Citizen Reader

Back in the reading saddle.

I realized the other day that I have a different book going in every room of the house (and one in my backpack), and it feels really, really...good. It feels like I am getting back to myself again, reading-wise.

So what's going on where? Details to follow, but in the bathroom I have a novel by a British author I've always enjoyed, in the bedroom is a book on how Generation Y is getting royally screwed, economically speaking (nice light bedtime reading, dontcha know), in my bag is a memoir that I'm not quite sure about but am going to stick with anyway, in the living room is a somewhat depressing book (book info toward the bottom of that post) that I've had to take a small pause from, and in the kitchen waits a book I started a few weeks back and really must get back to, because it is fascinating. Oh, and how could I forget a book about books, which, interestingly enough, has a chapter about being in the middle of too many books (and which roves around as I carry it from room to room and outside)? Add to that some books on gardening (every year in spring I read about gardening, rather than actually gardening) and some on toilet training (although, sadly, neither CRjr nor I are too interested), and you have a full reading slate.

It's lovely.

Looking for a few good business book reviewers.

I still periodically review books for Library Journal, and in with my last book they included this message:

"I need more reviewers with a strong grounding in business, able to take on a variety of books covering topics across the range of economics, whether it's exploring American capitalism, or the domestic and global impacts/causes of the Great Recession, investigating small business profiles and leadership models, or considering a biography of Warren Buffett!

If you have colleagues who may be interested in becoming a reviewer in such subject areas, please ask them to email me: Annalisa Pesek, at apesek@mediasourceinc.com."

Just thought I'd pass that along. You don't get paid for your reviews, but the business books aren't all that demanding, and it can be a nice credit for your skills list if you're looking for that sort of thing. Plus, sometimes you get real stinker books, but a lot of the business books I've read for LJ have been quite interesting.

I at least like my manifestos to be helpful.

I was thoroughly annoyed by Charles J. Selden's The Consumerist Manifesto Handbook: The Guerilla's Guide to Making Corporations Pay for Faulty Goods, Substandard Services, and Broken Promises.

Although I don't really have the energy to become a "consumer guerrilla," I do largely agree with the author that most corporations are out to make cheap, sell high, and by no means to provide anything approximating decent customer service. Largely I deal with this belief by striving not to buy anything I don't have to, but invariably, there are things a person needs.* And because I am the world's worst shopper, I somehow always manage (I feel) to get taken advantage of. So I thought this would be a handy little book for learning a few techniques for making complaints and actually getting them resolved.

Sadly: not so. Selden spends most of his book describing ways in which corporations take advantage of consumers (through various methods such as rushing goods to market; accepting a certain number of defects in their products because they'll make more money off them than they'll have to spend in resolving complaints; quality fade; customer disservice; etc.). Yeah, you're preaching to the choir here, Selden, I already KNOW that's what corporations are doing. I'm not saying a little background isn't helpful, but this is all old news for anyone who has bought any consumer goods in the past ten years.

Selden is also very good at relating stories about what a clever consumer guerrilla he is, most of which I just found obnoxious. Consider:"When I buy a prepackaged bag of food labeled fresh, I put any suspicious pieces--in their original containers--in the Returns Area of our pantry...Going to the minor trouble of retaining a couple of potatoes from a 5-pound bag, or even a couple of berries from a 1-pound box, nets me refunds for the entire container. Food retailers charge more for food because it is labeled 'fresh,' reason enough to raise consumerist expectations. Every potato and every berry had better be good--and fresh--or I'll expect a refund for the whole package--even if the majority was consumed." (p. 42.)

Now, that paragraph raises all sorts of questions. Were the majority of the foods they consumed actually "fresh" enough to meet their expectations, with one or two truly offending potatoes or berries really being "unfresh," or was the author just pulling a fast one, getting a refund for food already eaten?**

Later on the author discusses his wife's predilection for fancy-name clothes from Bergdorf Goodman***, and how he bought her a Barbara Bui suit on sale for $370 (marked down from $1,850), mailing it back to BG after ten months because its "feathery lapels" had started to lose feathers, and asking for an explanation or replacement. When they didn't hear back for a month, they called BG, who could confirm they had received the suit back but couldn't find it. Eventually BG offered to compensate them for losing the suit, asking them what they paid for it originally. The author's answer? The truthful (but again: dicey morally?) gambit, "I think it sold for around $1,800." BG offered a credit of $1,250, and the author took it, making $880 off a suit his wife wore for ten months.

