Always wanted to read this book since I missed it in my high-school reading and I finally did it on my Kindle. The online dictionary came in handy with all the colloquial words used throughout the novel. The title “Catcher in the Rye” interested me. According to some interpretation, it’s about someone who prevents kids from running from the rye field off the cliff, a symbolism of the transition to adulthood from childhood of innocence, kindness, spontaneity, and generosity.

In the three days after Holden Caulfield was expelled from his Pencey school, he got in a fight with his room mate (Stradlater), visited one of his teachers, had a clumsy encounter with a young prostitute – Sunny, met up with his old friend – Sally Hayes, went back to his house to see his young sister Phoebe, met with his ex-teacher – Mr. Antolini – who may have made “flitty” advance on him and remarked “it is the mark of the mature man who wants to live humbly for a cause, rather than die nobly for it.” Afterward, he hung around the city, dropped by museum, and looked for Phoebe. When he found Phoebe, he was surprised to know that Phoebe already packed up to go with him. At this point, he became the responsible adult and squashed her idea and promised to go back home. Phoebe became the catcher and caught Holden from falling off the cliff of adulthood.

Throughout the book, Holden smoked and drank continuously as if this showed how tough and adult he was and yet within him he hated all the phonies of the adult world and clenched to his child-like view of the world or the world it should be. Salinger’s writing style in this book fully reflected the mental state and maturity level of Holden at his age – meaning there was a lot of wining and cussing throughout he book – and who doesn’t at this age.

I find the ending a bit disappointing. Did he turn good and become a model citizen – probably too corny? Did he sink deeper and eventually move himself to a cabin? Probably. It’s left to readers’ imagination.

This book is both a memoir of Stephen King and a how-to on writing fiction. King’s early life growing up with a constantly-moving mother and a genius elder brother was very interesting. I wonder if the shifty environment he grew up made him who he was/is – striving to horrify people with his talents in hunting for the fears and dark side of the readers/viewers. He also went into great details of his fight against alcoholism and drugs. But when it comes to the question of doing it for the money, he replied, “I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it… I’ve written because it fulfilled me.. I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.” You can tell his passion for the art in his last chapter “On Living” where he described how he fought to survive from a freak accident and how writing got him back to life.

Stephen King taught us the merely mortal how to write fictions. Key advises:
1. Write often and read often. He himself wrote continuously while growing up and had a hook where he spiked all the rejection letters on his wall. Now that’s encouragement. Even for him, he reads constantly up to 70+ books a year. “Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling.”

2. From stories to theme than from themes to stories. This one surprised me. Most of the time, he just let the stories develop into themes instead of constructing the stores based on a certain theme. I guess that’s why most fictional writers don’t know how the stories would end when they started writing. Very interesting. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

3. On editing: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Always try to reduce the first draft and target 10% reduction. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway— it belongs to anyone who wants to read it.”

4. Put your desk in the corner… Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.

5. Writing is Telepathy. Build your toolbox: vocabulary (put on the top shelf but don’t make any conscious effort to improve it), grammar (read The Elements of Style), use active tense and reduce use of adverbs.

6. Writing takes discipline. King writes roughly 10 pages (2000 words) a day and finishes a novel in three months. He writes in the mornings. The secrets: stay healthy and stay married. Write what you know and what you love to read.

7. Stories and novels consists of three parts: narration (A to B), description (creates sensory reality) and dialogue (bring characters to life through their speech). “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.” King went to a few examples for each of the 3 parts.”Practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and that honesty is indispensable. Skills in description, dialogue, and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity (and without using a lot of tiresome, unnecessary adverbs).”

8. Have an Ideal First Reader to review your work. Like King’s wife and Alfred Hitchcock’s wife.

9. “As a reader, I’m a lot more interested in what’s going to happen than what already did.” Be judicious in the use of “back stories.”

The author went through the entire history of venture capital as his dad practically started the industry. It’s almost like a family business as his son, Tim, is also involved in the venture capital business. The book is thick with good stories and anecdotes of successes and failures. It’s not a how-to book to start your business but it did have a good explanations for each role of the players (funders, team, the pitch/product/market, deal and relationship) involved in funding a start up.

