What an AlphaScala Analyst Reads: Book Highlights

An AlphaScala analyst recently finished a dozen books. The list spans novels, philosophy, psychology, and memoir. Below are the selections and the passages that stuck.

She tucks her legs under them as she sits in her plush velvet armchair, a few candles glowing nearby, her face impassive and cool, holding a book in one hand, the other hand idly tracing the lip of a wineglass. He watches her touch that glass and wonders how a little fingertip can inspire such a large torment.

That opening comes from a novel about a marriage, a prairie, and a slow drift into midlife dissatisfaction. The analyst called it a fantastic new work from a living legend. One line sums up the view on marriage: "You find so many qualities within another person that you want to have within you that you're willing to take on their flaws, which will, by extension, also be within you, for life."

Another novel, about ambition and race, includes a mother's cold assessment of settling down: "Wasn't it ironic how women spent their twenties trying to catch a man and have his babies, then spent the next decade wishing they could escape through a bathtub drain?" The analyst noted that the book also contains a sharp comment on teaching: how it "ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers and mystical dogs."

A gripping true story follows a couple whose sailboat capsizes. Their survival at sea becomes a meditation on grief. "Trapped inside a person, grief can feel like a rising tide of water, something vast and dramatic requiring release. But once spoken, it tends to reveal itself to be the same, small essential things, over and over."

One of the most incisive foreign policy analysts shares a worldview built on two assumptions: "there are significant limits on our ability to reason about first principles, and we are social animals at our core." He adds that "there has never been anything approximating a universal consensus on what constitutes the good life."