30 Before Thirty: update

Lately, I've been reading again, so I thought I'd update my books read to date list.

To date I have read:

O1. The End of America

O2. The Omnivore's Dilemma

O3. French Bull Dogs

O4. Your Money or Your Life **

O5. Rich Dad, Poor Dad

O6. Mr. Darcy's Diary

O7. Scott Pilgrim series*

O8. thrift

O9. Living Rich by Spending Smart

1O. Money Girl's Smart Moves to Deal With Your Debt

11. The American Frugal Housewife

12. The New Frugality

13. The Cheapskate Next Door

14. Ghostly Awakening (This link was taken down for some reason. Not sure why it's gone.)

15. Green With Envy

16. Gluten-Free Girl and The Chef

17. No Impact Man

I've been debating if I want to review any of these books or not. From the current batch, I have mostly negative things to say about them with the exception of one. (The New Frugality, if anyone is curious. I was pretty neutral about Money Girl... and The Cheapskate Next Door.) It's in my nature to point out fault, but I'm not sure this is always helpful. I suppose I could try being more vague and general rather than nitpicking.

If you are like me and dislike reading books that are written by preachy people or tell you a bunch of things you already know and think it's new because it was new to them, avoid Green with Envy and No Impact Man. Both books also leaned really heavily on the, "WE MUST BE SPIRITUAL, WHAT DO THE RELIGIONS SAY...?" angle. As an atheist, this should not surprise anyone that it bothered me. A couple of mentions are fine, but when it starts becoming several times a chapter, you better believe my eyes are rolling, and I'm debating if I want to finish.

If I had to be honest, No Impact Man annoyed me the most. I had watched the documentary based on this project awhile back and it turns out that the author is equally annoying in print, even at the end when he's supposed to have learned so much about himself and made changes. I had been expecting a book with some practical information about the project, instead, it was filled with his obsessions and speshul problems. And seriously, dude: explain what the hell you did when you gave up toilet paper rather than throwing a hissy about how everyone wants to know about it. We do not live in the land of bidets here, and believe it or not, some of use would like to find ways to decrease our TP consumption. I made it through this book by sheer will power. It was not what I was expecting it to be.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, The New Frugality was well worth the time spent reading it, and I'm considering purchasing it for my collection at home. It was chock full of useful information and it struck a nice balance between Your Money or Your Life which was about spending as little money as possible, retiring NOW, and sustaining this sparsity for life, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which read like a bad GET RICH QUICK! scheme with all the talk about expensive cars and million dollar homes and how sparsity is for suckers. Not only that, it's a more recent publication and went into changes that we'll see in our lifetime regarding retirement and the effects of the recession. I learned more from this book than any of the others I've read to date. The only thing that raised my hackles about this book was the author's insistence that we must pay for our children's college education. On this subject, I actually agree with The Cheapskate Next Door and what was described as "oxygen mask parenting."

Anywho. I'm starting to fall into the desire to critique and nitpick these books to death.

I'm so excited that I'm just over halfway to 30 read, and I have just over a year to read the last 13! I'm thinking I may be more selective for these last ones. Truth be told, I've read a lot of duds recently because they were free Kindle downloads or library books.