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.”

Ladies and gentleman, it’s time to rewrite my Wikipedia page.  Before reading “Bossy Pants,” I had no idea Tina Fey and I had eaten at the same Red Lobster.

It happened in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which for her was a compromise midpoint destination for family Christmas.  For me, it was a well-planned Friday trip with college friends.

In our tiny college town there was only one Red Lobster-level dining option and none that had tasty cheddar biscuits.  So weeks in advance, one of my suitemates gathered commitments from roughly 10 people to make the trip to the closest Red Lobster 45 minutes away in Williamsport.  Many biscuits were consumed on site and many, many more were squirreled away in purses and brought back to campus for future eating.

How else have Tina and I intersected?  Well, in the book she talks about the anthrax scare at 30 Rockefeller Plaza when she left the building for a few hours and returned to NBC News chief Andy Lack updating the SNL staff on the situation.  Last year, Lack was very briefly the head of my news organization.

While I did not enjoy this book as much as the one by fellow SNL alum Amy Poehler (who I like a little more), it was still an entertaining look behind the scenes of a person who has had a huge impact on my generation’s pop culture.  It also reminded me that I hadn’t seen all of her show 30 Rock, so I started watching from the beginning on Netflix.

And that’s when yet another thing came up during a conversation between Fey’s character Liz Lemon and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy.

Jack: “So, big plans for the holidays?”
Liz: “Yeah, my parents are coming with my brother and we’re gonna go see Jersey Boys on Broadway and we’re gonna go to that restaurant where they pretend it’s Mars!”

You’ll recall that restaurant came up two books ago and was the scene of a delightful dinner I had years ago with my cousin.

That’s it for direct links, but Tina and I share a similar outlook on vacations.  Specifically, our complete lack of interest in going on a cruise.

“Luxury cruises were designed to make something unbearable — a two-week transatlantic crossing — seem bearable.  There’s no need to do it now.  There are planes.  You wouldn’t take a vacation where you ride on a stagecoach for two months but there’s all-you-can-eat shrimp.”

She also imparts great advice about the fact there is no such thing as perfect in writing, because there are deadlines and when the show goes on, you can’t change anything.

“You have to try you hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.”

This is what I tell people when they ask how I get started writing something.  At work, shows are going on the air and here, well, I have other things to do so I can’t sit here all day.  Perfect isn’t coming, so just write and move on.

She also has strong words for people who feel the need to let the world know they think women are not funny.  She doesn’t care.

“It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good.  I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”

It’s not often I see the movie version of a story and then proceed to the book.  Off the top of my head, I actually can’t think of another example, but I just did that with Markus Zusak’s “The Book Thief.”

For most books, having seen the movie would provide too many spoilers to fully enjoy the written version.  Sure, there are plenty of pieces left out, but you know the highlights and especially the ending.

This story was different.  I knew the ending when I flipped to page 1, and that was okay, since the narrator, Death, pretty much tells you the end right from the start.

Death turns out to be a really great narrator and should definitely keep up that line of work.  The main focus of the book is Liesel Meminger, a young girl whose mother gives her up to an older couple in Nazi Germany.  Liesel is the ultimate protagonist you root for and the actress that plays her in the movie, Sophie Nelisse, is downright perfect.

Death takes us through dual storylines involving Liesel and a man named Max, which are destined to come together, and he handles our expectations of the merger appropriately.

“The juggling comes to an end now, but the struggling does not.  I have Liesel Meminger in one hand, Max Vandenburg in the other.  Soon, I will clap them together.  Just give me a few pages.”

Death is busy at this time in history and uses his unique position to relate Liesel’s world and the wider one around her in a way that takes a perspective outside of a human body.

“You might argue that I make the rounds no matter what year it is, but sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little,” the narrator says.  “They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls.  A few bombs usually do the trick.”

As the bombs fall throughout Europe, Liesel wants nothing more than to read, and to do that she needs books.  Wartime in a poor family is not the ideal set of conditions to acquire said texts, so, as the title suggests, she is fond of stealing.  Her most frequent target is the house of her town’s mayor, in a library kept by his wife.

One of her selections involved motivations straight out of “Billy Madison,” who tells his teacher he drew a blue duck in class because he had never seen a blue duck before.

“Typically, many of the titles tempted her, but after a good minute or two in the room, she settled for A Song in the Dark, most likely because the book was green, and she did not yet own a book of that color.”