I don't know what you think about that, but I'll tell you what I think: Gross. 

A greater problem with the book is that, although you may pick up some consumerist tips buried in the author's self-congratulating stories, the actual section on how to deal successfully with corporations that have you screwed you over only constitutes about twenty pages of the book (pages 155 through 172). It contains some not unhelfpul suggestions: have a couple of credit cards ready to use so you can always dispute charges on one or the other, document your purchases, write letters and find company officer names and phone numbers so you can call them at times amenable to you, not them, and so on. The appendix listing online resources is also not unhelpful.

But all in all: start your consumer guerrilla career by not spending the $14.95 on this book.

*The other day Mr. CR said to me, "hey, you have a big tear in your shorts, in a fairly obvious spot" (meaning, "I can see your underwear, and I don't want to, and neither do our neighbors"). And I said, "Oh NO...this is my one pair of shorts!" I can only hope that hot weather doesn't return any time soon.

**I get his larger point. Corporations shouldn't charge a premium for "freshness" if they can't back it up. But this is a level of semantics--and deliberations with front-line grocery store workers--to which I am simply too lazy to go. And I remember what I used to think of shoppers who came back to my farmers' market stand, demanding refunds for my produce that they'd eaten. It was not kind.

***How hilarious is that? Even when such "name" merchandise is on sale, talk about "made-up" value, that consumers impose upon themselves. I don't think you can blame companies for that one.

Tuesday Article: The real problem with the economy.

I really enjoy reading the Christian Science Monitor online, although it's typically depressing as hell.

I found this article (written by Robert Reich) on one of the biggest problems in our economy echoed what I've been thinking for years but could never verbalize so well. If you don't have time to read the whole article, here's one of my favorite paragraphs out of it:

"The crisis of American capitalism marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens. And since most of us occupy all four roles – even though the lion’s share of consuming and investing is done by the wealthy – the real crisis centers on the increasing efficiency by which all of us as consumers and investors can get great deals, and our declining capacity to be heard as workers and citizens."

Incidentally, speaking of deals (or things that are not deals), someone posted yesterday on my post from a million years ago about Melissa & Doug products being crap. I share the comment here in its entirety because I will not rest, people, until all of you stop buying Melissa & Doug products. Thank you.

"Heh! I submitted a one-star review of a dreadful M&D product we were given -- a $35 set of dollar-store craft supplies with 'washable' paint that permanently trashed an easel, table, a bit of the floor, and so much clothing I have difficulty thinking about it, before I realised 'washable' was not 'washable.' The review was never posted. I got an e-mail from "Lisa" thanking me for my "e-mail" with an invitation to call her during [rather restricted times]. I wrote back to say I appreciated the response, but was extremely pressed for time and was not going to have time to make a phone call anytime soon; could she please address this in e-mail? Of course I didn't hear back, and of course my review simply didn't make it on the site. melissaanddoug.com is littered with enthusiastic four and five star reviews; I haven't been able to find any poor ratings or reviews. Apparently they are all simply trashed as mine was, perhaps with a half-hearted attempt at contact from "Lisa." At least the paint disaster was bad enough for me to be rude enough to finally ask the person who had been buying us all the M&D stuff to please stop..."

Thanks for the comment, K.

A different kind of business book.

I found Amy Cortese's Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit from It to be kind of a nice, straightforward, useful business book.

This places it squarely in the .01% of business books that aren't tired rehashes of management theories, comparisons of business to war and military figures, and crackpot books on personal finance that may or may not be advertisements for the author's own financial business. (See: Safe Money Millionaire --but don't buy it!)

