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Books of 2025Q1 on the Price Writer Podcast Episode 25
12 Plays3 days ago
Books mentioned:
Best Book of the Quarter
Aspiring Actuarial Leaders – The Modern Manager’s Toolkit - Julia Lessing
Insurance Books
Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It - Liran Einav, Ray Fisman, Amy Finkelstein
The Art of Uncertainty - David Spiegelhalter
Non-fiction Books
KIND - Graham Allcott
Dare to Lead - Brené Brown
The Authority Gap - Mary Ann Sieghart
Zig Ziglar's Secrets of Closing the Sale - Zig Ziglar
The Imposter Cure - Dr Jessamy Hibberd
$100M Offers - Alex Hormozi
Politics on the Edge - Rory Stewart
Apocalypse Never - Michael Shellenberger
Traction - Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
Let It Go: My Extraordinary Story - From Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist - Stephanie Shirley
Dear Female Founder - Lu Li
Be Useful - Arnold Schwarzenegger (twice)
Fiction Book
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Kids Book
Reaching for the Moon: The Autobiography of NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson - Katherine Johnson
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Transcript
Introduction to 2025 Q1 Book Reviews
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello! this video I'm going to do a rundown of the books I read in quarter one of 2025. So I read 17 books this quarter, they're mostly non-fiction but there is a fiction book in there as
Insights from 'Aspiring Actuarial Leaders'
00:00:15
Speaker
well.
00:00:15
Speaker
The best book I read is Aspiring Actuarial Leaders, The Modern Managers Toolkit by Julia Lessing. It's a really great book and I genuinely recommend it. So if you are a senior analyst thinking about moving into management or a new manager or even a new department head, i think it's this is a really good book for you to read.
00:00:36
Speaker
In pricing especially, i know it's aimed at actuaries, but I think it's got quite ah transferable skills for someone working in a pricing team. And it's really good for learning actual skills and actual ways of working in a team with other people and managing and leading that team.
Exploring Insurance Industry Books
00:00:59
Speaker
It's very practical, it's very do this, try this, work through this, it's very structured way of doing things. You get some good workbook style activities to use and actually you can measure your progress quite well.
00:01:17
Speaker
and how you actually do these. it's It's very clear that these are things that you develop by doing. So it tells you or it helps you to learn how to do these things, how to do management, how to help people, how to develop a sort of secure environment for people where they're comfortable, how to deal with mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable. So it talks about how to be honest about them but and also how to avoid them.
00:01:45
Speaker
I think it's really good. So I myself found it quite difficult when I first became a department head. I went to managing about 12 people. i was leading managers who had their own teams and I found that a really difficult transition.
00:01:59
Speaker
And I think if I'd worked through this book whilst I was a manager of a smaller team, I would have really developed those skills that were useful when I stepped up. So definitely recommend this book.
00:02:11
Speaker
The next two books are both insurance related books. So the first one is Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It. That's by Liren Inav, Ray Fissman and Amy Finkelstein.
00:02:27
Speaker
This is a good book. So anyone that works in insurance, particularly pricing, should probably read this book. it It's pretty much an entire book about anti-selection, but it is fantastic.
00:02:40
Speaker
It really makes you think about why so many of the products are structured in the way that they are, why so much pricing is structured in the way why a lot of the market operates in certain ways, and how the world outside of insurance just does not get that.
00:02:57
Speaker
and what we should do about that, what they are doing about it, how they, why they've written the book to actually try and explain that to people. I think we've all seen startup ideas where we're like, not sure that's going to work.
00:03:11
Speaker
And the reason we're not sure that's going to work is because people are open to anti-selection. It's an insurance that you just think to yourself, only people that think they're going to claim are going to buy that insurance.
00:03:24
Speaker
Particularly, they run through the example of divorce insurance. and So who is likely to buy divorce insurance? It's got to be people that on some level think there's some possibility that their marriage might split in the future.
00:03:39
Speaker
and Nobody who is happily rosy-eyed in the middle of their marriage is going to buy this insurance. say So it's it's
Understanding Leadership Qualities
00:03:49
Speaker
a it's an example that they use. It's very powerful. Really makes you think about who...
