One day we hope to retire

You thought you would never see the day, but here it is: Melody tries to adult! (Yes, a complete contradiction of this blog’s URL, I know.)

I had two objectives in mind when I started this book: first, to gain a foothold in this huge and daunting sphere (a sense of the basics, so to speak), and hence second, to acquire a modicum of interest in dealing with my finances, instead of chucking it aside in favour of idk pirouetting down the streets.

In both objectives the book was successful — the writing was engaging and concise, covering broadly a history of the markets, the two dominant schools of thought for investment strategies, some popular strategies now to manage risk, and finally practical suggestions on how to diversify our layman portfolios across different financial instruments depending on our appetite for risk. Along the way I learned about price multiples, futures, and stock options, although I had to google my way through some of the finance jargon because Malkiel didn’t think I was ignorant enough not to know them already.

The biggest point Malkiel keeps hammering is to put most of our money in index funds, trusting in the efficiency of markets to outperform any hedge fund. Other nuances in investing are to consider the commission fees each transaction incurs, and taxes either charged or offset by the purchase or sale of financial products. The book is tailored for USA, so I skimmed past a lot of the tax advice not knowing if it was applicable in our context, but the point of it was absorbed: do further research on Singapore’s tax laws.

Given that I have read a total of 0 other finance books, I am obviously no judge of the truth of Malkiel’s gospel. As a book to get started though, I think it performed admirably and now I am 15% on my way to sitting down one day and making a Google Sheet spreadsheet with arbitrary numbers on what to allocate my salary on. I’ll do that this year I swear.

Rating: 4.5/5

— A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton G. Malkiel, 2015 edition, first published in 1973)

The sole vocation of falling in love

 

Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other’s eyes — not knowing they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment.

Can you tell when authors write a story that draws too close from home? I thought, after finishing, that this book probably hewed too close to life, and the lack of distance somehow resulted in a less satisfying piece. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald is not the author of one of my favourite books of all time (The Great Gatsby, duh) for nothing. There are moments scattered all over of gasp-evincing beauty, especially when he touches on the euphoria of falling in love — the hush as the world narrows in on the lovers is palpable off the pages. The story holds together competently, and even bears the mark of any classic: it will stay with you long after you’ve put it down.

Anthony Patch is a man quite untroubled with life’s practicalities, having a serviceable passive income in expectation of a great deal more when his grandfather dies. And so it’s much easier to preach a philosophy of nihilism and devote himself to the pursuit of nothing, trading witticisms with fellow Harvard-graduate Maury Noble and mocking the ambitions of a third friend Richard Caramel, especially when sacrificing taste for commercial success is crass. When he meets the individualistic and beautiful Gloria Gilbert, he experiences the acute desire for something for the first time in his life — and surprisingly and suddenly, so does she. Love sweeps them both in a dizzying whirl where no impulse is unheeded, until inane calculations of cost catch up and leave two desiccated husks incapable of any labour but in possession of an unhealthy amount of pride.

Make no mistake, the characters are not likeable in the least. But Fitzgerald’s caricatures of the upper class, the hilarious epigrams, the sheer lushness of New York City in the Jazz Age, the exuberant interjection of lines set in a play in the middle of a novel — Fitzgerald doing that thing where he winks at the readers saying I-know-you-know-they-are-actors — propel the action for a good part. When Anthony meets Gloria, the pages blaze with the sheer strength of their personalities and the intensity particular to the first stages of romance; Fitzgerald is sublime in enacting that breathless wave, the sense that nothing else matters but the illusion of the other.

The book’s action flags when love’s freshness leaves, and given the selfishness and narcissism of our characters, there’s not much to keep the reader around, except for that dogged determination to see through the wreck. Unfortunately our characters never find something to strive for; falling for another was a feat in itself. Many a page went to recursing through yet another drunken party and self-pitying spiel. In between a war came and gave us and the couple’s lives some variety, but the delight of the couple’s reunion didn’t even last through a page before things fell further apart. Our couple is truly incapable of action beyond enjoyment of spoonfed wealth.

What sticks in the end is the sobering impression one is left with of the idle upper classes — the sense that it is possible to live a life devoid of reflection and action beyond reaching for immediate enjoyment. The predecessor of The Great Gatsby feels less accomplished as a work of art, but rings with familiar themes of excess and the rich’s carelessness.

Rating: 4/5

— The Beautiful and Damned (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922)

 

Outsiders, all of us

This is prose-poetry masquerading as a novel, a love letter to the form of civilisation most of us find ourselves in now.

Each section is short, the length of a paragraph or two, painting a vignette of a different city filled with esoteric wonders: mazes of towers, alleys, and canals; assortments of pickpockets and lovers; clouds of desires and memories. Invisible Cities follows the format of a travelogue, of which traveller is Marco Polo; interspersed within the depictions are dialogues between Marco and the great emperor Kublai Khan which take on a meditative quality, a moment of contemplation as the beating heart of an empire takes counsel from an explorer of lands beyond his realm. Between the two there are mutual respect and a deep desire to decipher the core of the human experience, a pattern that replicates regardless of the myriad forms a city takes.

Within its pages, despite the foreign architecture, we will find familiar the sense of wonder with our cities’ exuberance, tempered with the same alienation, a kind of outsider’s loneliness belonging both to the traveller and the city’s inhabitants: the same quest within ourselves searching, aching for something we don’t know but want. “If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off.”

What are all the possible permutations of buildings and people we can find? What does it mean for a city to belong within and without the same empire? Winding like a spiral staircase across eleven themes, titled Memory, Desire, Signs, Thin, Trading, Eyes, Names, Dead, Sky, Continuous, and Hidden, the book provides plenty of fodder for introspection, for dreaming of fantastical lands and their light and shadows, and then forever finding aspects of our homes reflected in these reveries.

Rating: 4/5

— Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver, 1972)