Why I Read History
A look at my Bookshelf would reveal a large no. of history books. Here are a few I have been reading recently:
I read history for both pleasure and learning. I have been always interested in stories. As I grew older and read more, I realised that Fact is often stranger than Fiction. The stories I came across in history were much more engrossing to me than anything I ever read in fiction.
Let me give some examples which would be of interest to my readers (who I assume have a bent of mind towards finance):
The movie Wall Street, is one of the most popular movies about powerful and unscrupulous financiers from the 1980s. It is a fictional story. But surely the events detailed in Barbarians at the Gate, are equally or more exciting.
Or take the fact that while Gordon Gekko is a fictional character, he is loosely based on a real financier called Ivan Boesky whose exploits are narrated in Den of Thieves. Both went to prison for their efforts.
That brings me to the next reason I read history - self-education. As I wrote in this blog's About Page, I strongly believe that an investor's primary task is to improve his stock of worldy wisdom, and apply learnings from various fields to investing activities. For example, an understanding of past financial bubbles, can help one to avoid incipient bubbles and protect one's capital. Hence, constant self-education is very important.
To expand my worldly wisdom, I read widely. However, I often find myself struggling to understand complex subjects like psychology, economics, mathematics, etc. Reading these concepts directly can be excruciatingly difficult. So I turn to my love for stories to understand these concepts better. That's why you will find Morton Hunt's Story of Psychology, Sylvia Nasar' Grand Pursuit and Anthony Gottlieb's Dream of Reason in my bookshelf. These books weave complex subjects into stories, and also include short biographies of individuals who contributed to these fields. The biographies also have an added benefit of helping the reader to understand the context, historical setting & personality traits which helped to generate these world-changing ideas.
So next time you are trying to understand a complex topic - try to find a book explaining the history of innovations in that area.
I read history for both pleasure and learning. I have been always interested in stories. As I grew older and read more, I realised that Fact is often stranger than Fiction. The stories I came across in history were much more engrossing to me than anything I ever read in fiction.
Let me give some examples which would be of interest to my readers (who I assume have a bent of mind towards finance):
The movie Wall Street, is one of the most popular movies about powerful and unscrupulous financiers from the 1980s. It is a fictional story. But surely the events detailed in Barbarians at the Gate, are equally or more exciting.
Or take the fact that while Gordon Gekko is a fictional character, he is loosely based on a real financier called Ivan Boesky whose exploits are narrated in Den of Thieves. Both went to prison for their efforts.
That brings me to the next reason I read history - self-education. As I wrote in this blog's About Page, I strongly believe that an investor's primary task is to improve his stock of worldy wisdom, and apply learnings from various fields to investing activities. For example, an understanding of past financial bubbles, can help one to avoid incipient bubbles and protect one's capital. Hence, constant self-education is very important.
To expand my worldly wisdom, I read widely. However, I often find myself struggling to understand complex subjects like psychology, economics, mathematics, etc. Reading these concepts directly can be excruciatingly difficult. So I turn to my love for stories to understand these concepts better. That's why you will find Morton Hunt's Story of Psychology, Sylvia Nasar' Grand Pursuit and Anthony Gottlieb's Dream of Reason in my bookshelf. These books weave complex subjects into stories, and also include short biographies of individuals who contributed to these fields. The biographies also have an added benefit of helping the reader to understand the context, historical setting & personality traits which helped to generate these world-changing ideas.
So next time you are trying to understand a complex topic - try to find a book explaining the history of innovations in that area.
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