00:03:55
Speaker
what about the way that people behave when they buy insurance products there's lots of other examples as well they go really deeply into the area of medical cover life cover they really cover the products where we genuinely need to ask lots of questions and collect lots of useful information like on car like on home like on life assurance, ones that are where we're really exposed to being selected against.
00:04:27
Speaker
And they also go through the products where it's not such a good idea to ask lots and lots of questions, such as medical insurance, where you do want it to be available for everyone and you don't necessarily want too much of the self-selection pressures forcing people out the system.
00:04:47
Speaker
So it's very good. It also goes through some of the court cases that have happened in insurance, some of the American US Supreme Court rulings that have really just been bonkers.
00:05:00
Speaker
and how people just do not understand anti-selection in the real world, and how they come along and think that insurance operates in a way that is antiquated or bad for them, or something like that.
00:05:15
Speaker
But the reality is it operates in the way that it has to, and it is a good way. It's just people need to understand why it works how it does. So the next book is The Art of Uncertainty. Again, this is a really good book. It's been number one on the Amazon charts for months. I'm glad i I've noticed it when I've looked for Pricewriter.
00:05:38
Speaker
I'm afraid to check where I'm in the charts. And it's always been, it's been top or near the top for, for, see the ages. And I can see why it's a really good book.
00:05:49
Speaker
So it's not specific, it's it's very much about probability and statistics. So it's not absolutely specifically about insurance, but it's incredibly transferable and relevant for what we do.
00:06:02
Speaker
It's also quite interesting to consider that what we largely think of as being probabilities, our opinions most of the time, even things that we're pretty confident like with dice rolls, there are elements of the fact that we we're not always doing controlled experiments and things, so even when we are like it's a fair dice, we're assuming things about that dice and saying that it's fair when we don't necessarily know that's the case actually.
00:06:38
Speaker
And it goes even deeper. So, and you can really think about this weird, like insurance pricing, because when we come up with frequencies and severities and, and then our expense loadings on top of it and all the things we do in the demand layer and stuff like that, these are opinions actually.
00:06:55
Speaker
And it's, I think it's hard for us to admit that they are opinions, but there's so much that goes on. And in fact, this is not reduced or got rid ah of by the idea of data science. And as everyone will know, I'm totally supporter of data science side.
00:07:09
Speaker
And we did data science before we called it data science. It's the same thing. But ultimately, If you only do the data science side, if you're just like, I do not need to do the opinion and the judgment bit and the understanding bit, you this will this will not work.
00:07:26
Speaker
It will fail. You will lose money. Because you are producing opinions using your data that you have no, you've just removed yourself from the control you have over that and the understanding you have over that.
00:07:43
Speaker
particularly in insurance, the world is always in motion. What's in our past data is not what the world's going to be like in future. How things operate, everything's always changing and we will never have enough data.
00:07:58
Speaker
Every claim is different. So every time there is a claim, it is a it is an experiment in the world with a sample space of one.
00:08:10
Speaker
Every policy has a sample space of one. That's the reality. We act like they are homogeneous units that we can all plump together and do lots of fancy analysis on.
00:08:22
Speaker
And to some its extent, that's true, but it's not really true. And that's the point here in the book. These things are all different. They're all in motion. They're all heterogeneous.
00:08:32
Speaker
And we can use statistics on stuff, but we have to also appreciate that a lot of this is built on a lot of foundations and a lot of assumptions. And no matter how much we get dispassionate and use machine learning and all of this for it, the reality is that we are still dealing with extremely uncertain things.
00:08:51
Speaker
So great book, really good, highly recommend. So I'll run down non-fiction books that read. So I read Kind by Graham Alcott.
00:09:02
Speaker
This running businesses or being manager or being a leader of an organisation. So the idea is that you can do this in a way that is kind. And kind is not the same as being nice.
00:09:16
Speaker
So someone who's nice is a pushover. Someone who's nice doesn't check up on things. They don't make sure people are telling the truth and things like that. They don't have difficult conversations.
