Category: Nonfiction

Financial, Nonfiction, Pop Culture

Number 52: Published in 2022

KC

Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy

Symeon Brown

I know I was around for the rise of the influencer, yet I know nothing about them.

Their rise coincides with my young adult years, when theoretically I was paying the most attention, and yet I missed it.

Maybe my technophobia was to blame (I regarded iPhones with extreme skepticism as late as 2014), or the fact that hipster culture back then was not particularly glamorous. Our early-teen-aughts aesthetic was ironically ugly and thrifted from the worst Salvation Army’s in Ohio. We had graduated into an recession and we were angry about it.

But clearly some people were not, and they became influencers. Regardless of how or why I failed to notice them, they exist now, and they are here to stay (maybe).

So I read a book about them to catch up. All in all, I enjoyed this little treatise on the influencer. Sometimes I was depressed, sometimes I was horrified, but mostly I learned cool facts about recent history. For example, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, has a masters degree from my alma mater. That was inspiring, unlike the rest of the book, which was more unsettling.

In conclusion, influencers are a menace to society, thank you for reading.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Ironically, I learned of this book while watching a Youtube video by influencer Jordan Theresa, who is clearly effective at her job, as she influenced me to read this book.

Biography, Nonfiction, Reviews, True Crime

Number 24: Addresses a Specific Topic

KC

Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy

Tom Wicker

I did not know much about this era of American history when I began this book, but now that I’ve finished, I still don’t.

It is not the fault of the author, it is just that the subject is so banal, like evil. I fall asleep even thinking about it.

That’s why he was so successful.

Wait, was he successful?

It seems to me idle to argue that he was not a demagogue. If he enjoyed his success, he was not entirely sanguine about its cost in ruined lives and damaged careers.

That sounds successful to me.

Joseph R. McCarthy was a demagogue, certainly, but… he was also intelligent, energetic, audacious, personally generous… too avidly craving the affirmation of others, too recklessly seeking it in the battle he exalted, McCarthy too carelessly believed that the approval he won justified the means of its achievement… who fought desperately and with uncommon success to achieve the wrong dream.

Indeed.

Anthology, Financial, Nonfiction

Number 44: An Anthology

KC

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo

Rebecca Walker

This is one of those books that you know from the beginning is going to get you. Anytime you have a group of diverse individuals sharing their honest feelings on one of society’s biggest taboos, at least one of them is going to hit a little too close to home and give you too many feelings. And that certainly happened with Women Talk Money. There were parts that were emotional, parts that were maddening, and a few sections that made me uncomfortably aware of aspects of my privilege I never even considered.

It was motivating, and reminded me that radical honesty about finances is necessary. The only way forward is to lift the veil of shame and secrecy until we understand how to do better.

I will definitely be looking into these writers in the future.

We tell ourselves so many stories about money; that it is the reward for our hard work, that is signals what is valuable, that it cannot buy things that will give our lives meaning, that we will never have equality until women assess their worth in the same ways men do. But none of these stories feel completely true to me.

P.S. I would be remiss not to mention that Rebecca Walker is the daughter of Alice Walker, whose essay is featured as the foreword of this book. While Alice Walker has done admirable work, her anti-Semitic views are, to say the least, problematic, and I cannot blame anyone for passing on anthology for that reason.

This world and these rooms might not have been designed for you, but you have to walk into the room and take the knowledge you need. Walk out with it. Don’t take anything else home.

Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction

Number 3: Title starting with the letter “E”

KC

Eve’s Hollywood

Eve Babitz

Words cannot express how much I love this collection. I read it every year and I always find something new to appreciate about it. Eve Babitz is commonly compared to Joan Didion, but I never understood it. In my opinion she is much more in line with Edith Wharton and Candace Bushnell, women who wrote savagely and frivolously, like pink stilettos, which is my favorite kind of writing. The difference being that they wrote about New York, and she wrote about L.A.

In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.

Of all her books, Slow Days Fast Company is probably her best, the most polished and to the point, but I like the messiness of Eve’s Hollywood. It feels like being 22 and sitting by the pool with your best friend over mojitos. Although I am originally from LA county, I did not appreciate the beauty of it while I was growing up, but I did after I read this book. It makes me homesick in the best possible way.

Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can’t see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it’s a ‘wasteland’ and other helpful descriptions.

Biography, Nonfiction, True Crime

Number 26: Has an “Author’s Note”

KC

The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York

Alex Palmer

The Santa Claus Man covers the same period of time that Edith Wharton skewered so brilliantly in fiction, but it’s even more disquieting because it was real, and I loved it as much as I love all Gilded Age tales. The New York this book describes is a utopia where children’s letters to Santa are always answered and Boy Scouts keep American manhood alive.

But, of course, this was a fantasy. The American experiment has always had duplicity, even in our most cherished institutions. I won’t look at Christmas the same way after reading this, but I do appreciate it more.

Memoir, Nonfiction, Pop Culture

Number 17: A Book Picked Based on its Spine

KC

The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture

Grace Perry

The category for this was obvious. This was the book that I picked based on its spine. I grew up in the 2000s, and I have so much nostalgia for the time it is a wonder I have space in my brain for anything else. This book did not disappoint! Grace Perry is awesome, and I would like to listen to her thoughts forever.

And now, a montage of the various pop culture this book made me miss:

What came first, the overeager collegiate dyke desperate for affection or the Banter Boy… was I mirroring him or relating to him?

So, that’s when I became a girl. At a time where gender-bending was encouraged and celebrated, but homophobia still reigned.

What a decade it was! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some movies to rewatch.

Financial, Investing, Memoir, Nonfiction

Number 10: A Book Based on A Real Person

KC

Invest Like a Shark: How a Deaf Guy with No Job and Limited Capital Made a Fortune Investing in the Stock Market

by James DePorre

Invest Like a Shark is a book on investing that dates back to 2007. I specifically picked it for this fact because 2007 seems like a lifetime ago. Since then, there has been a recession and a pandemic, the near-domination of the tech industry, and the introduction of cryptocurrency, so I was genuinely curious how dated this book would feel.

The answer is, not very.

Since this is a story of one man’s investment strategy, it is heavy on theory, but not as heavy on the mechanics of actually trading stock. In terms of investing metaphors, it is less egregious than some I have ready, but I am not a person who does well using with heavy visual metaphors to explain abstract concepts, so my memory of the book looks something like this:

Photo by Harrison Haines on Pexels.com
Photo by adiprayogo liemena on Pexels.com
Photo by Vova Krasilnikov on Pexels.com

Also, there is a forward by Jim Cramer, so you can’t say you don’t know what you’re getting into.