It's not a book to read if you're looking for very basic investment ideas, or if you're looking to get rich quick. What it is is an interesting consideration of various ways that people are starting to invest, financially, in their own communities. The suggestions range from the basic, like putting some of your money in locally or regionally owned community banks, to the more advanced, like forming a community investment organization. Each chapter provides examples and definitions, and ends with a very succinct rundown of the pros and cons of the investment type (community development loan funds, for example, may return slightly more interest than regular CDs, but are also NOT insured by the FDIC) and information on how to get started making such an investment.

Even if you don't have much to invest, it might give you some ideas about community investment options for a day in the future when you might want to give it a go.

Tuesday Article: Best of the best of the best of the best...

I will probably not get around to doing any best or worst lists this year, as just trying to match the Time Magazine Best 100 Nonfiction Titles list is doing me in. However, I did do one "Best of" list for Library Journal this year:

Library Journal Best Business Titles 2011

There's lots of other lists there too, although Library Journal's articles are much shorter this year (I only listed ten Best Biz books, last year it was around 35 or so). And if you're really jonesing for "Best of Books" lists for the year, check out the sidebar at the Reader's Advisor Online, or the exhaustive, exhausting list that Largehearted Boy has going. Have fun!

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Business

Moving right along in our consideration of the Time list of the top 100 nonfiction titles published in America since 1923, we find the Business titles:

Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman
Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
The General Theory, by John Maynard Keynes
How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
No Logo, by Naomi Klein
Unsafe at Any Speed, by Ralph Nader
What Color Is Your Parachute?, by Richard Nelson Bolles.

Here's where this list stuff starts to get a little dicey, because I really wouldn't call all of these books Business. Fast Food Nation I'd call Investigative, and hell, I'm going to include that as a category eventually, although Time didn't. And the Carnegie and Bolles titles I'd term Self-Help (and the Parachute book not very helpful self-help at that), although I suppose they really are known as business or career books. Still.

And frankly, can anyone who isn't an economics major force themselves to read books by Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes? Just reading the titles makes me sleepy.

Hmm, business books. That's a tough one, as a lot of my favorite business books are investigative titles, like Liar's Poker or Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. So what to do? Compromise: List a couple business books, but save most of my picks for a non-Time category of Investigative titles.

Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, John Bowe. Bowe's exploration of modern-day slavery, one of my favorite Business/Investigative titles of all time, contains one of the most perfect insights I've ever read in a book. When discussing our current system of economics, globalization, etc., Bowe pointed out that (I'm paraphrasing) "the system isn't broken, the system is working exactly the way it was set up to work." Think about that one for a while. I literally end up quoting that one to someone or other at least once a week.

In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton & How Wal-Mart Is Devouring America, Bob Ortega. Fascinating study of Wal-Mart and Sam Walton. It's a crying shame that this one is out of print. It pretty much put me off Wal-Mart for good.

As for actual, business-y business books, I might suggest Andrew Tobias's The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, just for its sheer readability, and my brother's always been fond of The One-Minute Manager for its succinctness.

Have a great weekend, all. Next week we'll have a few regular book posts, and then finish up our lists. Good times, good times!

Wanted: Good Business Books.

It looks like I'll be making some sort of "best business books" list for Library Journal again this year, and I'd like to cover all my bases. So: does anyone out there want to suggest any business books (published in 2011) that really lit you on fire? I'll happily consider any recommendations--and thanks in advance for any help!

Speaking of business, do consider reading this article from The Atlantic,* about how Americans are working harder and feeling poorer. If you don't have the time to read the article I can nutshell it for you, using a quote from its second paragraph: "Since the recovery began, corporate profits have captured nearly 90 percent of the growth in real income." Ridiculous.

*Thanks to the Lesbrarian, reference librarian with the mostest, for the link.

Waste of a perfectly good title.

I get a lot of my nonfiction reading from a pretty basic source: each month my local library system posts a list of new fiction and nonfiction books in their catalog, and each month I scan the list and order up any titles that tickle my fancy.

So imagine my displeasure when Hugh MacLeod's book, with the awesome title Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination, turned out just to be another business self-help book.