00:09:29
Speaker
Leaders that are kind will do all of those things, but they do them in a kind way. He used a good example of when Barack Obama had to fire someone, but actually Barack Obama did it in a very emotionally intelligent way that left the person feeling like they appreciated the reasons for the decision, even if they didn't agree with them.
00:09:55
Speaker
And that's, that's what we're talking about. You still have those difficult conversations, but you do it in a kind way. And your initial assumptions are always to see the benefit of the doubt and to be kind to people until you have reason not to.
00:10:13
Speaker
And when you do, you do have those difficult conversations. So I really like this actually. I think it's got very useful tips. And Yeah, I just, I enjoyed it as a book. Next one is Dare to Lead, it's by Brené Brown, and it's similar to Kind, they got a bit mixed up in my brain actually, but this one is about being vulnerable as a leader.
00:10:38
Speaker
So you invite people into your space and your values and you are open with them and you build trust with people that that you can, that reciprocate with you. Reciprocation is quite an important part of it.
00:10:55
Speaker
So you allow yourself to be vulnerable and you work towards an environment where people are comfortable with vulnerability they're comfortable with being quite open and you develop emotional bonds with people I thought this was really good I think again it's a practical book it's something you can use at work it's it's got it's not naive either it does give you good ways of appreciating when things are working or when you might have to change direction or attack with people.
00:11:31
Speaker
Both kind and dare to lead are honest about the fact that sometimes you will need to remove people from your team. Some people will not fit. The next one is The Authority Gaps. This is by Mary Ann Seighart. Now this is an eye-opening book.
00:11:45
Speaker
Even as someone who I would, I would say
Navigating Personal and Professional Challenges
00:11:49
Speaker
I'm pretty, yeah, ah aware of gender sort of politics at work and so on. This is still a real eye-opener. It really made me think about my own office behavior and things that I have seen in the past and ways that people have behaved.
00:12:06
Speaker
And it is full of statistics. It's full of quality studies, it quotes a lot of really hard evidence about how people behave.
00:12:17
Speaker
So as an example, women are interrupted far more often than men in meetings. They're talked over more often and these aren't anecdotal things. She's got hard evidence of recorded meetings that people have written academic papers about. These are big studies into these things.
00:12:34
Speaker
And it does really make you think. i yeah I remember a particular case ah that I witnessed once where a very senior person in organisation, during a talk, during an update being given by a another person, he just he just quite suddenly went,
00:12:54
Speaker
Reviewing Jeremy here, I realised a lot of people listen to this rather than watch it. So he shushed her, he made shushing sounds and moved his hand downwards towards the desk until she stopped talking.
00:13:07
Speaker
And I was the, i it was a meeting I didn't normally go to, but I was really surprised that like by that behaviour, but also that I was the only person that was visibly, because I'm no good at poker face, i was I was the only person that was like,
00:13:23
Speaker
wow, that's quite a surprising way to behave. So the whole book just, it makes you think about how you behave and it made me think back. So it points out that a lot of the times when people greet a group of people, they will generally shake hands with men first and then women.
00:13:42
Speaker
i think that's true. i yeah I think that's something I've observed having read it. I've thought about it as well. How often will you shake hands with the tallest male before anyone else?
00:13:55
Speaker
And it's really odd how I do think that's something that people do. And there's really good evidence that that is the case. So really good book. I think everyone should read it. Zig Ziglar's Secrets of Closing, The Sale. So Zig Ziglar comes up in lots of psychology books as someone to read.
00:14:14
Speaker
I found this quite fun book. I don't think it's really got much useful to it. It's very kind of old style, sort of American sales, clothes, clothes.
00:14:26
Speaker
and all of that. But Zig Ziglar seems like a really nice guy and it's a nice book in the way that it's written. and It's got lovely stories about how he behaves and he uses good things from his family.
00:14:38
Speaker
so yeah, it's quite nice. didn't think it was that useful, but it's quite nice. I read The Imposter Cures. This is by Dr. Jessamy Hibbert. So I found this good actually. I generally don't think as someone who has much imposter syndrome, but actually I do.
00:14:57
Speaker
And this book actually made me think, no, I think this is something I don't have, whereas actually I do. So particularly there is someone in my life that i actually didn't tell I'd written a book because they are an author.