The top ten avoidable mistakes of entrepreneurs serve as good lessons:
1. creating only optimistic projections about market size and customer acquisitions.
2. Underestimating timelines.
3. Trying to do everything yourself.
4. Failing to master the elevator pitch.
5. Not downsizing when necessary.
6. Being inflexible.
7. Not developing a clear marketing plan.
8. Building a board that consists of only friends.
9. Not taking action in a recession.
10. Not knowing the right way to approach venture capitalists.

What it takes to succeed: brains and education, energy and passion, expertise, vision, and integrity, and a sense of humor.

I’ve learned that venture capitalists add value to providing the advises and industry contacts, and even needed leadership talents to guide the startup to a profitable end. The end game may not always be IPO as the IPO has gotten harder due to the recent law change to merge banking with investment banking. Being bought up by a big company seems to be the norm nowadays.

I envy the author’s experiences from private venture capital investors to service public role like the Ex-Im bank, and even to fund socially-serving non-profit organizations. Very interesting journey the author has traveled – a real treat for the readers.

I read Roger Lowenstein’s “When Genius Failed” book before. His writing is journalistic and full of facts, unlike some other books like Michael Lewis’ The Big Short. Looks like he’s done a great deal of research in writing this book. It’s mainly about how the then-Secretary-of-Treasury, Hank Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chief, Ben Bernanke, and New York Federal Reserve Bank President, Tim Geithner dealt with the financial crises and the aftermath throughout the year 2007 and 2008. He went to great details about how the crisis – mainly the subprime mortgage came about, its development and its end result.

I learned about how the rescue didn’t take root in the beginning because Benanke was trying to fix the liquidity problem rather than the capital problem. Bernanke was blindsided by his familiarity with the historical ill of the Great Depression in 1930’s. Hank Paulson was hamstrung by his principle of moral hazard – the reckless assumption of risks knowing there’s an insurance or safety nets – the bailout. The logic of letting Lehman die but rescuing Morgan Stanley and AIG was not rational but it was the best the government could do without causing a meltdown and ripple effect across the entire economy.

Whether the Wall Street learned this lesson and the Federal government has re-instated enough regulation to avoid this kind of crisis in the future remains to be seen. I doubt the future generation of the people in Wall Street will remember this hard lesson. History is bound to repeat in the future unless the government comes up with a better set of regulation to control the leverage and risk without overburdening the firms. The author wasn’t optimistic either because the financial instruments being invented were simply too exotic for the government to gauge and the excessive compensation in the Wall Street firms attract envies of the unscrupulous.

So many people were harmed and continued to be harmed by the repercussions of the financial tidal wave of the 2008. One thing people should always remember. When there is too much a good thing like easy credit, no-down-payment mortgage, high-flying stock market (like the tech bubble), something or a bubble is being built up that will eventually bust. Let the common sense rule: when it’s too good to be true, it’s probably so.

The few weeks leading to September 2008 were made for a cliff hanger movie. Most people were too busy to survive financially to pay attention to the drama on the Wall Street and yet it’s where it all started. It’s simply amazing to me how few people (probably no more than a hundred) can cause so much damage. In a way they are the financial terrorists that triggered the financial weapon of mass destruction. Amazing.

This is the story of the Quants, the PhD Mathematicians who turned the financial market into a gambling casino. They made an obscene amount of money but ended up wrecking the market they helped to create. The players are: Peter Muller (Morgan Stanley), Ken Griffin (Citadel), Cliff Asness (AQR Capital Management), Boaz Weinstein (Deutsche Bank), Jim Simons (Renaissance Technologies), Aaron Brown, Paul Wilmott (foretell the meltdown), Benoit Mandelbrot (warned of the danger), and finally Ed Thorp, who started it all with the books “Beat the Dealers” and “Beat the Market” books.

It’s hard to tell with certainty what really caused the meltdown. The author seemed to point the finger at Allen Greenspan’s low-interest policy that started the housing bubble and his lack of oversight of investment bankers and hedge funds industry. If this were true, one should argue that Greenspan’s long tenure at the helm may be to blame for his insufficient understanding of the risk takings going on under his nose.

I learned a lot on how the Quants make money by hedge one bet against another bet in search of easy money or “sure” thing or the “truths.” There are the frequency trading to arbitrage values, and there are the hedging bets – all done with a huge amount of leverage and precision. Of course, those trades broke down when the market turned illiquid, which caused the melt down. In principle, all the algorithms should all work but when everything is linked from one another. A small change can cause a tsunami of ripple effects. Now they know.

