What are you reading, apart from finance and asset-allocation materials?

I was just reading Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" for the first time. ... I bought (Henry Miller's) "Tropic of Cancer," but haven't started reading it. ... But mostly I never get to read novels, I just think I might. Lately I've been reading a lot of French history. I re-read Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" last year just because I was tripping on President Bush after I read this great book by Alistair Horne called "Seven Ages of Paris." So now my beach book is Horne's "La Belle France: A Short History."

What do you like about Horne's books?

It's the synthesis of historical fact. ... And something I'm still intrigued by, as I understand contemporary France, is it has this post-colonial piece to it. What fascinated me about studying Slavic civilizations when I was a history major in college is this idea of multi-ethnic societies sustaining themselves over time.

Does reading about France's multicultural history give you any ideas about what shapes Hawai'i's economy long-term?

Not so much directly, but I've thought a lot about it. Even in terms of the arc of my adult life, which starts with the Hawaiian renaissance, and in between that and the present you have the emergence of the sovereignty movement and efforts to implement that. ... As an adult you see that things are a result of the way things happen and then historians go back and revisit that. ... It frames the way you do things going forward. I'm always thinking in terms of the economics, because that's something that tends to be missing. Economics now is different. You can go back in history and apply today's economic principles and see what was going on, in the same way you can see what's happening today.