00:15:09
Speaker
And I just felt I would be treading on their toes if I ever mentioned it. But now it's been out for a year. i was a bit like, okay, it's going to seem a bit strange. But because of this book, I was like, yeah, okay, I'm going to tell them I wrote a book and give them a copy.
00:15:24
Speaker
And I am really negative about my own work. If I meet someone and they're like, oh, yeah, I picked up some of your work years ago. i am just like mortified. I'm practically apologizing.
00:15:38
Speaker
And or or someone might say, oh I had cause to read a paper that you wrote 10 years ago. I'm just like, oh, now I'm really sorry.
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure it's, I'm sure I've done much better work than that. But always, I'm just, always feel really negative when people talk about having, having seen any of my old work. And tend to downplay the awards that the the book has won. even in my mind, I think to myself, oh yeah, but it's not a serious award, is it?
00:16:09
Speaker
It's not, yeah. And it's its it's imposter syndrome. These are real things and should be proud of them. So I do think people should read this, even if you, it especially if you think you have got imposter syndrome, but even if you think that you're over it, this is a good book to read.
Climate Change and Broader Implications
00:16:26
Speaker
I read $100 million dollar Offers. It's by Alex Hormosey. It's actually a reread. I read it and was like, no, it seems jam-packed with really useful marketing stuff, but then I didn't really find anything useful from it.
00:16:40
Speaker
So I'd reread it because I was like, well, maybe I, there was a load of stuff and I just haven't tried implementing it whatever. But no, I came away feeling it's quite fluffy It's a little bit bro culture as well, so I definitely don't recommend this one.
00:17:00
Speaker
Politics on the Edge, so that's Rory Stewart's book. he is, I think he's really good and it's a really good book. He is a very interesting character. He reminds me a lot of Ken Clarke, whose biography I've also read.
00:17:17
Speaker
Something interesting in his book and in Ken's Clarke book is that they both admit to quite a lot of failures when it comes to things like handling the media.
00:17:28
Speaker
or dealing with the internal politics of their own party and things like, they do howling mistakes with that. And they're quite honest about it. Neither of them ever admits to any policy failures.
00:17:42
Speaker
So they both, Roy Stewart does tend to come across as, I was always pushing for the right thing and everything I implemented was really good.
00:17:53
Speaker
And the things I didn't and implement implement would have been really good as well. i yeah, and I can't quite get with that view, really, particularly of that period.
00:18:06
Speaker
But he does come across as a very earnest, nice person who is in politics for all good reasons. So I did like the book. I would say it's worth reading.
00:18:17
Speaker
Some stuff will probably, like, get you annoyed, though. and Some of the ways that parliament just operates just are really angering is really inefficient.
00:18:30
Speaker
I read Apocalypse Never by Michael Schellenberger. So, the The premise here is that climate change is a thing, but we don't really need to worry about it so much. There's there's much worse things going on in the world. So like let's try not to worry about it so much, especially as we can burn lots of natural gas and that's nowhere near as bad as coal. So everything will be fine.
00:18:55
Speaker
In a way, ah there's something I agree with him with. He does talk about prioritisation as being an issue. And I can get with this that there are things that are much more important to deal with than other things.
00:19:10
Speaker
But actually climate and environmental policy do tend to be a little bit like scattergun and not really appreciate that we probably ought to try prioritising the issues.
00:19:22
Speaker
He used the example of plastic straws. is it Is it really that big an issue, particularly with there being so much backlash against it that you end up being like, yeah, we ought to deal with the coal thing, but people are busy having arguments about the straw thing.
00:19:39
Speaker
So can get with that. I really didn't like the style this was written in. it So it is lists and it is a long book. Like it is a long, long, long book.
00:19:50
Speaker
And mostly it's chapters about specific subjects like energy, like nuclear power, like wind, like conservation.
00:20:03
Speaker
So, and it's then just pretty much lists inside that. It's it's paragraph structured, but it's very listy. And it's generally lists of why things aren't as bad as they seeing So I actually, I did a very rare thing. The last three chapters of this book were very long. I skipped them and just read the epilogue.
