The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel, 2020

Rating: 4/5

Investing is a combination of financial acumen and behavioural skills. While there are several books and blogs devoted to the former, The Psychology of Money focuses on the softer skills around investing. As Housel points out early in the book, investing is one area where a formal education and a person’s connections do not matter much.

Housel has divided the book into short chapters and eighteen of them highlight a particular lesson for investing. These vary from recognising the role of luck, long tails in investing and keeping a margin of error to distinguishing between being reasonable versus rational and understanding that different motivations drive different investors. He supports many of his main themes with interesting anecdotes related to the economy or to famous people. But ultimately, this book is not just about investing — there are life lessons that he imparts as well such as the need to save and to know when you have enough.

This is a short book, but Housel is still unable to avoid repetition, especially within chapters. He sometimes takes several paragraphs to make the same point in different ways. But I guess he would have needed to get to a minimum size for this book to be recognised as one! Having said that, it is an easy read. Also, while some of the insights that Housel provides are extremely compelling, others are self-evident. I would recommend this book particularly to young people starting their careers as a guide to manage their money and avoid the behavioural pitfalls that many of us fall prey to (they will find the last chapter quite useful). But it will also be a good read for older folks, helping them recalibrate their financial goals.

Pros: Thoughtful, easy read, useful guide for young people

Cons: Some repetitive points, some self-evident insights

Never, Ken Follett, 2021

Rating: 3/5

Never is an epic story covering political events in the US, China, the Koreas, Chad and Syria, that inexorably spiral into a possible nuclear conflict. It details how a relatively small event in a remote part of the world could force the superpowers to get involved and how the compulsions of international relationships could actually end up escalating the conflict rather than ameliorating it. A scary possibility, and more so with the enhanced threats of cyber warfare now (interestingly documented in Nicole Perlroth’s “This is how they tell me the world ends” — my review here)!

However, what could have been a compelling political thriller becomes a mishmash of government manoeuvres and personal stories of some of the protagonists. The 800-page length consequently seems unnecessary — the entire track covering an undercover CIA agent in Chad and a mother-son duo from one of the Chadian settlements seems irrelevant and has very little bearing on the main plot, for example. Some of the personal side-stories are somewhat jarring and long, like the ones covering the lives of US President Pauline Green and her husband and daughter or even the relationship between a CIA operative and a French attache in Chad. The romantic tracks are awkward at best — when one of the key protagonists voices that “a woman’s heart can be an unexploded bomb … handle me delicately so that I don’t detonate”, you know that this isn’t Follett at his best. Foes of some of the main characters are reduced to caricatures. In a way, Never reminded me of the old Sidney Sheldon books — I would gobble them greedily when I was younger but would probably get nauseous reading parts of them now.

Given its length, the book is mercifully an easy read. However, only parts of it are real page-turners such as an escape from a terrorist camp or the spiralling of events towards the end. While I wasn’t tempted to leave the book unfinished at any point, Never was a bit of a lost opportunity to be a great book, in my view.

Pros: Epic story, easy read

Cons: Unnecessary length, awkward personal tracks