Here Are Some Books To Pretend You’ll Read On Your Imaginary Vacation

It’s been pretty cold in places like Manhattan, Greenwich and Boston. Perhaps you’ve noticed. In any event, this sort of thing has people dreaming of being on a beach somewhere other than New Jersey, where it is also cold, on which they like to fancy themselves kicking back and diving into a good book, when, in fact, we all know you’ll be reading research reports and a never-ending string of inane e-mails from colleagues in the unlikely event you make it to the Caribbean.

It seems JonesTrading��s Dave Lutz is among those who will be spending Spring Break in his office, because he has chosen to use his precious free time to run a poll of colleagues to see what they like to think they’d be reading if they weren’t also not going on vacation to escape the chill.

There’s plenty of the sort of fare you’d expect, like that really thick book about oil, a book about how fucked Europe is, that book where that hedge fund manager tells his stirring tale of standing up to Vladimir Putin and losing, the philosophy of Peter Thiel, Bill O’Reilly’s latest made-up war story that is also simultaneously the newest installment of his tin-foil-hat-type “Killing” series, and, of course, American Sniper. Also not unexpected are the presence of some prestige titles to sit ostentatiously next to the bed, unopened: The likes of a 30-year-old Paulo Coelho novel, some hifalutin historical fiction from 40 years ago and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, showing just how far behind the Zeitgeist people buried in an Excel spreadsheet can be. Wall Streeters are even further behind on To Kill a Mockingbird, which they’ve named either because they’ve never read it or because they want to pretend they’ll brush up on it before pretending to read the sequel when it comes out later this year. Also, people are really into (or aspiring to be really into) the 1936Olympics this winter, for some reason.

What books are you telling people you’re reading this winter?

Top 16 Books on Wall Street’s Spring Break Reading List [WSJ MoneyBeat blog]