For all the evil in the book, which should be expected when your narrator is Death, the story has an overwhelming balance of showing the good in people and what happens when you take the time to care.

Death sums it up.

“The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time.  The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst.  I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.”

I don’t watch horror movies.  The last thing I would ever do is watch one before bed since I often dream about things I saw or thought about late in the day.  In a similar vein, as much as I was riveted by the story and wanted to get to the end of the book, Marisha Pessl’s “Night Film” was not bedtime reading for me.

The depth of this book is fantastic and anyone who is a crime story fan will love it.  I was extremely impressed by the way the print version is presented with believable recreations of media websites like CNN and Vanity Fair. 

The story follows an investigative journalist and his look into the life of reclusive horror director Stanislas Cordova and his family.  Cordova is a cult legend with a legion of fans who gather for ultra-secret screenings and an even more secret website devoted to his life and work.

The reporter, Scott McGrath, at one point gains access to the site and reads about the concept “freak the ferocious out.”

“There were quite a few pages on the site devoted to Cordova’s supposed life philosophy, which meant, in a nutshell, that to be terrified, to be scared out of your skin, was the beginning of freedom, of opening your eyes to what was graphic and dark and gorgeous about life, thereby conquering the monsters of your mind.”

It’s safe to say Cordova films would not be in my Netflix queue at any point whatsoever.  Unless by some Cordovian way they creepily appeared on their own, in which case I would throw my TV in a river and move to another country.

One of the main themes in the book is the effect that Cordova has on people and the way that those he works with and other characters make choices to completely change their lives.  He mentions in an interview the three words sovereign, deadly and perfect to describe the perfect shot in one of his movies.  Perfect hits on that theme.

“The understanding that life and wherever you find yourself at the present are absolutely ideal.  No regret, no guilt, because even if you were stuck it was only a cocoon to break out of — setting your life loose.”

Now that is a Cordova-related thing I can get behind.  Of course, it’s not always true, but isn’t it nice to think that no matter the challenge, there’s always the potential to break free and flourish into something better?

Nora, a young woman who assists McGrath, spent part of her childhood living in a nursing home, and only left when a resident handed her a bunch of money and told her to scram.

“So I scrammed,” she says.  “I walked to the Kissimmee station and got on a bus to New York.  People don’t realize how easy life is to change.  You just get on the bus.”

Again, it’s rarely so simple.  But at the same time, even a smaller version of getting on the bus is all you need to get going.

Nora works as a hostess at a fancy restaurant when McGrath meets her, but later changes jobs to a place that brought tremendous 2006 flashbacks for me.

“Did you miss work tonight?” [McGrath] asked.  “The Four Seasons?”
“Oh, no.  My last day as yesterday.  The normal girl game back from maternity leave.  Tomorrow I’m starting as a waitress at Mars 2112.”

That, of course, is the restaurant in Times Square themed like you were visiting Mars in the year 2112 for your meal.  I went there with my cousin Lauren and it was everything we dreamed it could be.  

Yesterday at the grocery store a young man standing near the entrance tried to hand me a flyer as I grabbed a cart and pivoted toward the door.  I gave it right back.  His mistake was not following the advice of former Wisconsin Congressman Tom Petri.

That wisdom is relayed by Alexandra Petri, his daughter and a Washington Post columnist, in her book “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.”  She talks about being a kid on the campaign trail and how their team would hand out Packers schedules at parades.

“I always find that if you say ‘Have a thing,’ they don’t know what it is, so they take it!”

The guy at Giant gave me the flyer while explaining that it had to do with purchasing steamed crabs.  That gave me the opportunity to awkwardly hand it back to someone who wasn’t ready, setting off a fumble and near drop of said piece of paper that was useless to this non-seafood eater.

Petri’s book covers a lot of what it is to grow up, find your things and move through a world that at times finds those things (and you) odd.  Interspersed throughout is all kinds of wry humor and experiences like not having any modeling experience or serious aspiration to model and applying for America’s Next Top Model.

Her responses for that last one reminded me of my application for The Bachelor:

“‘What would bother you most about living in a house with nine to thirteen other people?’ (‘Not knowing more specifically the number of people in the house.’)”