The stories of the rich Quants’ spending their new-found wealth on such luxuries as $80M paintings, and luxurious homes, vacation homes, fancy cars, really excited my resentment and many tax payers who ended up paying for their mess. It’s not different than the Internet bubble that brought on the rise of greedy people and their excesses. The destructive ending was the same except they were bailed out by the government instead of the reduced wealth of the over-exuberant investors.

This is a reasonable good book that tells the stories of these Quants people but more importantly, it revealed the mentality and the motivations of these people. They thought they were doing goods to rid the market of inefficiencies and making lots of money along the way. Whether or not they realized the danger of the leverages from their bets is hard to know. But it’s like a drug addiction, you may know it’s bad for you and the society; it’s hard to break away from it. Ultimately, it’s the failing of the human nature and greed that did them in, dragging the society and world to the brink of a financial collapse. How the government can craft a good policy to prevent a similar collapse from happening in the future remains to be seen.

This book is similar to William Zinsser’s “Writing Well” book. This one goes into more details on techniques. The rules can be complicated but the spirit of writing should be preserved to be clear and concise for the reader to experience the messages/stories/contents. The book was a little hard to read but the contents are rich.

The 12 guidelines:
1. Keep sentences short, and keep to one main idea per sentence.
2. Avoid pretensions, gobbledygook and euphemisms.
3. Change long and difficult words to short and simple words.
4. Be wary of jargon, fad, and cliche
5. Use the right word.
6. Avoid beginning with long dependent phrases.
7. Prefer active verbs and the active voice.
8. Cut wordiness.
9. Avoid vague qualifiers.
10. Prune prepositions.
11. Limit number and symbol.
12. Get right to the point. And stay there.

There are other tips on storytelling, description, use of metaphors, similes, analogy, allusion, foreshadowing like in “you won’t believe what happened next”), irony, and word play. The authors dived into the sound effect via the use of euphony, rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration, resonance, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, cacophony, and etc.

On Pace, write fast and edit slow, avoid speedbumps (often arise from intrusions and obtrusion), logic and speed reading.

Dispelling myths: avoid split infinitives when it gets in the way of grace and precision and split away when it preserves grace and precision. Split verb phrase is not wrong, but is seldom unattractive. Use contractions where it makes sense. Use of ‘a’ and ‘an.’ “None” and “couple” can be singular or plural.

This is the 2nd time I read this book, the first time being a few years ago. I too watched the movie and still remembered the stellar performance of Jack Lemon. I particularly enjoyed the flashback to author’s early days in school – his relationship with his coach and the Morrie’s own early life – discovered his mother’s death via a telegram at age of 8, growing up with his young brother David, who contracted polio at early age, his step-mother, Eva’ influence, and identified his father’s body at the morgue. In addition, the author shared his relationship with his brother, who was fighting cancer remotely on his own in Spain. It helps to re-read this book every few years as we get closer and closer to the end line. A few lessons I learned:

If you must feel sorry for yourself, give yourself a good cry (limit your self-pity) and then concentrate on the good things that are still happening in your life.

Our culture doesn’t encourage us to think about the most important things in our life – our family, relationships and friendships. We’re so wrapped up with “egotistical things” (career, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, and etc.)

Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live. Ask the little bird, “Is today the day? Am I Ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?” “Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it.”

The great poet Auden said, “Love each other or perish.” “Without love, we are birds with broken wings.”

Embrace your emotion and experience it fully. Then detach from it.

Aging is not just decay. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it. If you have found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more and do more. If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.

“Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.” “The day he learned that he was terminally ill was the day he lost interest in his purchasing power.” “Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” “If you’re trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you’re trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.” “Do the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back.”

“Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.” On marriage, it’s important to respect each other, compromise, talk openly about what goes on between the two, have a common set of values. The biggest set of value is your belief in the importance of your marriage.

On culture: “No matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.” “Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”

Forgive others but most importantly forgive yourself.

“It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.” “We aren’t waves; we’re all part of the ocean.” “There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.”

Here are the Youtube Videos with Ted Koppel: 1, 2, 3, 4, ….