And not a very good one at that. MacLeod is the creator of the gapingvoid.com website, and is best known for drawing cartoons on the back of business cards. In this book he adopts a Seth Godin-esque approach to living your dream: be special, dream big, follow your entrepreneurial plan, etc. Here's the basic idea, from page one: "Everybody needs an Evil Plan that gets them the hell out of the rat race, away from lousy bosses, away from boring, dead-end jobs that they hate. Life is short."

Yeah, yeah. We've heard it all before. Does anyone still believe this stuff? Like this? "Thanks to the Internet, it has never been easier to have an Evil Plan, to make a great living, doing what you love, doing something that matters." p. 1.

In short chapters punctuated by his not-all-that-clever doodles, he holds forth on how you've got to sell not only your product but also your belief system*; how customers have to love your product AND your process; and how you should be overextended doing work you love. It all sounds la-di-da and wonderful, but I challenge you to find someone who can actually make this advice work. (The part about making a great living off the Internet in particular gives me a big chuckle.)

I kept the book in the bathroom for a while, where I read it for giggles, until Mr. CR told me it was depressing him and I had to get rid of it.

*This also puts me in mind of a GREAT quote from the movie Broadcast News, which I recall roughly a million times every day as it is. When Albert Brooks spits out, with such distate, about an anchorman colleague who's more style than substance: "And he'll talk about us all really being salesmen." Such bitterness. Awesome. You should watch the entire movie, but you could also see it here. The pertinent quote is right after the two-minute mark.

Women in Finance (Books) Week: Friday edition.

Well, I didn't really succeed in my quest to find a good, understandable personal finance book by a woman writer. I'll keep looking, though.

The best book by a woman I've seen remains a title I reviewed about a year ago, titled Does This Make My Assets Look Fat?: A Woman's Guide to Finding Financial Empowerment and Success. The author used an annoying dieting analogy (figuring it was something every woman could relate to) as her "hook," but I chose to overlook that because it was the first finance book I read in a long time that I wanted to re-read and take some notes from. This is part of what I said about it in a review for Library Journal:

"What might get lost in this extended metaphor are her definitions, explanations, and suggestions, which are comprehensive and excellent. In addition to covering the basics, the author (a financial advisor with JPMorgan Chase) provides surprisingly in-depth information about investment strategies. Of the books reviewed here, it's the only one I'll give to a friend with investing questions--although only as a loaner, since I also want to keep it."

I'm also on the hold list for The 10 Commandments of Money: Survive and Thrive in the New Economy, which Unruly Reader liked. I'll let you know how that one goes.

Women in Finance (Books) Week: Filling your "purse."

Welcome to today's installment of Women in Finance (Books) Week!

Today's book is yet another purple one, titled A Purse of Your Own: An Easy Guide to Financial Security, by Deborah Owens. As you can tell by the title (and the book's cover), this is yet another book that thinks layering some analogies on the problem will help women understand finance better. Owens's shtick is to get women to think of their entire financial picture as their "purse."

I don't own or carry a purse, so as you can imagine, this analogy was not as helpful to me as it might be to some.

But, once you get past the analogy stuff, and the author's introductory chapters about "wealthy habits" and "wealthy visions" (she's a big fan, as are most personal finance writers, of helping make yourself wealthy by believing you can BECOME wealthy), there's actually some interesting stuff here. For one thing, she does explain the "Rule of 72" (also, coincidentally, one of my father's favorite tools for understanding numbers): "This simple equation helps you to determine a rough estimate of the length of time it will take to double your money in an investment. Simply divide the number 72 by the annual interest rate or return on your investment." (p. 34.) Find something that pays 4% interest annually? It will take 18 years to double your money (72 divided by 4 equals 18). When authors share this rule, it always makes me feel a bit more secure in their knowledge.

This book also boasts one of the nicer explanations I've seen on bonds, and she doesn't do a bad job with stocks, either. I guess I can put up with a little nonsense about purses to get to some good (if still pretty basic) information.

Women in Finance (Books) Week: Stereotypes Abound

One of my least favorite "tricks" listed in personal finance books for saving money is to "cut out buying your daily latte."

Pretty much everybody says it, and it makes me nuts every time. I don't know what kind of glamorous life these personal finance writers think I'm living, but I can assure you it doesn't include daily lattes.