00:20:28
Speaker
But I had soldiered through hundreds of pages by then. I actually halfway through went back and read the introduction because I was like... What's the message of this book meant to be?
00:20:40
Speaker
i just forgot because it's so listy. I just had to go back and remind myself that that it was a about, it is about that there, we shouldn't really worry too much about this.
00:20:52
Speaker
And I think one of things that's quite difficult in the book is that the things that in one chapter, will be lauded as things not to worry about or things to worry about will then be the opposite in other chapters.
00:21:08
Speaker
So for instance, in the section on biodiversity, it's just very like, biodiversity is just not a problem. It's not going to cause any issues if lots of things go extinct.
00:21:22
Speaker
Fine. Okay. Then in when he's writing about how it's okay just to burn lots of natural gas, one of the things he uses as a reason why it's okay to burn lots of natural gas is that wind farms kill lots of birds and that's bad for biodiversity.
00:21:43
Speaker
But he's already told me not to worry about biodiversity. So, and it's like, and it's like, A does not equal B or C in that argument. So just because wind farms kill birds does not mean it's okay to burn natural gas.
00:22:00
Speaker
And the, this is, that this is just pretty common in the book, really. Like nuclear power is okay because it doesn't really kill that many people.
00:22:13
Speaker
And generally, human progress has always been towards being more efficient in the use of energy. So we shouldn't worry because everything's getting more efficient. And it's it's messy logic.
00:22:28
Speaker
So recommend it. Even though I i think there could have been a good book in here because I think some of the points are useful, but it's messy and it's incoherent and it's very dull.
00:22:48
Speaker
It's reviewing Jeremy here and I just wanted to say why i think there could have been a good book in here.
Marketing and Female Founder's Perspectives
00:22:53
Speaker
As I see it, the world has always moved towards getting better and better because of two things.
00:23:00
Speaker
One is capitalism and one is government. So I do think both of them work well together. And i I do think the world can be an optimistic place. I think we can do good things in the future.
00:23:13
Speaker
But it requires human endeavour to actually achieve those things. And just taking an attitude of things aren't really that bad, actually, and getting on with it doesn't seem to me like it's going to solve any problem.
00:23:26
Speaker
But taking an attitude of we can use capitalism and government regulation together to achieve things. That to me would have been a much better message.
00:23:37
Speaker
So I read Traction. This is by Gabriel Feinberg and Justin Mares. It's a useful book, but not an interesting book. So it's a marketing book. It goes into multiple marketing channels and how to use them effectively.
00:23:53
Speaker
So one of them's e-mail marketing. One of them's social advertising. it's It's quite boring, but it's quite useful. Oh, I read Let It Go. this is my extraordinary story from refugee to entrepreneur to philanthropist.
00:24:10
Speaker
It's by Stephanie Shirley. She is really interesting. So she escaped on the Kindertransport from Austria and she went on to found a software company.
00:24:26
Speaker
And she, so this is back in the 60s or the 70s. I think think she actually started in the 60s. And it's one of the very first, like, makers of software. So it's pre-Microsoft.
00:24:41
Speaker
It's really early production of software. But she worked from home and she employed women programmers who also worked from home. Like really, generally, people say words like decades ahead of its time, but this actually was.
00:24:58
Speaker
so So she had a business with no premises, no overheads, none of that. And they would d they would sell software. It was mostly bespoke made software, but they would sell software to people. It was fantastic.
00:25:11
Speaker
And they were all doing this in between raising their families and so on and Absolutely brilliant. So i I really liked all of that.
00:25:22
Speaker
It's another one where I like the startup journey. And at some point it crosses over into being a very big business. And she mostly spends her time as sort of chairperson of this business.
00:25:35
Speaker
And I don't find boardroom discussions terribly exciting. There's one other thing that I find a bit odd about this book. And so she had a very autistic child.
00:25:48
Speaker
And I think that the story she went through, the journey she went through with the care system and everything with this child is very interesting.
00:25:58
Speaker
And it's quite harrowing that I think it's an important story that she's told. But what's difficult is that it'll be 10 or 20 pages of business, then 10 or 20 pages about the autistic child, or it might switch after only a couple of pages.
