An SEC inspector reads

Three officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission share their summer reading list – which includes magical realism, market analysis and human behavior – with pfm.

Marc Wyatt, director of the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, will this summer be reading President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman by William Lee Miller. Publishers Weekly described it thus: “Miller has given us one of the most insightful accounts of Lincoln published in recent years.” He will also reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, which The New York Times describes as “a concise summary of why today’s social science increasingly treats the markets-know-best model as a fairy tale”.

Igor Rozenblit, senior specialized examiner and co-head of the Private Funds Unit, OCIE, is reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, “not so much as an allegory or magical-realist fable, but as an edge-of-seat adventure” says The Guardian. He is also reading Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden. “Golden gives us not only a richly sympathetic portrait of a woman, but also a finely observed picture of an anomalous and largely vanished world” says The New York Times.

Jennifer Duggins, senior specialized examiner and co-head of the Private Funds Unit, OCIE, is reading Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening. “Let this spiritual daybook become a sonnet for you; it will speak directly to your heart about the beauty, the bounty, and the blessings of life” says Spirituality and Practice. She is also reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book is a monumental work about being black in America that every American urgently needs to read” says Slate. As well as revisiting Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre, Duggins plans to read The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin.

Keep an eye out for next week’s Monday Monitor for a window into the reading habits of the private funds industry and a chance to win something from PEI’s own bookshelf.