Summer Reading

I decided this summer to rededicate myself to reading more books, in the place of the longform journalism that had become habitual to me. I even went to the public library and checked out print copies of books, though I ended up reading just as much on my iPad (if not more) as I did on paper. Here’s a partial list of what I read this summer and would recommend to others: Finance I’ve recently tried to educate myself about investment (thinking about retirement and saving for our young son’s education). I’ve become a strong advocate of passive investing (well-constructed index funds), and very much have a bias towards high savings rates combined with a set it and forget it approach biased towards broad, longterm equity exposure. I’ve read half a dozen books lately that impressed me, listed in order of interest:

Jason Zweig's Your Money and Your Brain. Zweig is a longtime financial journalist and columnist at the Wall Street Journal who consistently talks sense. He strikes me as a rigorous, skeptical thinker that has great concern for consumer/investor advocacy.
John Bogle's Common Sense on Mutual Funds: Updated 10th Anniversary Edition. I also read Bogle's Bogle On Mutual Funds: New Perspectives For The Intelligent Investor and his

Little Book of Common Sense Investing—it’s a shorter version of essentially the same arguments. Both were excellent. Bogle was the creator (4o years ago now!) of the first index fund, and the founder and longtime chairman of the Vanguard Group, and the namesake and honorary pater familias of the Bogleheads, an unfailingly helpful group of DIY investors with a commitment to low costs and a passive, rational approach to investing. David Swenson’s Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment John Bogle’s The Clash of Cultures: Investment Versus Speculation William Bernstein’s The Four Pillars of Investing Sheila Bair’s Bull By the Horns. Fascinating insider’s account of the Bush and Obama administration’s response to the recent financial crisis and essential failure of meaningful regulatory oversight by several federal agencies. Bair was the former chairperson of the FDIC and has been much lauded as a fierce consumer advocate. Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street. I thought I’d like this much more than I actually did. Worth reading, but I appreciated the other books on the list more, I think.

Longform https://sharedli.st/steelwagstaff