In today's entry in Women in Finance (Books) Week, we have the latte issue right up front in the title: Nancy Trejos's Hot (Broke) Messes: How to Have Your Latte and Drink It Too. Trejos is a personal finance columnist for The Washington Post, which is amazing, because this woman has no idea how to handle money:

"In January 2005, when I was twenty-eight, I bought an overpriced condo during the height of the real estate boom with my then-boyfriend, later my fiance, and then had to sell it at a loss two years later after we broke up. When I turned thirty, I bought a Volkswagen Beetle that I really couldn't afford because I got sick of my old car and wanted to drive around in something cute...After another bad breakup in April 2007, I blew all sorts of cash on a crazy trip through California..." (p. 6.)

Now, I don't really care what this woman does in her personal life or with her money. But she is a PERSONAL FINANCE COLUMNIST for The Washington Post? How does something like that happen?

This book is also hot pink.

This book is basic in the extreme: use your credit card responsibly, live within your means, be smarter with how you handle your money, especially in relationships, etc. It's really more of a memoir (she also details her experiences working with a financial planner) than a how-to, and unless you really need an introduction to how to control your finances, there will be nothing here for you. And, of course, there's this really annoying bit on page 197, when Trejos is well into (supposedly) taking back control of her finances:

"Over coffee at Starbucks one morning, Christine [her financial planner] and I reviewed my contributions..."

Well, as long as it was coffee, and not a latte.

Women in Finance (books) Week: Suze Orman

Recently I've been reading finance books by and for women. I've been doing this for a few reasons:

1. I honestly enjoy business books, which is weird, because I have no business sense or skills whatsoever.
2. I've been looking for anything that can explain to me how people actually make money in the stock market. I just don't get it.
and
3. I am a woman.

The first thing you learn about finance books for women is that they must have pink or purple covers. (More on this later in the week.) The second thing you learn is that there are a lot of them. One of the best-known authors in this field is Suze Orman.*

Suze Orman is one of those people who, if I'm flipping through channels and find her on PBS or a news program, I can't look away. I think that's largely because she is a spectacular public speaker. (I'm interested in public speaking and how best to do it as well.) She's always immaculately dressed and made up. She uses her hands emphatically while she talks, and when she moves across the stage, she moves deliberately. She makes good eye contact, varies her pitch and tone, and when she answers questions from audience members, you can tell they feel like they're the only person in the room with her, just having a conversation. It's always a performance. But I digress. I also enjoy watching Orman because, although I don't usually learn anything new from her, most of what she says makes sense to me.

Her new book is titled The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream, which is a genius title, when you think about it. The "new American dream," of course, has more to do with making do with less, etc., although Orman spins this with a genius tagline: "live below your means but within your needs." This one is for investors at a very basic stage in their lives**: those who are trying to use their credit cards less and still need to figure out how to have an emergency fund and save up for big purchases. For better or worse, I'm beyond that stage. (Well, not really in that I have any money, but I do know I have to pay off my credit card balance every month, and have known that since I got a credit card all those millennia ago.)

But I will still read her chapters on 529s and saving for college, because she does have a knack for making things pretty understandable. I'll peruse her chapters on retirement planning. But for the most part her books are for people just starting to think about their finances; her chapters here include tips for renting vs. owning your home, how to talk about finances with your kids, and how to start retirement planning and saving.

The bottom line: I get a kick out of ol' Suze (Mr. CR and I like to look at our pay stubs and crack "live below your means, but within your needs" to each other, and then laugh, bitterly), but she's not really offering a lot of high-level investing tips.

*And thankfully most of Suze's books do NOT have pink or purple covers.

**The first subheading in her "Advice for the Unemployed" chapter is "Cut your spending immediately." Really? Do people really need to be told this?

Why? Why can't I stop reading "frugal living" books?

