September 28, 2007
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
This book is very, very powerful. I think anybody who has escaped working retail (as I have) should pick up a copy and read it now.
Barbara Ehrenreich spent a month at a time working for minimum wage all across the country. She worked as a waitress, a maid, and a Wal*Mart employee. She allowed herself a small amount to start each month, and then tried to earn enough to pay the next month's rent. She didn't always succeed. Nickel and Dimed taught me about the injustices heaped upon the working poor, and made painfully clear something I've always suspected: It is not true that a job, any job, will lift you out of poverty. Many jobs don't pay well enough to keep a person housed and fed, let alone handle the health emergencies that invariably crop up when you work hard all day and don't eat enough, let alone eat well. One of her coworkers when she was on a team of maids often had half a small bag of Doritos for lunch.
I also learned that those teams of maids you can hire don't actually clean - they provide the appearance of cleanliness. The rules and regulations the maids toil under prevent effective cleaning -- half a bucket of warm water is all they're allowed for mopping, for example, which merely redistributes the dirt evenly rather than removing it. And the maids are treated terribly, both by their management (a man who insists they "work through it" whenever they complain of injuries) and by their clients (who do things like leave piles of dirt underneath the centers of their throw rugs so they can have proof of vacuuming later).
This is an eye-opener of a book, and it made me angry that we live in a country that allows people to work full-time (or more than full-time) for pay so low they cannot get by.
Book 24 in 2007.
Maverick
By Ricardo Semmler
This book is AMAZING! Ricardo Semmler took over SemCo from his father as a young man and proceded to turn it into the most unusal workplace you can imagine. He slashed management and administrative roles, gave all the workers a voice, took down office walls, and generally made the company a short-on-bureaucracy democracy which survived the insanity of Brazil's economy to remain profitable even during rough times. He's a surprisingly humble for such a successful young man.
Maverick is a must-read for anybody interested in how businesses are run. I myself am sorely tempted to buy a few spare copies and sneak them into the offices of the CEO and other top guys at my job.
Book 23 in 2007.
Your Money or Your Life
By Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
This is a great book for anybody who handles money. It covers how we look at money, how we deal with it, and how to replace our bad habits with good ones. The program itself is hard and I'm not sure I could handle doing it - it involves several steps, including taking a complete inventory of everything you have and figuring out how much it's worth, calculating how much money you've made in your lifetime, and tracking every single bit of money that goes into or out of your life. I would love to sit down with the authors (I believe Dominguez is deceased, but Robin is still around) and see what their thoughts are about folks like Antwon and I, who handle improbably large sums of money on a regular basis and deal with stock and whatnot. When I was in college, this program would have been a cinch. But now, when I literally handle thousands of dollars on a monthly basis, it seems very daunting.
That aside, I loved the rest of the book. It gave me a lot to think about, particularly the idea of enough. How much money is enough for me to live on? Once you've figured that out, you can start working toward financial independence -- having enough investments that one can live off the interest.
Book 22 in 2007.
Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth
By Peter Kelder
This is an interesting little book. It presents, beneath a thick layer of fantastical storytelling, a series of simple movements which supposedly can make you feel younger and healthier. I haven't tried them yet, but they are similar to Tai Chi, and I suppose that just about any stretching/agility movement, performed daily, would be beneficial to most folks. The story around the movements is incredibly silly, though, and borders on Victorian. I am thinking about tracking down a few more books out of the many which are available about this series of movements to see what they have to say.
Book 21 in 2007.
September 20, 2007
The Way of the Traitor
By Laura Joh Rowland
I devoured this in a few hours while waiting for a badly-delayed airplane. It's a quick read, with loads of interesting details. I have read several other books in this series about Sano Ichiro, the Shogun's Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People, and really enjoyed them. They're not terribly deep, and they tend toward the melodramatic, but come on! It's a murder mystery, people!
This one starts when Sano is sent off to the port city of Nagasaki by an enemy in the Shogun's court. He finds himself caught up in the dangerous political minefield of Dutch trading with Japan when a Dutch trader goes missing and then turns up dead. Loads of intrigue, excitement, and politics. Good times.
Book 20 in 2007.
The Myth of Matriarchal Pre-History: Why a Manufactured Past Won't Give Women a Future
By Cynthia Eller
This fascinating book painstakingly skewers all the hogwash matriarchalist feminists and matriarchalist pagans have been pushing for ages. In short, the old time when all the world was run by women and everything was peace and harmony until those nasty patriarchal invaders showed up and ruined it all never existed.
