Category Archives: Books

Book Log – The Richest Man in Babylon

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The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason

This book is based upon a series of pamphlets originally published in 1926. Each pamphlet was a parable set in ancient Babylonia, and taught a lesson about the way to riches.

It’s a short book, and even so somewhat repetitive, as it was originally separately published essays.

Basically, the key lessons can be summed up as presented in the title essay, The Richest Man in Babylon:

Seven Cures for a Lean Purse
1. Start thy purse to fattening. (Put aside no less than 10% of your earnings as yours to keep, and, in theory, never spend.)
2. Control thy expenditures. (Live below your means)
3. Make thy gold multiply. (Invest!)
4. Guard thy treasures from loss. (Don’t make stupid investments! Don’t take on too much risk!)
5. Make of thy dwelling a profitable investment. (Buy your home, don’t rent! And grow vegetables in your yard!)
6. Insure a future income. (Make sure you’ve got money to retire on)
7. Increase thy ability to earn. (learn, grow, be good)

Nothing terribly surprising here, but it was told in an entertaining way. I would classify it as an inspirational book, if you need that extra kick to get your money stuff in order.

I sort of wish I had bought and read this book instead of any of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series, because although the lessons are basically the same, Robert Kiyosaki is a guy who got rich telling people how to get rich.

Book Log – Running With Scissors

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Running With Scissors: a memoir by Augusten Burroughs

Well, that was an odd childhood.

My favorite scene in this book is when teenagers Augusten and his “sister” (it’s complicated) decide the ceiling in the kitchen is too low, so they rip it out. Then they decide it’s too dark, so they cut out a skylight in the roof, and use one of the side house windows to fill it, only it’s 12 inches too short. When the “father” comes into the kitchen in the morning, he steps over the rubble, makes coffee and says, “that’s quite a project you’ve got going.” They hit him up for a couple hundred dollars to finish the project, which they spend on beer. Nice.

I’d heard that this story was disturbing, but I wasn’t particularly disturbed. It was an odd childhood, though.

Book Log – Fast Food Nation

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Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser.

Well, if it’s at all possible, I’m never eating at a fast food restaurant again.

But what about Moe’s, Chipotle, and other sort-of fast food restaurants like that? Where do they get their beef and chicken, and how are their workers paid?

Maybe there’s a restaurant rating somewhere on the web.

Books, glorious books

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I cracked on Thursday and placed an Amazon order for 5, count ’em, FIVE new children’s books by Sandra Boynton.

I am really, really tired of reading The Very Busy Spider, Goodnight Moon and dear Dog anything but Goodnight Butterflies. By gum, there WILL be new books in this house.

I love Sandra Boynton books. We have Dinos to Go and the Philadelphia Chickens cd book.

Soon, we will be getting something called Moo Baa La La La and something else called BUT NOT THE HIPPOPOTAMUS amongst others. I am very excited, and have been checking UPS tracking twice a day. I kind of wish I hadn’t done the Free Super Saver Shipping, but perhaps they won’t be long, having shipped from Kentucky.

Moo Baa La La La!

deWoostered

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I’ve had a sobering realization just now.

I believe I’ve read all of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster short stories. I may or may not have also read all of the full-length books. I’m going to have to check my library at home and double check it with the list linked above.

While Plum has a great many other story series I can start plowing through, it still irks me to come to the end of the Jeeves & Wooster chronicles. It gives me that sad feeling you get when you come to the end of a great book, knowing you can never read it again for the first time.

(Though, sometimes, thanks to my extremely spotty memory, I can sometimes read a book for the first time again, but not very often.)

Book Log – Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

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Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris.

Awesome. Simply awesome. However, too short. As all of his stuff is. I got this book this morning, and I’m done. hour and a half at the DMV, an hour at lunch, and 15 minutes at the end of the day and poof! no more book to read.

Thank goodness I have The Confusion at home waiting for me which, if it’s anything like the first volume Quicksilver, will take me 3 months to read.

And I forgot, my mom got me The Well of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde’s latest Thursday Next book. The first two were good mind candy reading. Nothing really brilliant, but an interesting universe where they have time-travel but not Jet airplanes.

Book Log – How to Buy & Manage Rental Properties

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How to Buy & Manage Rental Properties by Irene and Mike Milin.

Some good info, but a lot of it is out of date. Written in the 80’s when interest rates were 10-12%, and you could do things like assumable mortgages. And people couldn’t afford to buy houses on their own.

They advocate finding meek tenants who won’t assert their rights. Gives me a bit of the heebie-jeebies.

Books – Stolen from StochasticGirl

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books
College Board’s 101 Greatest Works of Literature:

Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you want to read.
Underline those you started, but haven’t actually finished yet.
* indicates personal favorites.
+indicates having seen on stage

Beowulf (a translation)
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch-22****
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World*
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird********
Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible*
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet+
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream+
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet+
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels*
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire – Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Harrison Bergeron
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie+
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard – Native Son

I’m actually surprised at the number of these that I’ve read. I don’t consider myself a connoisseur of “great” literature.

Unfortunately, there isn’t as much time these days for me to lay supine on the couch for hours at a stretch and plough through a good book. I grab my reading opportunities a half hour at a time, at lunch or before bed. I guess that’s why it took me 4 months to complete Quicksilver.

Baroque Action Sequence

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I’m sadly nearing the end of reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1). It makes me somewhat sad to near the end of a great book, but I am heartened by the fact that there are two more volumes to come, and I saw The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) in a bookstore display window in the airport last night.

While Cyptonomicon still tops the list of my all-time favorite books, Quicksilver is humbling in its breathtaking richness of detail, history and compelling storyline and characters. Every so often I have to set the book down and marvel at the amount of research that must have gone into this rather large tome.

I wonder if it is harder to create an entire world filled with rich history (say, The Lord of the Rings) or to meticulously research the real world and weave a fascinating story into it.

It is not so very often that I am reading an action sequence in a book and I am actually overcome with a rush of adrenaline, especially if I am sitting in a cramped airplane seat next to someone who is large enough to have justifiably purchased two seats, but didn’t. Such was the case when I read a sand-sailer action sequence. A sand-sailer (and I hadn’t heard of it) is basically a large skateboard with a sail on it, which is used on beaches. In the novel, William of Orange rides one every morning, and there’s a great sequence with horses, sand-sailers, pirates, muskets and stuff. Woo. I was thinking it would be worth making the book into a movie, if just for that sequence.

Woo.