The latest one I read was so bad it brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from a television show: "It's like watching a car crash. Into puppies."*

Yet another frugal living book I didn't enjoy and didn't learn anything from (but yet read all the way through) was Natalie P. McNeal's The Frugalista Files: How One Woman Got Out of Debt Without Giving Up the Fabulous Life. It's basically McNeal's year-long diary, which was also posted at TheFrugalista.com, of trying to get out of debt and live more frugally. And when I say diary, I mean diary: like a lot of blogs-into-books, it reads like it was lifted wholesale from the website without much of an editorial look-over. I hate that.** This was also published by Harlequin, which should have tipped me off. Nothing against Harlequin, or romances (I like romances, actually, the juicier the better), I just don't think it's a publishing concern known for its work with serious nonfiction.

McNeal's voice is pleasant enough, even though she's not saying anything new (p. 85, ah, it's the obligatory latte quote: "Death to the latte! And it's about time. Middle-class Americans are dropping their $4 lattes and brewing coffee at home."), she doesn't actually get out of all her debt in the course of a year, and she really does, as far as I can tell, give up a lot of the "fabulous life"--for instance, she has to stop traveling as much with her friends. (A lot of her "buy nothing" frugal strategy also seems to be to go along with her friends buying her drinks and dinners out--not a bad strategy, but one you have to be pretty damn charming to pull off.) She does talk at length about her job as a reporter for the Miami Herald, and the downsizing in the newspaper business, which I found interesting (if sad), and I must say I finished the book without rancor, wishing her luck in her freelance career. But all in all? A pretty forgettable read:

"February 3. I had a love affair with George this morning. George Foreman, that is. It's Sunday and I had to work today, so George and I grilled some chicken breasts. I packed the chicken, some salad and an apple in a bag.*** I like this cooking healthy stuff, but it sure isn't as filling as eating out." (p. 20.)

So why? WHY can't I stop reading these frugal books? I rarely find them helpful, and they're now actively starting to annoy me, as I'm finding it increasingly naive to think we're all going to "frugal" the country back into shape--as if not buying as many meals out is going to put a dent in our personal debt (or our national spending, much of which is disappearing into the money pit that is our "defense" and military spending. For some reason these books are like candy to me****, but much like candy, I think it's probably time to give them up.

*Oh, the short-lived CBC series "An American in Canada," we hardly got to know ye.

**I like blogs, and I like books. I like them for different reasons. This is not to say a good blog can't make a good book, but come on, people, tidy up your writing a little bit when publishing it in book form.

***I think she needs the serial comma here too.

****I ate so much candy this weekend it was obscene.

Worst Business Books 2010

Per Robin's fantastic suggestion last week, I thought it might indeed be fun to list some of the business books that most annoyed me on my search for the best business books of the year. They are as follows, in no particular order:

Dave Ramsey's The Money Answer Book. This one I actually reviewed for Library Journal earlier in the year, and it really pissed me off. Ramsey is one of those financial writers who take one simple idea (don't use credit cards) and leverages it to the hilt*; he's known as a financial guru for helping people get and stay out of debt, with a twist of right-wing Christian fanaticism (this book also contains numerous questions and answers about the necessity of tithing to one's church). What REALLY pissed me off about this one is that it's a reprint, but it's a reprint no one cared about updating, because at one point Ramsey refers to the importance of putting the maximum amount toward one's yearly IRA limits, and he cites $3,000 as the individual max, which is wrong (it's 5,000 currently). Now, that is a big error on a pretty basic and important piece of information, and it shouldn't be a hard piece of information to verify during the reprinting process. Lame, super lame. Wonder what Ramsey's faith says about greediness in reprinting books quickly for the maximum amount of profit. I suppose if he gives 10% of that profit to his church all will be forgiven.**

Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, by John Quiggin. It's got a catchy title and cover, but this is still a very dry academic text about popular economic ideas and how they don't always hold up.

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry, by Steven Rattner. I was hoping for more out of this one, but it is just TOO BORING. What I'd like to read on this subject is a really good, insightful, and short article about it by someone like William Langewiesche.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison. This one ended up on a lot of other "best business books" lists this year, but I thought it was completely dull and never really did figure out what the authors were saying. Under the heading "What to Expect in this Book" the authors say this: "Pull is about expanding our awareness of what is possible and evolving new dispositions, mastering new practices, and taking new actions to realize those possibilities." (p. 6.) Bleah. I ask you, doesn't that sound like an undergraduate trying to pad with business research paper with words that don't mean anything? Snore.***

Those were the biggest offenders. Anyone else read any lousy business books last year and want to share?