00:26:17
Speaker
And it just, it's it's a bit like you're changing gear all the time. And I wonder if it might have been better as two books about two separate subjects. both are worthy of talking about, it's just quite hard to read.
00:26:32
Speaker
So next one is I read Dear Female Founder by Lu Li. So this is a collection of letters, they're sort of about three, four pages long each, from successful female founders to other founders.
00:26:50
Speaker
I got this. A friend of mine is about to become a director in a small business. It's the first time she will have been a founder in a business. It's very exciting journey for her.
00:27:04
Speaker
And I just thought this would be a really good book to get her, but I thought I'd best read it first to check it's any good. And I'm not going to be giving it to her, sadly. So the problem is that it's very much targeted at people that are founding technology companies with VC backing and that is so often the area I think people would are most excited to read about in fairness but it's also a micro percentage of the people that actually set up successful businesses.
00:27:38
Speaker
So in that way, I just don't think it's that relevant. Plus, pretty much most of the letters give the same advice, which is build a good team, work hard, listen to customers.
00:27:51
Speaker
it's It's advice that you will hear in lots of places when you start in business. And in fairness, they're quite short letters, so people can't really say much else. but there isn't just, there just really isn't much variety between the letters.
00:28:05
Speaker
So in a way, I think the book is a missed opportunity. I think having a short letter from a multiple female founders that have them give specific advice, not the same advice repeatedly, and having it be a really big mixture of types of businesses, I think that'd be a much more interesting book.
Motivation and Success Strategies
00:28:29
Speaker
And the last non-fiction book is Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger. I actually read this book twice, so I got to the end of it and I read it again, and it's a reread, so it's the, this, I've read it before, this is a really, really good book.
00:28:47
Speaker
If you are feeling like things are quite hard, like your enthusiasm or your motivation is taking a bit of a dent, this is a great book to read.
00:28:58
Speaker
I just, I think Arnold Schwarzenegger is fantastic. So the guy is an environmentalist. He is very strongly supports social justice. He very strongly supports social programs, but he is also slightly right wing and he is fiscally conservative.
00:29:16
Speaker
And he is someone who came to a country as an immigrant. He has a very strong Austrian accent and yet is still a massive movie star. I just think the guy's brilliant.
00:29:28
Speaker
And the way that he goes about things is really brilliant as well. He's very caring, very, he's actually very emotionally intelligent. And one of the really interesting things in a lot of his stories is how much he got treated like what we, how we used to say that people get treated in, ah in, in they're treated like bimbos.
00:29:51
Speaker
So he is, people are surprised he is articulate. People are surprised he is intelligent. People assume that he won't be any good at things.
00:30:01
Speaker
They assume that his only interest is in stardom and fame. And actually he's very deeply caring about things. He's very good at planning, very good at working through and achieving things.
00:30:15
Speaker
He's, I just, I think the guy's brilliant. Really, really good. I thoroughly recommend this book. It's, it's a structured way of making maintaining motivation and being successful, but it's actually really useful and practical.
00:30:30
Speaker
So yeah, I think this is a great one to read.
Classic Literature and Social Insights
00:30:34
Speaker
So, I read one fiction book this quarter. It's Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
00:30:42
Speaker
no I've never read this. So I thought for quite a while, I'm like, yeah, it's a book that you read as a teenager. And I'm not really a teenager anymore, obviously.
00:30:52
Speaker
so I was like, I just didn't really have an interest in reading But I yeah happened over a YouTube video that was about Georgian economics, but it was told through using the characters in Pride and Prejudice to talk about actually wealth inequality in Georgian England.
00:31:11
Speaker
So it's quite good. And that sort of set my mind on it. And our assistant at Price Writer, she is an English literature graduate, as is my brother and my wife, actually.
00:31:23
Speaker
So i i just thought to myself, you know what? i will I will read this book. I will get inside kind of everyone else's head and and read Pride and Prejudice. It is good. is funny.
00:31:34
Speaker
like it is really funny. It is laugh out loud funny. i had no idea how funny it was. I don't think people have ever said to me, it's really funny, you should read it because it's really funny.
