Books – Page 33 – …on the B.L.

Get Money

March 27, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Difficulty: II
Quick Review: Kristin Wong writes about finances in the most approachable way possible. She doesn’t overwhelm you or make you feel stupid while comprehensively covering everything from basic savings to investments and taxes.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Especially for the millennials who are entering and working through adulthood. I was lucky enough to have parents who taught me about finances, but, in adulthood, I have realized so many of my peers have not been so lucky. Which is a shame because money is a huge part of our lives… Usually something we struggle with because it’s money or we don’t have enough of it or whatever.

Kristin Wong has tons of experience with money because she writes about it for all the biggest outlets and she’s also human. Money is scary. Money can be depressing. Money can seem like a distant dream belonging to our favorite Instagrammers. She is unafraid to talk about the nitty gritty details without dumbing it down or making it too hard to understand.

Balance. The overarching theme of Get Money is balance; balance between savings and living. From the beginning of the book, Wong talks about the Oh Shit Cycle; us adults out there adulting are probably over familiar with this cycle of blame, shame, and a bit of depression. Wong gets to the real point of money, it’s personal. How we spend, save, and look at money is different with each person. She is consistent in pointing out in order to put your finances in order, you must look inward to your motivations, which takes time and work.

Money is rough, but it is a part of life. It is part of friendships and relationships. Who we are is intrinsically linked with money. Wong understands this and so much more. She gets money. No pun intended. She wants her readers to understand money and the choices they have. Banks. Everyone needs one. What we don’t realize: we have options. Wong wants her readers to know they have options. She does not want anyone to be blinded by their fears and reservations of money.

Things included in Get Money that you need to know/Reasons to buy her book: a) credit scores are confusing b) taxes c) compound interest for the good and the bad d) savings e) IRA, 401k, what? f) debt g) financial advisers h) negotiating incomes/interest/anything. You need it!

The book is organized into three sections covering about every aspect of money issues normal (non-financial sector) people need to know. There are work spaces throughout, so you can make plans and complete the exercises. If you’re awkward or shy like I am, Wong includes advice and scripts for calling to negotiate with insurance companies, banks, etc. She gamifies money/reading into levels, so you can level up instead of dealing with boring old chapters. Advice from other financial experts is scattered throughout, as well as, outside information and resources. If you’re wanting to put her words to work and use it as a guide to getting your money in order, it’s not a quick read. Although, I would suggest reading it all at once, and then going back using it as a personal game plan.

Kristin Wong is competent, funny, motivating, helpful, understanding, and human. I don’t want financial advice from someone scary, and she is anything but scary. Her book is fun to read and informative. Everyone and anyone can learn something from her.

Memorable Quotes:
“If you’re bad with money, take solace in the fact that you’re not stupid, you’re just human.”
“Sticking to your budget is really about sticking with your goal.”
“Sex is an awkward topic, but based on my experience, money is leaps and bounds more taboo.”
“If you want to stick to your budget and goals, learning to spend consciously, with a purpose, is a must.”

Title: Get Money; Live the Life You Want Not Just the Life You Can Afford
Author: Kristin Wong
Publisher: Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 9780316515658

Books

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

March 23, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Notable: New York Times Bestseller
Quick Review: A look into the collecting, conserving, hiding, and rescuing the most important manuscripts documenting African history, literature, culture, life, philosophy, science, religion and more.

Abdel Kader Haidara is not a name most of us are familiar with. Joshua Hammer reveals the heroic efforts of Haidara and his team to save not just once but twice the illuminating manuscripts documenting a little known history of Africa in his third book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.

Africa has a reputation for not having a history because it lacks written documentation of their vast and varied history. Haidara began a journey in the 1980’s to contradict the stereotype of a dark continent. Timbuktu was the center of scholarship in Africa for centuries. Out of fear from jihadis and colonizers in the past five hundred years, those who possessed valuable manuscripts began hiding them in order to protect. Haidara spent years accumulating these precious manuscripts that had been buried, hidden, and even forgotten. In the early 2000’s, Haidara gained recognition for his conservation efforts and building a large library to house his family’s manuscripts. In the 2010’s, Al Qaeda began moving into the region and took over Timbuktu. In order to protect the manuscripts, Haidara moved them into private homes before smuggling them out of the city.

The book is split into several chapters alternating between Haidara’s story and the terrorist activity in the region. The sections describing the terrorist activity are very dry full of facts. The area has been a hotbed of religious extremism for centuries, so the information is incredibly important. A lot of the names and events are familiar because they were mentioned in the news at the time but never went into in any detail.

