Non-Fiction in 2011

I read almost as much non-fiction as fiction last year, and that doesn't include all of the study material I read for the CFA Level 2 exam. And in all honesty I read some pretty crappy books. However, these stand out.

About this time last year I wrote about OUTLIERS. Truly remarkable. It doesn't need my commendation but it earned it nonetheless. I'll not talk any more about this except to say that it was so good I'm going to read it again this year.

THE LITTLE BOOK OF BEHAVIORAL INVESTING is from the Little Book series of investment and finance books, each written by a subject-matter expert. Or at least someone who has a reasonably impressive resume and a 'method' that can be distilled into a book. Some of them are great. Christopher Browne's one on value investing is fantastic, as if Jonathan Clements' on more generally getting your financial house in order. Pat Dorsey wrote one that boils down what is basically Morningstar's equity valuation heuristic into a third of the book he wrote on the same subject for Morningstar. Three years ago, I shot some holes in Peter Schiff's Little Book on how not to get smacked around by a bear market, which is now in another edition but probably isn't much better. (Hey, Peter. You were right about decoupling. Too bad it looks like the U.S. isn't the caboose.)

James Montier's take on behavioral investing is concise and to the point. If there is a book folks ought to read before they invest, it shouldn't be something by Ben Graham or Philip Fisher or the Motley Fool. It ought to be THE LITTLE BOOK OF BEHAVIORAL INVESTING. Know thyself, and beware. This book can help you in that direction.

(A more in depth dissection of this subject is YOUR MONEY AND YOUR BRAIN, by Jason Zweig. It too is a fine book, but about four times as long as Montier's Little Book.)

RICHARD THE LIONHEART appealed to me for several reasons. One, the subject. Two, the effort that author Antony Bridge makes to place Richard's actions and perceptions of them in the context of Richard's own time. Too much of what we read and think nowadays is influenced by our modern takes on the Crusades and eight centuries of creative speculation, a la Robin Hood and THE LION IN WINTER. Three, Antony Bridge is a polymath, the author of a brilliant biography here, an accomplished artist in his youth, an officer in military intelligence during WWII and later a priest--and a dynamic preacher. I like that.

The most interesting thing about Richard that Bridge reveals in his efforts to strip away centuries of myth and malice built up around him is that he really was the archetypical knight-king of the Age of Chivalry. Tireless and just like his father, artistic and emotional like his mother, unbeaten in battle, brave to a fault, negligently forgiving, ruthlessly cunning, the only thing Richard lacked was a son.