00:31:46
Speaker
So I i e think people have a tendency to want to be like, I'm like this character or that character. And I think that's good because it shows how good the characters are.
00:32:00
Speaker
They are pretty three-dimensional. They all interact, but they all are different people. You feel they're different people and you learn about things. how they are.
00:32:11
Speaker
No one is particularly good or bad in the book. There are good and better characters, but I wouldn't even say even the bad character is an irredeemably bad character.
00:32:23
Speaker
So I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to pick a character and sound like that person. i think I think it's a real cliche for anyone that's introvert to be like, I'm just like Mr. Darcy, because at some point,
00:32:38
Speaker
I have been socially awkward and it's come across as that I'm aloof or arrogant. I think most of us have at some point, most of us introverts have at some point probably done something like that. I don't think it makes us like Mr. Darcy and I'm not really sure if we want to be like Mr. Darcy, but I'll get to that.
00:32:59
Speaker
I do think so. There's a character in it, Mrs. Bennet, who is often done down in a way, and I actually didn't really read it in the same way that people do. So they tend to see her as being quite silly woman who's very obsessed with her daughter's marrying.
00:33:16
Speaker
But actually... in like she's the only person thinking about what's going to happen to my children should I or when I and my husband are no longer around to look after them so she's trying to get them married for that reason and she displays some really bad social awkwardness she does some real faux pas and we're meant to the way the narrative works it meant to make us think of her as a silly person because of this it's Lots of people in this book make a lot of bad social choices. Mr. Darcy himself, as I've just said, does this.
00:33:50
Speaker
And we aren't like that about him. And I felt there's a bit of a sexism and a bit of a classism. As a modern reader, looking at this character, I felt like it's a bit judgy.
00:34:04
Speaker
And the interesting, another interesting one is her husband, Mr. Bennett. So he is, he's a really fun character, but he's also not thinking about what's going to happen to his daughters after he's not around anymore.
00:34:19
Speaker
Mr. Bennett, he needs to be focused on these things and he tends to be quite withdrawn. He's, he finds the whole thing quite amusing at times and it's, and it's No.
00:34:32
Speaker
Another character I really want to talk about is Lydia. So Lydia is the youngest daughter and the narrative really gives her no sympathy at all for the way that she behaves and the choices that she makes.
00:34:46
Speaker
And I don't think that's really fair. Quite a lot of characters in this story are tricked by the bad character that I mentioned, but we don't, we don't feel like that about them. We're quite forgiving to them, including Darcy's own father is taken in by this character.
00:35:02
Speaker
And yet we don't think of him as being like a silly person. We don't think of him as being selfish. So I just I just found that quite interesting that the narrative makes this.
00:35:13
Speaker
And I guess as a youngest, I probably feel a little bit of sympathy for her in that way as well. And there's a bit where she lords over her new status to her older siblings.
00:35:24
Speaker
And that is such a natural thing for a youngest to do, isn't it? Let's not be judgy over that. a A youngest would, I see nothing wrong with that. You get your chance. You're going to use it in that way.
00:35:37
Speaker
So, I just, I guess I feel a bit sorry for Lydia. I think it would be awful for this girl if she'd ended up with someone boring. Someone like Mr. Collins.
00:35:49
Speaker
Bingley. who are just boring characters. Even I think if she'd ended up with the hero Darcy, i just, I don't think she'd have been happy in that way. I don't think any of those people that I mentioned would appreciate her. I think within a couple of years, it would be a marriage where she just isn't listened to. She's probably ignored, and I'd find that quite sad, really, because I think she's quite fun.
00:36:13
Speaker
So I also have another character, which is Mary the middle sister, who is just a bit ignored by the narrative. However, i quite, I quite like her.
00:36:24
Speaker
She's described as being pedantic and bookish. And I don't, I'm not sure I see either of those being bad characteristics with a person. Pedantic can often be confused with just being accurate and caring about accuracy of things. And I'm not sure that's a problem.
00:36:40
Speaker
There are two characters I really dislike though. So there's Mr. Collins and he is a proper bore. So he is simultaneously a real suck up to the people above him in the social order and really snobbish with the people below him.
