Thomas Jiang

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2024 Reading List

24 March 2024

Not looking good this year and it’s only January.

Pride and Prejudice

Author: Jane Austen
Date published: January 28, 1813
Date read: May 17, 2024

When it comes to the classics, I oft find myself struggling to understand their greatness. So, as is becoming increasingly common, I turned to ChatGPT for help. Surely, I thought, there must have been popular contemporaries in Austen’s time that covered similar themes with the wit and complexity of Elizabeth Bennet. To my query, ChatGPT listed a slew, including The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, and The Wild Irish Girl. In order to practice close reading, which I had learned in school was important but not how to do, I asked ChatGPT for a couple of passages from each, to compare and contrast against Pride and Prejudice. The quote from Pamela by Samuel Richardson stood out to me.

O the delight, the charming delight of being able to acquaint you, dear parents, with the joyous tidings of my being, after all my dangers and apprehensions, the happiest creature in the world!

Because that last phrase is remarkably similar to the declaration Elizabeth makes

I am the happiest creature in the world.

But Austen demonstrates her prowess in the following lines.

Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.

The vital execution is in “She only smiles, I laugh.” It’s clever, but it’s also a little twisted, filled with that confident smug superiority, and thought provoking as a result. Maybe that sense of smug superiority is Austen talking back to Samuel Richardson, lifting his line and delivering it with “justice”. Or maybe that line never appeared in Pamela, because when I went to go look for it, I could not find it. The closest I could find in a text that I trusted, was

O, my dearest sir, said I, not a single wish more has your grateful Pamela! My heart is overwhelmed with your goodness! Forgive these tears of joy, added I: You have left me nothing to pray for, but that God will bless you with life, and health, and honour, and continue to me the blessing of your esteem; and I shall then be the happiest creature in the world.

To ChatGPT’s credit, some of the words are there.

To wit, this calls to mind the compelling ‘found’ or ‘generated’ entries listed in the Lyttle Lytton contest. Though not intentionally generated to be bad, it does feel like ChatGPT understood the assignment I gave to mean that it should generate a quote like Pamela that was worse than what Austen wrote. Which, in a way, is a creative, if not roundabout, exercise in demonstrating the ways in which Austen’s writing has those extra qualities that more mediocre writing lacks.

You can find, and maybe continue, my conversation with ChatGPT. Maybe there will be something there that makes you laugh too.

Here, leading the way through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an interval to utter the praises he asked for, every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind.

A Man Called Ove

Author: Fredrik Backman
Date published: August 27, 2012
Date read: May 7, 2024

Are funny people more likable?

Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up the brain.

Do they have to be intentionally funny or can they be inadvertently funny?

He doesn’t understand where this woman keeps appearing from all the time. Can’t a man calmly and quietly stand over a cat-shaped hole in a snowdrift in his own garden anymore?

Are there qualities that are not just enhanced by humor but are changed from bothersome to appealing when combined with humor?

Among their own houses they put up speed bumps and damnable numbers of signs about “Children Play,” but when driving past other people’s houses it was apparently less important.

What’s the limit; is there a point at which there has to be more substance than humor?

We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like “if.”

I’m worried that I’m not as good a person as Ove and not nearly as funny.

Going Infinite

Author: Michael Lewis
Date published: October 3, 2023
Date read: March 24, 2024

For a long time, I’ve asked my friends in trading what they do all day and the sorts of analogies I get back are equal parts hilarious and uninformative. Professional trading has been compared to playing video games, driving, and sauteing vegetables. So when Going Infinite actually attempted to give some real concrete examples of trading, I was a bit skeptical–this doesn’t sound like sauteing vegetables in the slightest…

So, because I had some doubts about the veracity of the account, I asked my friends to fact check. Not unsurprisingly, they mostly agreed that the account felt accurate by and large. Details like the fact that a trading floor sounds like an arcade to the example of pricing ETFs of foreign stocks tracked with their experiences. Having another pair of eyes also illuminated the fact that, while Lewis doesn’t use sauteing vegetables as a direct example, food analogies show up a surprising amount. I only really internalized the ham and cheese ETF example because it really resonated with my vegetable sauteing friend.

In fact, the particular passages and lines that stood out to my friend quite surprised me. Because I don’t participate in a frequently meeting book club, reading is a very solitary experience and it is easy to forget the stuff that does not stand out to me. Without others to remind me about the parts that I don’t internalize, my memory of a book is often single dimensional.

By 2014 you just had to look at the average IQ of the people going to Morgan Stanley and the people going to Jane Street to know what was happening

Once I was reminded of this, I do remember reading it and laughing but would not have recalled this otherwise. Instead the lines that I collected had different slants. Either they were about the internal personal characteristics of the central characters, à la

  • he told me that he would probably never love me
  • this made me feel really sad and really bad about myself
  • I didn’t want him to know how bad it made me feel, since I was worried it would cause him to break up with me

me after living in the Bay Area for a week: monogamy is hopeless and dying. Might as well be a plate for alpha guys while I’m still young/hot enough and freeze my eggs for later

“I thought she might be willing to trade EA for reciprocation of love any day.”

Or about the whimsies of venture capital.

Selling a new business to a VC was apparently less like selling a sofa that it was like pitching a movie idea. The VCs’ eagerness to buy turned less on your hard numbers than on how excited they became about the story you told. IT was as if they spent their day listening to stories and picking the ones they liked best. There was no rhyme or reason to their evaluations: English class all over again.

Much later, it would be reported that Taylor Swift had turned down FTX’s money. That wasn’t quite true. FTX had an agreement with Swift to pay her between $25 and #30 million a year, but Sam dragged his feet on the deal. “She wanted to do it,” said Natalie Tien, “but Sam kept postponing on response to her team.” Another person intimately involved with the negotiation between Swift and FTX said, “Taylor did not turn it down. They were waiting for Sam to sign it when he didn’t.”

The same thing happened after I recommended Breasts and Eggs. They would read a chapter, gasp, point out a line or story beat. And although, in fairness, it had been a while since I had read it, I could not for the life of me remember any of it. None of it had stood out to me at the time. A good sign to ask more questions about what other people notice and see even if it appears obvious to me, and to really listen to their answers.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

Author: David Eagleman
Date published: February 10, 2009
Date read: January 15th, 2024

I recently learned how to make Shakshuka. Under the careful guidance of a watchful hand (as no responsible governing body would let me within a boat length of an active stovezone, I discovered that it is composed of surprisingly few ingredients that work very well together.

It starts with a compelling premise. Doesn’t really matter if the premise begins to crumble under the weight of a full inspection because that’s really just the base. Then fill it with little eggs of ideas. I have for a long time wondered whether life was merely a dream - that I was a coma patient imagining a life that didn’t match reality - a vivid Descartes brain in a vat scenario.

Something dawned on you when you heard the children’s song: Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. You began to suspect that you were, perhaps, a butterfly dreaming it was a human, or, worse yet, a brain in a jar experiencing sights and sounds and smells and tastes–all of them buy dreamstuff. And so you waited for death in order to find out whether you were strapped with spotted wings or surrounded by a glass jar.

Or

As you wait in line and strike up a conversation with the woman behind you, you discover that the afterlife was long ago given over to committees.

And finally, a meaningful, specific, story takeaway that turns those ideas into something individual, something human, something personal.

And thus your punishment is cleverly and automatically regulated in the afterlife: the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with.

Sprinkle in some nice phrasing and language and it becomes something people can obsess about.