Hammer does a great job in relaying the emotions the citizens of Timbuktu went through during the Al Qaeda invasion. He relays a great deal of information in a concise package. There is a lot of cultural, religious, and regional information, which he describes to those who may not have a knowledge of Northern Africa. It is well written but a tad dull.

Fun Fact: Bouctou means: the woman with the big belly button. Tin means: well. The Tuareg tribe was a nomadic tribe. In the twelfth century, they found an area with good water. When they described the area to others in their tribe they said it was the Tin of Bouctou or the well of the woman with the big belly button. Over Tin Bouctou evolved into Timbuktu.

Fun Fact: Hammer refers to the kidnapping of 276 girls. Alexis goes deeper into the subject in her debut work A Moonless, Starless Sky. A great book also dealing with extremism in Africa.

Memorable Quotes:
“The confrontation between these two Islamic ideologies-one open and tolerant, the other inflexible and violent-would bedevil Timbuktu over the following five centuries.”
“He was particularly interested in manuscripts that contradicted Western stereotypes of Islam as a religion of intolerance – pointing with pride to Ahmed Baba’s denunciation of slavery…”

Title: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu
Author: Joshua Hammer
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781476777412

Books

An Irish Country Doctor

March 17, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: III
Quick Review: A sweet tale about the finding the beauty in a small town.

Patrick Taylor writes about Northern Ireland and doctors with authenticity because he’s a retired doctor from Northern Ireland.

An Irish Country Doctor is a sweet story. None of his writing feels trite or imaginative but grounded in reality, which is how I like my novels. Even though the town of Ballybucklebo is imagined, it is obvious Taylor has native experience with the region and people he’s inhabiting.

Ballybucklebo remains deeply rooted in their traditions and heritage. Doctor O’Reilly is the esteemed and trusted village doctor. It’s 1964, and the world is changing. O’Reilly brings young Doctor Barry Laverty into the fold as his assistant bringing with him new medicine and point of view. The town is inhabited by a group of highly eccentric yet totally lovable villagers. Barry is put off at first by O’Reilly’s unconventional treatments and rather bizarre medical practice in general. At a shocking pace, Barry is taken in by the community and begins to fall in love with the entire profession of General Practice in a small village.

The novel is full of Irish phrases and Taylor’s own unique word plays. It’s hard not to be drawn into his prose. His style is straightforward, but there are lots of descriptive bits. Normally, I am not a fan of too much descriptors, but Taylor is not excessive nor too flowery.

Ireland is a majority Catholic country, and was just as conservatively Catholic as you can imagine in the 1960’s. Taylor deals with issues that were prevalent during the time – and today, as well. The plot is thickened with touches of pregnancy out of wedlock, birth control pills, abortion, poverty, deadbeat dads, among other things. If the novel were any shorter, the abundance of hot button issues would have been a bit much; however at 429 pages set in a poor village, it’s appropriate. Taylor has touches of feminism as the books is riddled with strong female characters including a female civil engineer student. Even the aging Doctor O’Reilly is pro birth control, pro choice, and tells husbands to help their wives with the children.

The story is a sweet one allowing you to escape into a lovely small village of Northern Ireland. Every storyline wraps up with a nice, neat bow.

Memorable Quotes:
“Sometimes we doctors aren’t much better than a bunch of Druids.”

Title: An Irish Country Doctor
Author: Patrick Taylor
Publisher: Forge Books
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 9780765368249

Books

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

March 15, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 352
Quick Review: He’s an opinionated dentist with almost no online footprint until someone else did it for him. Funny, witty, insightful, and highly originally.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is Joshua Ferris’ third novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I didn’t know a thing about the book when I picked it up, but I knew it was different than what I have been reading lately.

Paul O’Rourke is a dentist in New York City. He’s an average man. He’s addicted to his phone, but abhors people attached to theirs. He smokes, is a fan of the Red Sox, an atheist, has an obsession with religion, falls into obsession with the women he dates, and is alone. Paul O’Rourke has many opinions and a thriving internal dialogue. He keeps his online presence to a minimum hiding behind a different name; his dental practice doesn’t even have a website. He continues leading his rather mundane life until someone hijacks his identity online, which he deems wildly violating. What begins in anger launches him into a full inspection deep into his soul.

Ferris has an incredibly unique style. The majority of the novel is not action based but thought based. He has an uncanny ability to bring the reader into the mind of someone who, otherwise, would be difficult to relate to. He makes the mundane wildly funny. Paragraphs can go on for a brief sentence or several pages.

The novel could have been a complete disaster, but Ferris is very successful. The book is captivating.

Total side note… While reading this book, I was waking up at an age appropriate time. Coincidence? Most definitely.

Memorable Quotes:
“To me, a church is simply a place to be bored in.”
“”How could you be a good person and not believe in God?””