00:36:56
Speaker
And we all know people like that. He's also not a fun person to be around. He is just boring suck-up. i I have definitely no middle managers like this.
00:37:09
Speaker
And yeah, we we live with people like this even now, definitely. That is not an archetype that that's gone away. The character could called Catherine de Burr and I find her snobbery just all horrible.
00:37:24
Speaker
And the last character I want to talk about is Elizabeth. So she is the main character and I don't think I like her actually. She's rather goody good. She thinks of herself as being very clever with people, but she's just as prejudiced as a lot of the other characters.
00:37:41
Speaker
She's really snobbish and ill-tempered with her own family and her friend. And she never shows any sympathy to what happens to her younger sister. At least if she does, I missed it.
00:37:53
Speaker
So she very much acts like Lydia behaves in a silly way and the horrible, terrible, embarrassing consequences on us and the family because of it. It's never like she was she was taken in, she was tricked.
00:38:09
Speaker
And I don't see much sympathy in that. And it's also like the gal probably was in love as well. People do behave in ways that they perhaps wouldn't do if they were using their better judgment. But love is love.
00:38:24
Speaker
So that's it for the book. As I said, it's really funny. And there's a particular couple of chapters that are based around a proposal that does not go well all. And it's it's actually a humour that I thought was quite modern. It's this like uncomfortable British humour where it's like, it's just like watching something awfully uncomfortable unfold.
00:38:47
Speaker
The pages, it goes on. and and And it ends, the tension is released by Mr. Bennett and it is funny. Like I laughed out loud at the end of this chapter. It is very good.
00:39:00
Speaker
So that's it for those books.
Mathematical Minds and Historical Context
00:39:02
Speaker
The final one, I'm not going to go on about the kids' books I read, but I am going to tell you about one. So I read Reaching for the Moon, the autobiography of naer mathematician Katherine Johnson, and it's by herself, Katherine Johnson.
00:39:15
Speaker
This is a really good book. So it's a biography of her life. She lived to be ah's slightly over 100. So she was born towards the end, at the end of the First World War and she lived till Covid time so that's a quite a stretch of time.
00:39:34
Speaker
She is African-American and a woman and an absolute genius at maths and at French. So, so she's, she's incredibly clever.
00:39:45
Speaker
She was so clever as a girl that she was so good at maths as a four-year-old that her parents thought her brother was, was slow at learning maths.
00:39:57
Speaker
So they gave her brother more help and attention at learning maths because his sister was so naturally good at it, they assumed that he needed help.
00:40:09
Speaker
And this actually links in really well in my mind with the authority gap I talked about earlier. So in the authority gap, there's statistics on how many people Google things like, is my son gifted versus is my daughter gifted?
00:40:23
Speaker
Now, spoiler a alert, people Google the son one a lot more and it's very similar here. So their parents provide more help to our brother because it doesn't occur to them that their daughter might be a genius at mathematics.
00:40:39
Speaker
And it's her life and it's nicely tenderly told. It's a good mixture of what she does at work and what the world is like for her because she lives through some of the most incredible social change.
00:40:53
Speaker
And we think that there's a lot of political upheaval now. The 60s were, particularly in the USA, were incredibly... social, incredible times of massive social change and there was a lot of opposing forces and a lot of revolt and it was a difficult time for a lot of people and it went through a lot of positive change came out of it.
00:41:20
Speaker
So it's really good to read about that, but really good book. Very good for a child as well. The only thing I would say is that because it's written by someone that was born over 100 years ago, the language is not things we would find it acceptable to say now, and she's just totally comfortable with it.
00:41:37
Speaker
So that's just something to be prepared for, wait particularly for reading it out loud to a child, because you might find yourself using some words you find very uncomfortable.
Conclusion and Future Book Discussions
00:41:47
Speaker
So that was it. That's my 17 books from 2025 Q1.
00:41:53
Speaker
It's been really fun talking about them, actually. So I'll be back talking about the same thing at the end of Q2. So have a lovely day, everyone. And thank you so much for listening. Bye bye.