*Mr. CR thinks Ramsey is actually pretty good at what he does, making the simple point that some people can't handle credit cards and therefore shouldn't have them. I don't know how a person lives without a credit card, especially if they have to do ANY traveling or purchase anything online, and would argue that the true nuance would be having a credit card but learning to control yourself with it, at which point Mr. CR points out that sometimes nuance is just beyond people. It's a fair point.

**I lied about the no particular order. I hated this one the most.

***No links to books today; I don't want you to buy any of these.

Best Business Books 2010

My article on the best business books of 2010 has been published in Library Journal!

I had a great time doing the list this year; I got to read a lot of good business books. I wasn't as happy that part of my introduction to the article was cut, but I know the magazine has space constraints. A variety of cuts were made, but the paragraph that was cut wholesale was:

"This emphasis on the personal—personal financial responsibility, personal career development, and even the personalities behind the biggest business stories of the past few years—indicates that business books, along with all of us, are living in a world where the individual has many new opportunities, but also serious responsibilities and fewer institutional or governmental 'safety nets.'"

I worked on that paragraph a depressingly long time (it takes me forever to string together coherent thoughts these days) so I had to include it here. Next week I'll (hopefully) post a few reviews of some of the business books from the list I particularly loved. In the meantime, have a great weekend!

Citizen Reader's Holiday Gift Guide: Griftopia

There are not enough words to describe how awesome Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America is.

And by awesome, of course, I mean depressing as hell. If you want to get a handle on a) how our political system now only functions as entertainment for the masses, and b) how thoroughly manipulated our financial markets are for the vast personal gain of the very few, then this is the book for you. And no one, NO ONE, can lay it on the line like Matt Taibbi:

"Bad political systems on their own don't always make societies fail. Sometimes what's required for a real social catastrophe is for one or two ingeniously obnoxious individuals to rise to a position of great power--get a once-in-a-billion asshole in the wrong job and a merely unfair system of government suddenly turns into seventies Guatemala, the Serbian despotate, the modern United States.

Former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan is that one-in-a-billion asshole who made America the dissembling mess that it is today." (p. 34.)

I'll give him this: he tells the truth, so he makes me cry, but at least I'm laughing while I'm crying.*

Rest assured: he does not blame everything on Greenspan. He goes on from there to describe (in terms a normal person can actually understand) how the financial crisis of 2007-2008 actually got rolling, how the "commodities bubble" caused gas prices to go up (an event which had nothing to do with supply and demand), and how our politicians are currently busy selling our infrastructure to foreign investors for lump sum payments that vastly underestimate their value. The last anecdote I wowed my brother with from this book was how all the parking meters in Chicago have been sold to a consortium of foreign owners, and now they can't have street fairs anymore in Chicago. Why? Because the consortium wants to charge fair organizers for their day of lost meter business--and no one can afford what they're asking. (pp. 165-171.)

So who might like this book?

Anyone you know who feels ripped off by their vote for Obama.

Anyone you know who enjoys indignant profanity.

Anyone who know who might be interested in learning what a credit default swap actually is, without reading a whole boring business book on the subject of the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

*Taibbi must have a great sense of humor and a sanguine personality. A friend told me she recently saw Taibbi speak, and he was quite chipper, especially in light of what he was talking about. This annoyed her--she didn't see how he could be so happy--but it made me feel better. Taibbi's one of the smartest guys around, and if he can write this whole book and understand it and STILL smile, well, that makes me feel better too.

Business, business, read all about it!

A collection of reviews I wrote for Library Journal about business and personal finance books has been published in the September 1 issue!

For whatever reasons, I had a lot of fun writing this one. The books were varied and interesting (even when I didn't like them) and I always feel like I'm doing a real service for librarians by reading business books so they don't have to.

If you read the reviews, please note that the Dave Ramsey book in particular really ticked me off, due to a pretty basic inaccuracy in the text. It was a good reminder that even if you do read ONE book about investing, you might want to consider checking whatever you learn against at least one other source, or asking someone you know who knows a little bit about personal finance about it. I'm just sayin'.