This is a thoroughly scholarly work, to the point of being very difficult to read. This is actually my second time through it and I'm still not sure I got everything. Still, her writing style is engaging and has a strong thread of dry wit under all the complexity and I enjoyed reading it both times (especially once I started using two bookmarks - one for my place in the narrative and one for my place in the endnotes).
Book 19 in 2007.
September 19, 2007
Loving What Is
By Byron Katie
This is an interesting book. I read it very quickly, and found it surprisingly powerful. I didn't much care for her take on physical pain, which she seems to be that it will be perfectly bearable if we think of it as the physical memory of injury. I have a condition which makes me essentially in pain all the time, and often in entirely more pain than any circumstances warrant. This pain is not the memory of an injury, it is faulty wiring in my body. Grr. Would love to meet her and ask about this.
Anyway.
The schtick in this book is to take a statement which you think to yourself about a stressful situation (for example, "John is so damn thoughtless!") and ask yourself four questions about it:
- Is it true?
- Can you absolutely know that it's true?
- How do you react when you think that thought?
- Who would you be without that thought?
Then you turn it around - reverse it. So "John is so thoughtless!" can become "I am so thoughtless" or "John is so thoughtful" -- and then you try to find ways in which these statements are as true or more true than the original one.
It's very interesting and actually has helped me lower my stress levels around some things. I don't think it's a cure-all or a panacea or whatever, but it's very very interesting.
You can learn more about it at TheWork.com.
Book 18 in 2007.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
By J. K. Rowling
Well, it's finally over.
Spoilers abound below. Be warned.
I've gotten really, really behind on my booklog because I have been putting off writing about this tome. I have very strong and very varied opinions on it. So, here's an inelegant summary of what I thought:
- Snape - Oh, love love love for my favorite potions master! Even if Rowling did make him a bit of a romantic wet blanket ("Always!" Feh.). It made me very, very angry that she killed him off with so little respect (nary a mention after he died!) but her writing around death is a bullet-point of its own below, so I'll let that be. I was pleased that she vindicated him entirely - one of the strengths of the Potter series is that even the good folks have flaws and (as someone has said, I forget whom) there is a marked difference in the books between being good and being nice. Snape is good. He is not nice. That's actually one of the things I love about him. I sometimes wonder what I'd be like if I didn't have the overwhelming urge to be so damn nice and desire for folks to like me. I bet I'd be a lot like him.
- Dumbledore - I was very, very happy to see Dumbledore finally get some depth, even posthumously. It's wonderful to see that his wisdom is hard-won, that he isn't always right, and that yes, he has hurt people. Yay.
- Voldie - Consummate villain to the end. Almost a tragic figure, really - absolutely brilliant, but with the tragic flaw of ambition not held in check by compassion.
- Character Deaths - I am planning to write a long, detailed essay someday about what constitutes a "good" death for a character (my classic example of a good death is Boromir's in LotR). Very few of the characters in this book got "good" deaths - they happen offscreen (Tonks, Lupin) or are handled so badly that I wanted to punch something (Dobby - a truly heroic death, important to the concept of elves being persons, and she dashes it off with very little attention. WTF.).
Then there's George. As far as I can figure, Rowling killed George and spared Percy (who, if any of the Weasleys deserves to go, is the one - he spent the last several books betraying everything his family stands for, and gets to return with nothing but "sorry! Oh, and Minister, I quit!" OMGWTFBBQARGH!) because she thought her audience would expect the opposite. That is a terrible way to plot things. A stupid way to plot things. If characters have to die, I expect them to die for a good reason. "To redeem his honor" is a good reason (Boromir). "Because he's the villain and deserves it" is a good reason (Voldie). "So he can rest in peace" is a good reason (Darth Vader). "Because you weren't expecting it!" isn't a good reason. It's a cruel reason. Hell, even Joss Whedon, whose casual attitude toward character death has finally driven me away from his work for what I hope is the last time, can come up with better reasons for his characters to die most of the time. "It makes the plot work" is a WAY better reason than "you weren't expecting it!"
- Camping - boy, howdy, did the pace drag while the trio were camping. And wtf was up with chapter after chapter containing next to nothing in terms of events? Ron being a twat, Hermione being sniffly... could've been done in fewer pages, imo.
- As an end to the series - I think this is a decent one. Ties everything up fairly well. Brings the video-game plot to a fairly good end. Finally explains wtf Dumbledore has been doing this whole time (and I love love love that he was basically using Harry. Heee!). Yay.
I think that about covers it. I'll be intrigued to see what (if anything) Rowling does next - more books in the same world? Something new?