3 Lies, by Helen Hanson

The plot was inventive and interesting, but the execution was poor.

Our hero is Clint. His girl friend goes missing before a scheduled dialysis treatment, and he tries to find her. Her family is not cooperative, and files a restraining order against him.

Meanwhile, CIA agent Doug finds shady goings on at work and investigates.

Spoiler ahead: don't read further if you plan to waste your time on this novel on your own time.

The idea was to kidnap a relative of each Supreme Court Justice to blackmail them to vote in a particular way on an upcoming case. See how interesting this plot might have been? And yet, I do not recommend Ms. Hanson's book.

The Taste of Fear, by Jeremy Bates

Wealthy Salvador has an assassin after him. He and his movie star wife Scarlett go on holiday in Africa. They end up as hostages of terrorists, and the dogged assassin is right behind them.

Somewhere between meh and good.

Creation, by Greg Chase

This is the first volume in Mr. Chase's Technopia series. It is overly preachy and dull so I don't recommend it nor the other books in the series (although I've only read this one).

Hero Sam lives in a wasteland of Earth. He takes a job as a computer repairman on the edge of the solar system. His pirate employers abandon him but he's rescued after having interacted with the ship's computer core in some meaningful way. Ending up in a utopia with is wife Jess, all is well until Sam is recruited to return to Earth to help fix things.

Pirates of the Outrigger Rift, by Gary Jonas

Think of this as a prose version of an old-fashioned comic book. (By which I mean, not a modern graphic novel, rather the shallow, action heavy, somewhat humorous comics of old. Maybe like a low budget TV cartoon.)

It is in the sci-fi genre. Sai is a courier who is also a telepath (the kind that connects to the web). She encounters trouble, pilot Hank, investigator Mike, and a ruthless but fortunately incompetent pirates.

The Change, by Teyla Branton

I'm writing this some time after having read the novel. I suppose I need to add a new genre type to my list for urban fantasy, but I'll just keep it at para-normal.

So what to say about this book? I know the hero is Erin, that she's "Unbounded," in a battle between the "Emporium" and the "Renegades," and as though that isn't enough, she's hunted by a secret society who do not like Unbounded people.

Having said that, I remember nothing about this novel! I'm going to have to skim it again just to satisfy my curiosity; usually not remembering a book means it was horrible. But with a description that includes Unbounded, Emporium, Renegades, and all around bad guys, this should at least be memorable for its silliness, or being completely horrible, or something!

Forging Zero, by Sara King

I don't care for novels featuring dumb heroes. Or heroes who do or say dumb things and yet manage to bumble their way forward successfully. So I didn't care for this book.

It is sci-fi: Joe is 14 and drafted to the Congressional Ground Force (military) run by the aliens who invaded and conquered Earth. He is the leader of a band of children who become soldiers.

Yuck.

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

I read this book to evaluate it: would it make a useful holiday gift for some young person just starting their career? It isn't a clear winner, but I'm leaning towards saying it is.

The bad news is the good news here - the book is essentially a long motivational speech from a credible and interesting presenter. The net net is foreshadowed by the title: pick the most important thing and do it relentlessly. There's plenty more advice, albeit at an overview level, on how to execute.

If you're just starting out, or if you're not but find yourself frustrated by career, or work-life tradeoffs, or you're just looking for an edge, then this may be a good choice.

How Not to Die, by Michael Greger

This is a terrific book, albeit at times a bit overwhelming. Dr. Greger's gig is medical research into the potential to improve health and /or reduce disease through nutrition. His website, nutritionfacts.org is a phenomenal resource with brief and amusing videos that summarize research on a variety of topics.

This book summarizes years of research and review into two sections: how to minimize your risk of a variety of diseases, and how to adjust your lifestyle to maximize health and minimize risk.

To be clear, Dr. Greger, like a few other medical leaders (I'm thinking folks like Dr. Alan Goldhamer, Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Dr. Dean Ornish), is disruptive, pushing the current medical norms to recognize the potential of nutrition on disease.

Dr. Greger quotes Dean Ornish on this: "[he] realized reimbursement is a much more powerful determinant of medical practice than research."

Fighting consensus thinking doesn't make these folks wack-jobs: think about the history of medicine. I'll give you a couple of examples just in case you're skeptical:

In the 1700s, one woman in six died of fever after childbirth. That's a lot of dead moms. In 1795, Alexander Gordon said the fevers were infectious and could be cured. Consensus thinking said he was a fool. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes said similar, with evidence. Ignored. Most disturbing, in 1849, Ignatz Semmelweiss showed that sanitation (physicians dipping their hands in a disinfectant between the autopsy room and the delivery room) eliminated puerperal fever entirely. You'd think that was heroic. The consensus said he was mad, not to mention a Jew, and fired him from his job. (He died in an insane asylum.)  It took until the start of the 20th century (Dr. Lister was presumably a better politician) for doctors to accept this information. There are plenty of other examples, like pellagra. But you get the idea. Just because something is "normative" in medicine doesn't mean it is best for the patients.

