City Boys

So, I read this book ages ago, Ugly Americans by Ben Mezrich, about these city boys who dealt in the Japanese stock markets. Because of the system in Japan, they had to live in this one city to do trades, and were responsible for causing skews in the market, netting themselves billions. They took on Japanese stock traders, some mafia-like family ... two of them almost died in a motorcycle accident. It was a good book actually, and I learnt a lot about trading from it.

Anyway, I was in waterstones today, procrastinating from the task of finding a present for a three year old girl I've never met (hello Tinkerbell tea set) and came across a book called This Bleeding City. It was written just before the stockmarkets in the UK took a fall apparently, and the guy who wrote it was a trader and therefore is probably writing from experience. I've had a peek at the preface, and Oh My Word. I may leave the 50 book list just to read it (in the preface, the protagonist has left his son in the car a moment to do something in the office, gotten sidetracked, and hours later, realises his son is still in the car. It's a hot day and the kid's barely a toddler, so he's running into A&E with this kid who's feet are bruised from burst blood vessels. Did that really happen to Preston's nephew? Jesus ... oh yeah, it's Preston's brother who wrote it, apparently, but it doesn't mention it in the book because he obviously wants to make a name for himself/have nothing to do with someone so blah. If the rest of the book is like those three pages, I have no doubt he'll do better than his brother. Well, he should.) ... speaking of the 50 book list by the way, picked up like, 9 more of the list! Thank you works, for having a sale on poor yet legible reprints of The Great Gatsby, The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Gulliver's Travels and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (and War And Peace, since I'm curious) ... got Catch 22 and The Grapes Of Wrath from Waterstones too .... and a few other less impressive texts (Sharon Osbourne's first novel, and another Twilight Spoof called New Moan which is funnier and less off on a tangent than Nightlight, though it does reiterate their view of Bella as a narcissist far too much for my liking) because I'm not exactly WonderWoman.