Friday short takes.

Ah, the weekend, she's almost here. And I for one am glad.

Nothing particularly pithy today (or any day, yes, thank you, hecklers), just a few short takes on this Friday morning.

I went to look at Joseph Stiglitz's new book Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy yesterday, and it looked quite interesting. But I have to face reality in that 1. I don't have the heart to read it right now, and 2. it's well-written, but it's still pretty dense stuff and I'm not going to have the time to read it right now. So then I flipped to the back to take a wander through the index (I do this a lot; I find that doing indexing has helped me develop the skill of looking at an index and gleaning a lot of information about a book that way) when I was shocked to find that THERE WAS NO INDEX. What the hell? In a complex book about finance and economics? W. W. Norton and Co, and Mr. Stiglitz, you should be ASHAMED of yourselves. I'm no economist but I could tell you how to make one person's economy better: hire a freelance indexer, you cheap bastards.

I only got about two chapters into Ian Mortimer's book The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century, and it's a bit too dense to recommend for pleasure reading, but it's a lot of fun nonetheless. I wish there were books like this for every century (and location)--Mortimer talks about every aspect of the 14th century, from costume to traveling to health to eating and drinking to the law (among many other topics), and it's all written in the form of a friendly guidebook introducing you to the culture. Super cool stuff.

Anna Dean's Bellfield Hall: Or, the Observations of Miss Dido Kent. If you're a Jane Austen or Regency fan run, don't walk, to get this title. It has nothing to do with Austen, but is set in her time period and features witty writing somewhat similar to hers. And its heroine is named "Dido Kent." You've got to love that. At least I did.

And that's it! Enjoy the weekend, folks, life's too short not to. Or, alternatively, sometimes it feels too damn long. Either way grab a good book and tell the rest of the world to buzz off for a couple of days.

Why read business books?

I'm not quite sure how I ended up with the habit of reading business books.

Well, that's not quite right. I know how I started. Library Journal had an opening for business and economics book reviewers, and I wanted to review for Library Journal, so I applied for it. Then I just started reading business books I didn't have to review, because I thought they would give me insight into the business world. This is something I could use, as I totally don't understand the business world. I mean, I understand it, in that I believe most businesses nowadays are out to screw me (telephone and internet service company, I'm looking at you), and I know from knowing salespeople that one of their favorite methods is to mirror your physical actions and motions so you feel more comfortable around them and are therefore more amenable to their sales pitches.* But real insight, I thought, would be a useful thing.

I don't know that I've gained a lot of insight over the years of reading business titles. But I have found this: when I find a good business book, it's always a book that really gets to me, or completely changes my thinking, or opens my eyes to some new ideas. Sometimes they even make me laugh. And that's worth something, even if I have to read or look at 100 books to find one good one.**

Take a book like Jonathan Pond's Safe Money in Tough Times: Everything You Need to Know to Survive the Financial Crisis. It's a fantastic book (I put it on the Library Journal Best Business Books list this year, and it was one of the picks I felt most strongly about) and if you want to know more about the financial mess we're in OR some great, common-sense ways to approach your own earning, saving, and investing, this is the book for you. In addition to finding it useful, I also found the author's clear-eyed approach to the world enjoyable. This was my favorite part of the whole book:

"Reevaluate any contemplated major purchases, such as a home, home improvements, or an automobile, in light of the current economic situation. While the economy may benefit from these purchases, it may make sense to postpone them. (You can rely on other members of your community to boost the economy by buying things they neither need nor can afford.)" (p. 14.)

Come on. Even if it's in a how-to business book, that's funny. So that's why I hang in there on the business books. Every now and then, as in John Bowe's Nobodies, Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires***, and Paul Midler's Poorly Made in China (as well as anything written by Michael Lewis), they actually open my mind in ways I never expected. So do consider a business book this weekend. It may not make you happy, but it might blow your mind OR give you a laugh. Both good things.

*Ewww.

**Really, that's about the ratio.

***About the founder of Facebook, who is icky, and who could care less about your privacy, especially if he can sell it for profit.