Of course, just because something is fringe doesn't make it good either: the key is evidence based analysis, where one accounts for motives (e.g., was a study funded by an industry with billions at stake?) and quality (e.g., was the study well run?). This is precisely Dr. Greger's specialty.

In part two of his book, Dr. Greger presents his "daily dozen:"  beans, berries, other fruits, cruciferous vegetables, greens, other vegetables, flax seeds, nuts, spices, whole grains, beverages, and exercise.

Really though, this section is a bit much. I might just not be ready to run my daily menu through a checklist.

One other complaint about Dr. Greger's work: he tends towards reduction-ism. As T. Colin Campbell points out, current research gets so engaged looking for the magic chemical (that a pharmaceutical firm can market at profit) that it forgets the holistic nature of unprocessed plant based foods. To this end, Dr. Campbell points out that researchers might notice that apples seem like healthy eating.  They notice there's vitamin A in an apple.  So they look at the health effects of vitamin A, with a goal of making a vitamin A pill that will provide the healthy effects.  Presumably without the hassle of eating the apple.  But, unfortunately, all sorts of systems get in the way of this working out the way a pill lover might like.

All in all though, this is worth reading. If nothing else, for the preface and introductory chapter.

Quantitative Momentum, by Wes Gray and Jack Vogel

This is a terrific book. As good as "DIY Financial Advisor," which was also great.

I did, however, manage to get myself all sorts of confused about which approach to measuring momentum the authors use in the book. I believe this would not have been a problem for me if two approaches to measurement hadn't been laid out early on, on page 11.


There, the authors start out saying they're going to outline what they mean by stock selection momentum. Then they define two approaches to measure momentum, time-series versus relative strength. The explanation is clear. Although the conclusion is puzzling to me, as on page 12 they say that these two approaches are often used in market-timing or asset-class selection, neither of which is the focus of the book.


But surely in this book they do measure momentum, and presumably with one or both of the two methods they just defined. So which is it? I was hoping for a summary line like this: "When we talk about measuring momentum in the rest of this book, we'll be using the {choose one of: time-series / relative strength}approach." Or, we'll use both and use words like "trend following when we use relative strength" and "generic when we use absolute," or whatever would be accurate.


I figured this would become obvious as I kept reading but I didn't come across a clear rule. Yet it must matter, since the authors bothered to define the terms. I find myself wondering, perhaps this is an OCD trigger issue for me. You're no doubt wondering the same.


On page 49, it sounds like relative strength is the approach. On page 77, the authors introduce the phrase "generic momentum" as a time-series approach. Since they earlier spent a page defining time-series and relative strength, I was really hoping they'd come back to those terms again. Now I have three terms, but I feel pretty confident that I can reduce them to two, with time-series and generic as roughly equivalent.  This was supported by "How to calculate generic momentum" on page 80. I'm not super confident though, because I kind of feel that if they wanted me to consider generic as isomorphic to absolute, they'd have said so back on pages 11/12.


Things sort of come together on page 122, where my sense is that the authors calculate generic momentum (time-series) and then use those scores to do relative strength measures against the universe of stocks. Well, whether or not that's what they meant, that's what I took out of it. Since I wasn't clear on the fundamentals from page 11 to page 122, I'm not confident that I have it right now either. And on page 172 they specifically mention time-series, but that may be to clarify the method used by the reference for that particular analysis.


In fairness, I am so much not the target audience of professional investment quants that I'm clearly not a good test subject for the readability of this minor detail within this book. But if the authors ever do another edition, in deference to the slower students, they really should consider changing the summary section on page 12 to something like this:


"You'll find that we also use the term 'generic momentum' as a synonym for time-series or absolute momentum. As you progress in this book, you'll find that we use a combination of the two (time-series and relative strength), using a time-series sort first, and then comparing the outcomes to the universe of stocks to get relative strength as the secondary measure."  [Unless this is dead wrong. Sigh.]

I'd also probably delete the sentences on page 12 that say these usually only matter to market-timing or asset-class selection which aren't the subjects of this book -- because it feels like the authors are telling the reader that they've wasted their time understanding a description of time-series and relative strength when it isn't even relevant to the book they are reading. And lead them to wonder what the authors do use.


Okay, barring that, I really loved the book!  Well written, very clear, and good examples.

First Strike, by Ben Coes

I didn't enjoy the last book I read from this author, so I'm not quite sure how I ended up with this one. Must have been an eye-catching display at the public library. My comments on the last book were, "...suffers the typical trite memes of the "special forces operator acts as spy to save the world" genre."

Well, not much has changed. The hero is a bit less stoic, due to a love interest. But the plot suffers from ridiculous hero worship (the US President is a personal fan) and absurd plot devices (our injured hero flies directly to NY City to save the day personally, presumably because there is no other special forces operator on the planet who can do the job). Oy.

Okay, I will remember Mr. Coes and try much harder to avoid his novels so as to avoid getting all worked up.