Title: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
Author: Joshua Ferris
Publisher: Back Bay Books (Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group)
Copyright: 2014
ISBN: 9780316033992

Books

Winter Garden

March 7, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: No
Length: 394
Quick Review: Meredith and Nina think their old, Russian mother hates them, but on their father’s death bed everything changes. A mother-daughter mystery couldn’t be more generic.

As a Russian speaker… This book was incredibly painful to read. As an English speaker… I found it mundane and common at best.

Meredith and Nina are sisters following vastly different paths. Meredith stayed home to help run the family business as her father aged. Nina left for adventures as a photographer. Their childhood was marked by a father’s unconditional love and their mother’s frigidity. A fairy tale they heard as children transformed into something meaningful to their mother and their own lives after their father dies suddenly.

Hannah tries to build a beautiful picture in the reader’s mind, but falls short as she uses too many unnecessary adjectives giving the narrative a clunky, arbitrary feel. Her efforts feel amateurish as she becomes overly repetitive. When she refines her language, everything flows better, but these moments are fleeting throughout the almost four hundred pages.

The characters come off as flat, grating, unempathetic, and overly stupid. Spoiler: The mother is an elderly, Russian woman with a heavy accent. The plot takes place in 2001. If I could VERY easily do the math: Woman. 80 ish years of age. Her heavy accent means she did not leave Russia as a child but an adult. Even if she moved to the US as a 23 year old woman, she would have been in Russia during WWII… Which explains all of her behavior. So… In the 37 and 40 years her daughters had with her, they didn’t even think about her life before them. I have a hard time feeling sympathy for adult characters who live in me-me-me land, which is exactly what the main characters here do. Not to mention their inability to view the “fairy tale” as an allegory for their mother’s life. As children, all of these things are excusable, but as adult characters it’s surprising and not believable.

Hannah has an obsession with “unconditional” love throughout the narrative. Every time the word “love” is used it is almost always in conjunction with “unconditional.” It just irritated me. After the first few times, she could have dropped the word since she was referring to family and not an “unconditional love” of dirt.

All in all, the book was a waste of my time. I had the plot guessed in detail within the first thirty pages. It’s a formulaic mother-daughter relationship story with an even more uninspired mystery for good measure. As a non-Russian speaker, I would have been able to forgive her, but I’m not that. She fell short. It’s a lesson in how one should only write about languages they’re familiar with.

Memorable Quotes:

“She had thought she was full grown then.”
“”A woman can be a girl and still know her own heart.””

Title: Winter Garden
Author: Kristin Hannah
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Copyright: 2010
ISBN: 9781615239498

Books

The Last Black Unicorn

February 27, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 288
Quick Review: She is hilariously funny and heartbreakingly honest in a memoir about her uphill battles to a little bit of money, fame, stability, and happiness.

I had never heard of Tiffany Haddish until Christmas, which is unsurprising since I live under a rock. She knocked my socks off in Girls Trip. I just had to read her book.

I read The Last Black Unicorn last night in one sitting in under a few hours. She is funny finding the humor in some of the darkest hours of her life. I can completely identify with her sense of humor. She used laughter as a survival and/or defense mechanism. Comedy was her way out of a life that could have ended in a million different ways of bad.

Haddish doesn’t shy away from the dark in her life with a cut and dry style. Her life is filled with concepts and feelings so many struggle to name and describe, but she lays them out in the world. Her childhood was filled with an abusive mom, an absent father, foster care, sexual abuse, physical abuse, homelessness, racism, depression and more. She was able to use her talent for entertaining to gather every experience and hardship and rise above. She succeeded when everything in the world was against her.

I knew she had had a rough childhood. I knew she was a comedian. Most comics write over the bad stuff with a sense of humor. Haddish wrote funny, but she also did not gloss over or try to make things funny that cannot be funny. She embraced the hard.

Haddish writes the way she talks. Her voice is evident throughout the entire novel. It’s hard not to feel a certain camaraderie because she’s talking to you. Allowing you to enter her internal dialogue and love her flaws and quirks and insecurities. She comes off as this confident woman, but under all the self-assuredness, she is still fighting to prove and explain her existence to everyone and herself.

I just want to give her hug. I don’t know if she likes hugs, but she deserves all the hugs.

Memorable Quotes
“Hurting myself made them stop hurting me and care about me.”
“I was eighteen. To survive, I had to quit comedy.”
“I wanted to be in the gang, because I felt like then I’d be a part of something.”
“When you ruin a black man’s shoes, you never know what’s going to happen.”

Title: The Last Black Unicorn
Author: Tiffany Haddish
Publisher: Gallery Books (Simon & Schuster Inc. )
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 9781501181825