Petri talks about how great stories come from times when things don’t go as planned and you end up looking like an idiot, and the fact that in the grand historical scheme of things we have solved so many big life problems that we end up worrying about things that are not exactly life-threatening.

“Embarrassing ourselves in front of strangers is literally one of the worst things that can happen to us,” she says.   “It’s in the slot where polio used to be.”

Somehow we arrive at adulthood where other people see a person who looks like an adult and give us a frightening lack of supervision:

“The odd thing is that nobody stops you,” Petri writes.  “I can rent a car.  I can vote and walk into an office and — doesn’t anyone notice that I am secretly twelve?”

She has much more insight on our modern world and how we perceive success and attention, plus what it’s like to be a public writer — specifically a female one and the challenge of being judged on looks first.

Finally I have to thank her for sharing this take on Statuary Hall, which she says is her favorite part of the U.S. Capitol.

“Apart from Will [Rogers] and Bob [La Follette], my favorites were the statues from Hawaii — the big statue of King Kamehameha with gold trim that was always garlanded in leis, and the big boxy statue of someone called Father Damien who looked like a deranged refrigerator.”

This was one of those things I marked to go back and Google later just to see the picture, and I could not have been any more pleased with the outcome.  Seriously, check out the Father Damien statue.

Publishers put lots of focus on book covers in order to grab the attention of readers, but there’s a far better way to basically guarantee I pick up your book: deckle edge pages.

Granted, they have nothing to do with the words printed on the pages themselves, but for some reason the deckle design instantly makes me feel positive.

At a bookstore in D.C. earlier this year I stood in front of the section for one of my favorite authors, Paul Auster, trying to decide which of his works to tackle next.  They had about eight of his novels, but the only one with deckle edges made the decision no contest.

“Moon Palace” was not my favorite Auster work, but I did enjoy the story of M.S. Fogg’s experience sabotaging and rebuilding his life through adventures accompanied and inspired by a somewhat crazy old man.

Auster always has great detail that shows how much research he puts into his settings.  Fogg has an uncle named Victor who plays the clarinet and is in a few different bands during his life.  Fogg talks about one iteration, called the Moon Men, dropping a reference that is not about a singer named Taylor, yet in a modern reading actually kind of fits.

“There was no question they had put together an original act, and when I went to see them perform the next night, the songs struck me as a revelation — filled with humor and spirit, a boisterous form of mayhem that mocked everything from politics to love.  Victor’s lyrics had a jaunty, dittylike flavor to them, but the underlying tone was almost Swiftian in its effect.”

Apologies to Jonathan, but Swiftian is only going in one direction in terms of cultural understanding, and it’s not back toward the 18th century.

In terms of aphorisms and general wisdom, Uncle Victor is second only to the old man named Thomas Effing, for whom Fogg works in the second half of the book.  Victor is largely responsible for raising Fogg and clearly has a desire to impart as much as he can on the kid.  That includes wonderful baseball analogies.

“As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone.  A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws.”

While working for Effing, Fogg is sent on a journey to a museum, which Effing notes was designed by Stanford White, who also designed the buildings at Fogg’s university and was involved in a salacious and true story involving a girl and a murder at Madison Square Garden.

Effing also talks about Thomas Moran, who he says helped talk him into a trip out west that plays a big part in the story.  I flagged this page because I was vaguely sure Moran had feature pieces in what I consider the coolest room in Washington.  A quick search confirmed that yes, his works are part of the second floor salon at the Renwick Gallery across the street from the White House.  Sadly they are majorly changing the room during a renovation, but wouldn’t it be an amazing place to play whiffle ball?

My final note on this book is one of pure coincidence.  I do the bulk of my reading on the train to work, and one night before heading out I was watching The Simpsons during dinner.  In the episode, Lisa is invited to join Mensa and told to go to an address on Euclid Street.

Then half an hour later in “Moon Palace” Fogg says about Effing, “Every morning he would test himself by walking down Euclid Avenue at rush hour…”

Before two weeks ago, I did not know John Steinbeck was a war correspondent in World War II. I learned that while reading “Once There Was A War,” a collection of pieces he filed during that time.

Steinbeck went to Europe in 1943, which was several years after “The Grapes of Wrath” shot him to stardom and he won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Needless to say, this is not the kind of career move we see these days.

The book is a fascinating way to look at the war, stripping away the usual nuts and bolts of battle that you might find in a typical World War II collection. Instead, what we have is Steinbeck’s style of painting vivid pictures of characters and situations that put you in that space.

