Why We Want You To Be Rich

Why We Want You To Be Rich: Two Men, One Message by Donald J. Trumb, Robert T. Kiyosaki, Meredith McIver, and Sharon Lechter. According to this book, the middle class will soon be a thing of the past, at least in America. It offers ideas and inspiration of how to get out of the middle class and become rich. It’s a fantastic book, easy to read. Most non-fiction books I read, I might mark two or three pages with a quote or a reference I want to note down. I had 20-30 pages marked. The only other author that beats that is Sark, who is just too great for words. I highly recommend it.

The Dance of Anger

The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships by Harriet Lerner is an easy to read book, rather insightful, and has decent advice. It doesn’t go too much into depth into any one kind of relationship, but it does offer strategies you can use in a broad number of them. Unless all your relationships are perfect, it’s worth a read.

The Obsession

The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness by Kim Chernin is a very interesting book, and I do recommend reading it. Written over 20 years ago, it still is very relevant to women today. It is about dieting, eating, anorexia, and the power of women. Why is anorexia found almost exclusively among women? Why was it being found in almost epidemic numbers at that particular time? Why are women the ones who diet, to whom the diet books, magazines, and groups are marketed? Kim Chernin answers these questions and many more on an interesting journey into the culture and eventually the soul of current life. I don’t agree with everything she said, but some of her observations are simply amazing and well worth it.

What Should I Do With My Life?

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson is a good book, and I recommend reading it. The author interviewed hundreds of people who either have found their “calling” or who were still searching for it and has put a lot of their stories in this book. Along with their stories, he includes the wisdom and guidance he’s gleaned from it all. It doesn’t answer the question for you, but it offers a lot of help in answering the question yourself.

Living Wicca

Living Wicca: A Further Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham is worth reading if you’re Wiccan. If you’re not, skip it. I don’t agree with everything he says, but as he says, take what you want and leave the rest. He goes much further into depth on how to be a solitary practitioner of Wicca than he did in his previous book. He includes a section on how to define your own tradition, giving guidelines on what you should think about when creating a tradition that you may be able to teach others some day. It certainly gave me plenty to think about. How do I see the Deities? How are the Goddess and the God different? What do I believe their place is in human life? It also has an extensive bibliography in back with comments on what he recommends and what simply is out there.

The Tao of Pooh

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff is well worth the read. If you’re a fan of Taoism or of Winnie the Pooh, or preferably both, then you should read this book. The author believes that Winnie the Pooh is the greatest Western Taoist and sets about proving it with examples from the book and from Taoist writings. For people who don’t know much about Taoism, it’s a good primer, told in a way that most people who grew up in America would be able to relate to.

Simplify Your Work Life

Simplify Your Work Life: Ways to Change the Way You Work So You Have More Time to Live by Elaine St. James is well worth reading. It’s short but highly effective. The author puts in a lot of information in a very small book. It’s also easy to read – no long words, no page-long paragraphs, no convoluted sentence structures. It’s straightforward and has great advice.

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom by Christiane Northrup is an excellent book. I highly recommend it to any women, but especially to women who believe in alternative therapies and healing. She mentions a healing intuitive a few times. If that’s not your thing, then skip those parts and read the rest. She is a doctor, and the biological information alone is worth checking out. However, the advice on diet, health, and other parts of a woman’s life is very much worth the read.

The Bisexual Spouse

I was going to read this and do a book review on it, but I had to put it down after starting the third chapter. I was going to throw it down after the introduction, but I decided to give it a fair shot and read five chapters. No. I have better things to do with my life than to read this piece of garbage. I don't know where I got the recommendation from, but I wish I hadn't picked this up.

Short version of why I think this book sucks - the "bisexuals" in the interviews aren't bisexual. They are homosexuals who had heterosexual marriages for a while. That's the author's definition of bisexual - gays who thought they were straight but then came out as gay.

This upsets me, ticks me off, to use more "polite" language. I'd rather not swear in my blog, but this really gets to me.

I am bisexual. I am not gay. I am not straight. To declare that all bisexuals are really one or the other who dabbled or were mistaken is insulting to an extreme. I am attracted to women. I am attracted to men. I am also attracted to different physical aspects in men versus women. I like my women to be curvy and soft. I like my men to be fit and solid. A woman can be soft and solid, curvy and fit. So can a man. But, I am not attracted to androgynous people, or rather not just, because the physical has never been my main attraction to people. I am in no way monosexual. I am bisexual, and to be told that I don't exist or that I don't know myself as well as this author does is condescending and extremely upsetting.

There are times when a person is too close to something to see it clearly. We've all had friends (or been that friend) who ends up in the same situation over and over again, though we think it's a completely different thing each time. Our friends see it, but we don't. This is not one of those things. I've done a lot of thinking about this. I've done over two decades of thinking about this. I've gone through all kinds of labels and "what if"'s and things like that. I know what I am, and I know who I am. This author can go stuff himself.

Another thing that ticks me off about this is that other people will read this and think that the author is correct, that that is the real definition of bisexual. I have an ex-boyfriend who thought that way. There is enough derision and societal pressure about being bisexual without this spreading it around.

