With 19 books done and the chance to hit 20 for the year so close, my initial thought was to read one of the shorter Steinbecks on my bookshelf to close out the year.  Then I looked at my spreadsheet and noticed I had already read two of his in 2015 and that option quickly soured.

So I asked for help:

@cjhannas Have you read Station Eleven? It looks like a good year-ender. ?

— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) December 25, 2015

This turned out to be an excellent cjhannas move.  Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” was a tremendous year-ender, which also happened to be about the near-end of the world.  At least the human part of it.

I was a little annoyed at first with the way the story jumps around to different sets of characters in different places and different time periods, but as the book went on I found my reaction to a new chapter was more like, “OH! These people! Need to know what’s going on with them.”

The basic premise is that a ridiculously effective flu has wiped out most of the population and those who remain live in small groups in otherwise abandoned cities or as travelers.  Or as a traveling group that performs Shakespeare plays when they stop in a town.

There’s an old actor and his bevy of ex-wives, a young actress and her comic book, a reformed paparazzo, a prophet, an artist, and a swimming pool with double moon light.  Mandel drops hints and reminders about how they all connect that leave you saying, “Riiiiight, yes yes,” as the pieces fit together and all the players figure out more and more what the post-flu word is.

At times it’s a little depressing, but also made me think a lot about what would happen if the lights went off and never came back on.  And yet, there’s an underlying hope in some of the characters about returning to what they once knew that is refreshing in such a setting.

It was also hard not to think about the Fox show “Last Man On Earth,” which doesn’t explain why many of the people in the world died, but has a similar focus on the small group that is left.  That show is intentionally much more comedy focused but touches on similar ideas like the first task of figuring out if you’re the only one left, and if not, how do you find the others?  In that case the main character spray paints “Alive in Tucson” on billboards and eventually some people show up. 

In the book, people meet by accident in small travels, and then wonder and dream about the world beyond.

My favorite part of reading a book of short stories, like B.J. Novak’s “One More Thing,” is that unless you cheat and flip ahead to check, you have no idea if the particular story you’re reading is one page long or 10.

When you read a novel, you can sense by the dwindling number of pages on your right side that things are coming to an end and can make assumptions about what is getting wrapped up and when.  You know when there’s time for a surprise and when it’s time to go.

Not so with short stories.  A twist to relaunch in a new direction or another that brings a sudden end are equally possible.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read that is mixed with stories that are both insightful and funny and hit all the notes of stories we tell as humans.  As a collection, they cover a lot of ground and feature occasional recall to earlier stories that make for delightful moments of recognizing something clever just happened.

There is the story of the guy who invented the calendar and had a plan for all months to be 40 days, but then had to adapt to his audience.

“Finally, I just told everyone that this would be the last day of January, and months would be just 30 days instead of 40.  But there wasn’t enough time to get the word out.  So to be safe, we have to make this month 31 days, and then we’ll make the rest 30.  Not a big deal.  Everyone is excited to see Febuary — including me!”

There’s also an elementary school principle who calls an assembly to tell the kids he’d like to eliminate math altogether.  He asks them to consider the difference between themselves and a happy retirement community.

“The difference is ‘rithmetic!  A retired person living by the ocean, just doing a little reading and writing till the end of their days — that’s the dream, right?’

In another favorite, a guy takes the adage “If I had a nickel…” for every time he spilled a cup of coffee and works out, in great detail, the economics behind making that a business.

And then there’s one of the shortest stories, which is brilliantly succint:

“I was sad that summer was over.  But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.”

This was book number 19 of the year for me.  I’ve long wanted to get back to 20, something I haven’t accomplished since 2009.  Time to get reading.

Telling a story involving complicated financial dealings, as Michael Lewis does in “The Big Short” is difficult enough.  Doing the same on a movie screen for a broad audience is a downright Herculean task.

After reading the book, which recounts the way mortgage backed securities caused the financial system to fail in so many ways in 2007, I was interested to see how the movie version was going to play out.  Specifically, would they be able to quickly and clearly describe a collateralized debt obligation to someone who has never heard of that before?

Before reading the book I had a basic idea of those terms and how it all worked.  For years I’ve listened to an excellent NPR podcast called Planet Money that attempts to put those complex financial things into plain English that most of us can understand.

Lewis tells the story of the collapse through the guys who saw it coming.  While mortgage lenders gave money to riskier and riskier borrowers and banks packaged those loans into worse and worse quality bonds, and then sold insurance on those bonds, a few people saw how crazy the whole system was acting and bet against it.

As one person puts it, they saw a house that was already engulfed in flames and someone was standing right in front of it offering them the chance to buy fire insurance.

One of the keys to the entire collapse was the extension of those loans to people who should never have been allowed to borrow money.  Steve Eisman, a hedge fund manager that Lewis highlights in the book, puts it this way:

“The subprime mortgage loan was a cheat.  You’re basically drawing someone in by telling them, ‘You’re going to pay off all your other loans — your credit card debt, your auto loans — by taking this one loan.  And look at the low rate!’  But that low rate isn’t the real rate.  It’s a teaser rate.”

The people getting the loans didn’t fully understand the ramifications of what happened when their interest rate shot up extraordinarily after two years.

Lewis recounts an email sent by another fund manager, Michael Burry, describing just what it looked like from the outside to those who were seeing what was happening:

“Those 2005 mortgages are only now reaching the end of their teaser rate periods, and it will be 2008 before the 2006 mortgages get there.  What sane person on Earth would conclude in early 2007, smack dab in the midst of the mother of all teaser rate scams, that the subprime fallout will not result in contagion?  The bill literally has not even come due.”

The bill came due.  Quickly.  All over the country.  We all saw what happened.  But as mortgage lenders and some investment firms went out of business and big banks got huge bailouts, those who saw cashed in those insurance contracts on the flaming housing bonds and made billions of dollars.

One thing the movie nails is this moment, particularly with Steve Carrell playing Eisman (or a character with a different name whose entire presence mirrors that of Eisman in the book).  Lewis describes most of the guys betting against the banks as having almost a crusading attitude, of finally being able to stick it to institutions that for too long have profited on practices that screw normal people.  And yet, for their big bet to pay off, they need Armageddon.

“Being short in 2007 and making money from it was fun, because we were short bad guys,” said Steve Eisman.  “In 2008 it was the entire financial system at risk.  We were still short.  But you don’t want the system to crash.  It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and you’re Noah.  You’re on the ark.  Yeah, you’re okay.  But you are not happy looking out at the flood.  That’s not a happy moment for Noah.”