I picked up Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, as I recall, because when Ira Glass came to speak at Oberlin College last year, he recommended it as a masterpiece of storytelling. As Ira Glass is one of the best storytellers in popular media, I figured anything he recommended has got to be pretty good–and I was not disappointed.

The Big Short follows the lives and investments of several characters who foresaw the 2008 mortgage crisis and put down massive bets against the market. Lewis, for the most part, capably walks us through all the complex financial machinations that made these bets possible and that caused the Wall Street banks to fail. I admit that there were a few points at which I didn’t understand all the details–but this, too, is part of the point. The bets that were going on within Wall Street at that time were so complex and so obfuscated that none but a small group of people really understood them:

The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified. A bond backed entirely by subprime mortgages, for example, wasn’t called a subprime mortgage bond. It was called an ABS, or asset-backed security. When Charlie asked Deutsche Bank exactly what assets secured an asset-backed security, he was handed a list of abbreviations and more acronyms—RBMS, HELs, HELOCs, Alt-A—along with categories of credit he did not know existed (“midprime”). RBMS stood for residential mortgage-backed security. HEL stood for home equity loan. HELOC stood for home equity line of credit. Alt-A was just what they called crappy mortgage loans for which they hadn’t even bothered to acquire the proper documents—to verify the buyer’s income, say. Alt-A, which stood for “Alternative A-paper,” meant an alternative to the most creditworthy, which of course sounds a lot more fishy once it’s put that way. As a rule, any loan that had been turned into an acronym or abbreviation could be clearly called a “subprime loan,” but the bind market didn’t want to be clear. “Midprime” was a load of triumph of language over truth.

But what really makes this book remarkable is not that it is a primer in the life cycle of subprime mortgage loans, but how empathetic Lewis is to the subjects of his book. The characters who inhabit the book are more than just players in a game–they are fleshy people who are motivated by their own personal tragedies, afflictions, family lives, personalities, and principles. Describing one of the main characters, Steve Eisman:

In his youth, Eisman had been a strident Republican. He joined right-wing organization, voted for Reagan twice, and even loved Robert Bork. It wasn’t until he got to Wall Street, oddly, that his politics drifted left. He attributed his first baby steps back to the middle of the political spectrum to the end of the cold war. “I wasn’t as right-wing because there want as much to be right-wing about.” By the time Household’s CEO, Bill Aldinger, collected his $100 million, Eisman was on his way to becoming the financial market’s first socialist. “When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off,” he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. “I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.”

Or, toward the end of the story, explaining the fate of Michael Burry, after doubling the money of his investors, but receiving no gratitude for it:

Most of 2006 and early 2007 Dr. Michael Burry had experienced as a private nightmare. In an e-mail, he wrote, “The partners closest to me tend to ultimately hate me…. This business kills a part of life that is pretty essential. The thing is, I haven’t identified what it kills. But it is something vital that is dead inside of me. I can feel it.” As his interest in financial markets seeped out of him, he bought his first guitar. It was strange: He couldn’t play the guitar and he had no talent for it. He didn’t even want to play the guitar. He just needed to learn all about the sorts of wood used to make guitars, and to buy guitars and tubes and amps. He just needed to… know everything there was to know about guitars.

This book gripped me, from the moment I picked it up. Even knowing how the story ended, I had to read it. I had to find out what happened next. Lewis builds up a complete picture of Wall Street and the people who inhabit its center and fringes.