So, whoever recommended this book, please stop. And for anyone who was thinking about reading this book, don't. Not if you're looking for something about bisexuals. If you want to read about homosexuals who married people of the opposite gender, this is for you. But it sure isn't what it claims to be.

This Year You Write Your Novel

This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley. I have a very good vocabulary, better than most of my friends, as good as the rest. When I hit the third word I didn’t know in the book, I stopped. How good could a book on writing be when the author doesn’t know how to make his own book readable by the majority of his target audience?

1001 Ways to Cut Your Expenses

1001 Ways to Cut Your Expenses by Jonathan D. Pond. It’s repetitious. It may be good for a once-through of just the bolded parts for a quick-and-dirty summary of methods. Not a whole lot that isn’t common sense, but you don’t always think about everything when you’re in the midst of a situation, financial or otherwise.

Ten Poems to Change Your Life

Ten Poems to Change Your Life by Roger Housden sucked. I'm not a big poetry fan any more, but the title sounded promising. So I read the first couple of poems, and I skipped the interpretations, and I skimmed the remaining poems. These poems are supposed to change my life? One of them was about how warm the poet's socks were. I'm not kidding. I have had some poems if not change my life at least influence or comfort me greatly, and I'll get into some of them and what they mean to me in future posts. But I'm not going to be so pompous as to claim that they will change your life or that my interpretation of them is the right one. My interpretation is influenced by my life and my experiences, and your interpretation will be influenced by yours. Maybe you'll enjoy the poems I suggest. Maybe not. It's your life and your Future. You get to decide.

Fire in the Soul

Fire in the soul : a new psychology of spiritual optimism by Joan Borysenko. I read about a third of this. About half of that consisted of "as I said in my previous book...", so I stopped. I figure if I want to read this one, I should read the first one, but the first one doesn't sound very interesting, so I won't, and this book wasn't interesting enough to read without it.

On Writing

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. This is a great book for any writer or Stephen King fan. A good portion of it is autobiography, but it’s all relevant for a writer. It’s going to end up on my bookshelf. It’s to the point, it has great examples, and it is funny in a whole lot of places. I recommend it.

Bird by Bird

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. I was a little leery of reading this, despite the recommendation by SARK, due to the title, but it connects to a very telling story and makes complete sense once you read it. I very much enjoyed this book, and I recommend it to any writer and to some non-writers as well. It’s very different from other writing books. It deals much more with being a writer than with writing, and it is honest, brutally so in some places. I’ll probably end up reading it again at some point.

Career Tests

Here's a quick book review to make up for the lack of post on Monday.

Career Tests: 25 Revealing Self-Tests to Help You Find and Succeed at the Perfect Career by Louis Janda. Skip everything and read the epilogue, and only the first page of that.

Common Sense Economics

Here's a quick book review to make up for the lack of one on Saturday.

Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity by James Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, and Dwight R. Lee. If you’re a student of economics, read the book. If you think that personal finance self-help books are beneath you, read section 4 of this book. Everyone else can skip it.

Bi Any Other Name

Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu is a great book. It was written in 1991, and I would love to see another of its kind written on its 20th anniversary. It’s almost a Chicken Soup for the Bisexual Soul. It’s full of stories by bisexuals about their lives and experiences. Each of them have different views on and different definitions of bisexuality. It’s quite a read. They cover all kinds of topics as well – coming out, politics, biphobia, oppression from monosexuals, celebration, feminism, racism, and much more. Most people will find something in there to relate to. I recommend it to any bisexual and anyone who loves a bisexual. It’s not a “read in one sitting” book, but it’s worth finishing.

Cinderella Was a Liar

Cinderella Was a Liar: The Real Reason You Can’t Find (or Keep) a Prince by Brenda Della Casa is not the greatest relationship advice book of all times, but it’s better than most and a whole heck of a lot funnier. The advice you can get from plenty of other places (other than the no sex on a first date rule which seems to be right or wrong depending on the book), but it presents it in a manner that’s amusing and straight forward. It’s easy to relate to the advice, because it’s presented in fairy tale language – not as a fairy tale or about fairy tale characters, but about princes and toads and maidens and slippers. I’m glad the author asked me to reconsider reading this. Even if you’ve found your happily ever after, check this out of the library for an amusing read. It’s more entertaining than a lot of things you could pick up.

The Millionaire Next Door

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko. I read this book perhaps a decade ago. I read it again about five years ago. This past summer, I bought a copy, and it now resides on my bookshelf for me to pick up and leaf through whenever I want. I recommend this book. It has a lot of statistics, but it also has a lot of examples and stories. If you don’t like statistics or if you don’t like stories, you could still enjoy this book. Just skip over the parts you don’t like. I recommend this book. It’s an eye-opener about who really is a millionaire and what they really do. It also has a lot of excellent suggestions about how to become a millionaire yourself. Have I become a millionaire in the past 10 years since I read it? No, but I don’t always practice what I know is best for me. However, I’m closer to it than a lot of my friends, and I fully intend to get there, and this book will help.