each question.

One of the big upsides of this book is teasing fellow students with ridiculously difficult puzzles. Just watch your friends squirm when you tell them to estimate the number of bubbles in a bottle of champagne. There is no right answer, mind you, just a bunch of tricks to get you on the right track.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Despite a long pause without updates, I haven't been skipping on the reading. Quite the contrary actually. During the past two weeks, I was travelling in the USA, first in New York and then in Washington DC. If you are like me, travelling is the best time to read novels: the long flights and bus rides are the perfect chance to enjoy a good book while viewing the slowly passing landscape (or airspace). Travelling causes a feeling of limbo in me and this has helped me to concentrate and really jump into new books and stories.

During the two weeks I not only read Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (which is discussed here) but also The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? by William Poundstone. As you might guess, these books have nothing in common, and maybe it's better that way - there is a certain beauty to variety.

The first time I read The Sun Also Rises, many years ago, I loved it but was also baffled by it. It was the first book by Hemingway that I had read and not being used to the subtle narrative and beginning of the century expatriate culture I also managed to miss some of the key points.

Why is Jake Barnes, an American world war I veteran living in Paris, unable to consummate his love for the British Brett Ashley? You'll never know if you don't pay attention to the seemingly mundane dialog. The way Hemingway loves to build the characters relies on unspoken (or barely spoken) gestures. I hear it's called the iceberg theory, and in a way that makes sense; it's a short book with a lot of things going on beneath the surface.

What I loved about The Sun Also Rises is the way it depicts people stuck in transit, constantly travelling without actually getting anywhere. Jake's war injury prevents him from having a true relationship with anyone, Robert is hopelessly in love with a woman who he is never to have, Brett, who in turn is unable to commit to only one man.

It might sound like a complicated love triangle (which it is on a minor scale), but there is so much more at stake. These unlikely heroes travel from Paris to northern Spain looking for adventure, wine and bull fights, while each embodying some part of the culture of the times. And after all, the sun does also rise, in beautiful, bloody shades of red over the spanish planes with trout swimming upriver and bulls awaiting their turn in the arena.

"Kaiken käsikirja" by Esko Valtaoja

Now I know this one can only be found in Finnish. Stick with me, however, because it's one of the best non-fiction books I've read in a long while.

Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything is one of my favorite books ever, both as an experience and through matter of principle. In some one thousand pages Bryson managed to describe the world with faithful accuracy and astounding insight. It was one of those books that marked an end of an era for me. It was the first book that described the world through rational, loving eyes and in a way that felt just right for me. God knows that worldviews vary from person to person, but I really understood that book.

"Kaiken käsikirja", or the Handbook to Everything as I would loosely translate it, is not unlike Bryson's masterpiece, both in subject matter and ideology. It is a tale of how the universe came to exist and how we as humans have learned to see, hear and experience it. Valtaoja, who is a professor of astronomy, is a brilliant scientist as well as someone who can explain to you, in a few sentences, why the search for the Higgs boson is as important as anything in this world. Even though it deals with some fairly hefty matter, "Kaiken käsikirja" could be read by everyone from your grandmother to your florist.

Where Bryson's look on the world concentrated on anecdotes and natural history, Valtaoja's approach focuses more on philosophy, religion and astronomy. In a matter of ten chapters, it manages to span the thirteen something billion years of this universes existence, the growth of civilization and the rise of both religion and science. Unlike the Short History, it does all is in under three hundred pages. Mr. Valtaoja is a man of few words, but those words seem to have weight that not many possess.

I was especially moved by chapters on religion and philosophy. Without disclosing my own stance on the matter, the chapter on the evolution of religions is very likely the best case for agnosticism that I have ever read. Brilliant, beautiful work that hopefully anyone can appreciate. The argumentation is flawless, but even more importantly, the message is one of rational action and sane morale. With his beard, Valtaoja might seem like a preacher, but his doctrine is a combination of the scientific method and a healthy dose of humility.

It is the modesty of it all that would probably catch foreign readers off guard. This book is not a grandiose statement like Richard Dawkins' the God Delusion, or a light-hearted (and supremely hilarious) Bill Bryson novel. Valtaoja plays coy and often underplays the seriousness of his opinions. He seems trustworthy, honest and the type of person you might meet in a local pub and he has a wonderful way of discussing the facts that makes them almost irrefutable.

In high school, I used to tell my friends that if they ever picked up a non-fiction book, they should read the Short History of Nearly Everything. After reading Valtaoja's latest, I might change that suggestion: read "Kaiken käsikirja", it will change your life.