My favorite example of a Steinbeck description is the third chapter in “The Grapes of Wrath” where he spends a few pages showing in intimate detail a turtle crossing a road. In this book, an emblematic piece involves soldiers massed on a transport ship.

“There are several ways of wearing a hat or a cap. A man may express himself in the pitch or tilt of his hat, but not with a helmet. There is only one way to wear a helmet. It won’t go on any other way. It sits level on the head, low over the eyes and ears, low on the back of the neck. With your helmet on you are a mushroom in a bed of mushrooms.”

This is what I love about the book. Steinbeck talks about certain operational things, but really it’s about the soldier’s experience with waiting, with equipment, with each other.

Oh and a goat. More specifically, Wing Commander William Goat of the Royal Air Force, who is described in a chapter titled “Alcoholic Goat.”

“This goat has only one truly bad habit. He loves beer, and furthermore is able to absorb it in such quantities that even the mild, nearly non-alcoholic English beer can make him tipsy. In spite of orders to the contrary he is able to seek out the evil companions who will give him beer. Once inebriated, he is prone to wander about sneering. He sneers at the American Army Air Force, he sneers at the Labor party, and once he sneered at Mr. Churchill.”

We can’t help but see this goat sidling up to a certain guy who scratches him behind the ear, makes sure a supervisor isn’t looking, then leads him over to the stash of beer. And then they sneer at Churchill together, because of course.

Obviously I recommend everything in the Steinbeck library, but this one is a unique look at war told in what amounts to a bunch of short stories only a few pages long but full of detail and insight.

@cjhannas Ok, check out AN EMBER IN THE ASHES by Sabaa Tahir. I’m 150 pages in and feel like it’s a mutual win.

— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) June 5, 2015

Is it lazy to begin a post with someone else’s tweet?  What if I follow that up with another one that suggests I followed through on this recommendation?

@cjhannas i adore that you order a book because i say a thing. #somuchpressure

— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) June 5, 2015

And now you may be thinking that since I read “Dark Places” so long ago, how could I possibly be just writing about “An Ember In The Ashes” now?  Well, as sometimes happens, I’m a little behind on the book posts.  Get ready for a few in a row!

I connected with the protagonist Elias in a very key way since he and I are both a member of the tall kids club, which he lays out when talking about his longtime friend and emerging love interest Helene:

“She stands two inches shy of six feet — a half-foot shorter than me.”

That actually makes Elias an inch taller than me.

TIL I’m the same height and weight as Steph Curry #importantinfo https://t.co/xZFc4imLtD

— Chris Hannas (@cjhannas) July 16, 2015

Elias and Helene are graduating from a military academy where they’ve spent basically their whole lives.  Suddenly they are chosen to compete for the right to take over the entire empire, but first must make it through a series of mysterious trials.

During one, Elias (whose name I still can’t decide how to pronounce) has to walk through a battlefield filled with the bodies of everyone he’ll supposedly kill in the future.

“How do I make it stop?” he asks a boy.  “I have to make it stop.”
“It’s already done,” the boy says.  “This is your destiny — it is written.”

Hm, where have I seen that before…oh, right, just to the left of my computer monitor:

Of course with any empire there’s another side with the regular people, and Tahir sets up an interesting dynamic by having the first half of the book alternate between chapters narrated by Elias and ones told by Laia.  She is a scholar whose brother is taken by someone just like Elias, and from the start the two of them are on an inevitable collision course.  It’s a perfectly done dual narrator setup.

Laia’s ultimate goal is to get her brother Darin freed, and often spends time wondering if she ever will, and what will happen if she fails.

“No more,” she tells herself about the what-ifs.  “Nan once said that there’s hope in life.  If Darin’s alive, nothing else matters.  If I can get him out, the rest can be fixed.”

For the generally optimistic among us, that’s the basis for so much.  If you’re still kicking, there’s always a way.

Laia’s pragmatism and loyalty to others clashes at times with Helene’s personality, which helps draw Elias in.  Helene is the obvious choice for him, but he can’t help but think about Laia no matter how hard he works to put her out of his mind.

“I try for days not to think about her.  In the end, I stop resisting.  Life is hard enough without having to avoid entire rooms in my own head.”

Amen, brother.