Perhaps I wouldn't preach against book-reading so much if it weren't for some college memories that stuck. I recall seeing bookworms hang out at the student union, while slouching in a chair. Liberal Arts majors, I guess. Their entire image was so unappealing and unfortunately it's what first pops into mind when I hear the word, book.

Most students--particularly those of a technical field--know the difference between reading a textbook and working homework problems based on the reading. When reading, it all goes in one eyeball and out the other. In fact, it always seemed that mere reading was only 10% as effective as working the homework problems.

Ever since then I have distrusted passive reading. Of course, there are no homework problems at the end of the chapter of a novel or a non-textbook book of non-fiction. Oddly enough, traveling helped me make reading a more active experience. Rather than just look at some pretty scenery and then feel jaded in a couple minutes, I would recall memorable scenes or quotes from classic books or movies at locations that seemed perfect for them. This creates a mental playground that seems visceral and real; I tried to experience the book at that location.

Investing offers opportunities to do this, too. An idea in a book is just disembodied intellect, and the reading of it is sterile and mechanical. But try to use that idea when investing and the idea sinks right into your skin tissue.

Recently I reread Tolstoi's War and Peace. It's a good guess that many readers find the old Russian general, who was matched against Buonaparte, to be one of the more interesting and endearing characters. He was old, fat, had bushy eye-brows, and fell asleep during staff meetings.

The younger officers were infatuated with their own brilliant ideas of troop positioning and movements. Buonaparte himself would look over the battlefield just before it began, and commend himself for doing such a fine job of arranging the chesspieces.

But the old Russian general knew that it was not a game of chess or a mathematical theorem. His orders would be based on reports that were inaccurate or out-of-date once the madness of battle began; and then the orders wouldn't be carried out, anyway.

He thought that the invaders were overconfident. The Russian troops were technically backward but their morale was the kind that would still fight when they were losing and retreating. They were defending the sacred soil of Mother Russia. So the old Russian general just gave Buonaparte enough rope to hang himself with.

I was rereading these battle scenes during the recent carnage on Wall Street. The battle scenes in War and Peace seemed more real and informative than the daily news clutter.

Imagine if the old Russian general, after a lifetime of battles between bulls and bears, had been the CEO of a big Wall Street investment bank when the whizz kids came up with their shiny new gadgets of financial engineering. He would have ignored them or fired them. They would have had to get a new job working at, say, the United Nations, massaging math-based models of global warming.