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Christmas is a great time for books. My friends and family make sure that I receive at least a few gift wrapped paperbacks every year, and many of them have impeccable taste when it comes to non-fiction. I've always been especially grateful for receiving books, that I wouldn't normally even consider reading, as presents.

Another reason I love the holiday season (and hate that it's now over) is that I rarely have time to read more than during the Christmas break. Since my late teens, weeks with nothing to do have been hard to come by, and these days with all the frenzied studying and work going on, I can only hope to get 20 minutes of reading done just before I fall asleep on the couch in a state of serious fatigue. Christmas is different, however. Last year I managed to finish Jonathan Franzen's Freedom in three days of blissful reading coma.

This year was no different, and I managed to load up on enough good reading to get me through the worst of this winter. The first on this list was Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, which many of you have undoubtedly heard of already, if not actually read.

Nudge is about influencing people through public policy and something called choice architecture. Choice architects are people who create systems, where others are forced to choose between alternatives. For example, you might have noticed those check boxes at the end of Internet forms, where you are given a choice whether or not to subscribe to a weekly advertisement newsletter. Turns out that the default choice (i.e. whether the box for the newsletter is pre-ticked or not), has a huge impact on our decisions.

People are immensely influenced by how choice situations are arranged. Test where people are required to choose between complex (or sometimes fairly simple) alternatives, have shown that we are nothing if very poor at choosing the option that suits us best. Anything can have an effect our choices: the style of music playing at that particular moment or the arrangement of whatever items you are choosing from. Defaults are one of the biggest influences, since often the majority of people decide to go with whatever default option has been predetermined.

Despite being widely acknowledged and influential, Nudge is sometimes a bit of a bore. United States pension policy doesn't make for a exciting read for anyone, even actual citizens. For me, these parts were as uninteresting as ice fishing is cowboys. I could have skipped many chapters, but didn't mostly because "cheating" with books makes me nervous.

A strange thing about Nudge is that despite being only 5 years old, it does have an air of obsolescence to it. Many of the problems it mentions have already been resolved on some level, especially those that had not been previously implemented due to technological restraints. This may be more a testament to how fast the world has changed in the last 5 years than an actual problem for readability. It does, however, make some passages feel redundant.

I'm not entirely sure, whether this should be required reading for all political hopefuls and future choice architects (IT-consultants, this includes you!). You might be better off reading one of the older magazine articles done when this book was released. The idea behind all of it is so simple: nudge people toward more sensible options, and you can make the world a better place.

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

It might not be easy to compliment Too Big to Fail. It's a book about how rich bankers courageously fight for their firms' survivals, I would tell my friends. No no, it's really compelling and well written! Just imagine John Grisham writing a novel about the key people involved in the financial system's collapse. It's about big egos having to deal with failure and intelligent people making awful decisions. Still convinced that this book is not worth your time?

Too Big to Fail is one of the more successful business books of the last ten years both according to its sales figures and praising reviews. It's the story of the key people involved in the unraveling of the global economy, especially American politicians and investment bank CEOs.

Most of all, Too Big to Fail does a wonderful job of describing the dozens of people working for a plethora of government institutions, investment banks and the like. Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers and main antagonist, is described without the usual fussy praise and damning accusations that sometimes weigh on American journalism . He is a mere mortal, on the brink of a burnout or a possible mental breakdown. Seeing the company he saved from doom a decade before crumble, he regresses to his most human.

Most secondary characters also offer interesting insights to the world of high finance. The chief executives at AIG, an insurance giant, rummage old company vaults in search of a $ 14 billion stash of old stock paper in order to save the company from imminent bankruptcy. Joe Gregory, of Lehman fame too, flies a helicopter to work everyday, and overall probably earns a spot at the top of an all-time worst corporate executives list. Brilliance and folly are shown in equal measure as is sacrifice and salvation.

At the height of the panic, the Federal Reserve calls for a meeting of the biggest banks in a desperate attempt to counter the looming disaster. It's a strange meeting and more than once reminded me of a gathering of the heads of Mafia families. Men with egos the size of power boats perched around a mahogany table, henchmen whispering in their ears, threats being volleyed from all sides. Secret agreements are made in hushed tones over dinner at Michelin restaurants and aboard private jets.

All this is told in a matter-of-fact tone by Sorkin, who brilliantly manages to leave connecting the dots to the reader. This book is all about the facts, a proper and uncompromising history of events. There is no attempt to draw conclusions, no need to underline the themes. I might be overplaying my hand, but at its core, this is a book about human weakness and making mistakes. I still have no clue how a non-fiction business book swimming in jibberish like Credit Default Swap and Mortgage Backed Asset could be this good. This one shouldn't be judged by it's cover.