Suggestions

I am soliciting suggestions for the following things.

- Good books to read over the summer.

- Good 3-4 day vacation ideas which are relatively easy to plan, fun but different. Trekking maybe? Or a roadtrip?

- Good things to do over the summer that would aid my overall development and growth into a wonderful human being.

In turn I am going to suggest to you what you should not do:

- Do not try to read Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. It is a bollywood style gangsta movie written as a book - gangsters, smugglers, pimps, prostitutes, murder, money, more money put into the usual set of semi-predictable plot scenes. It starts off promisingly but 100 pages in starts meandering, sounding cliched and contrived. It has another 900 pages after that, which I haven't been able to get myself to trudge through. If he had cut it down to about 500 pages and done away with the 25 side stories, I would probably want to finish it.

- A healthy sense of paranoia and circumspectness would go a long way in pushing up the mean and reducing variance on your life's happiness function. In non nerdy english, you would be happier if you did choose to follow my advice. This does not mean going crazy, but has more to do with keeping a langorous, relaxed but watchful and wary eye. Thus you should not be non-circumspect.

- In addition to not being non-circumspect, you should also not not maintain information assymetry. As a trader, information assymetry is all you want (in your favour obviously), but even otherwise it has its benefits. Information should be released on a purely need to know basis. Believe me or not but it leads to solutions that are more optimal for everyone. In Economics, the fancy word given for changes that make no one any worse off is "Pareto improvement" (you learnt something new today, but then you probably knew it).