Cocktail Time

I was complaining to my mom about all the depressing books I've been reading lately, so she recommended I borrow some P.G. Wodehouse from my brother.  So that's how I ended up reading Cocktail Time.

Cocktail Time is about the adventures of Lord Ickenham and all the chaos he spreads around him.  It starts with him knocking Sir Raymond Bastable's top hat off with a Brazil nut.  Sir Raymond thinks it is some young hooligans who did the deed; Lord Ickenham does nothing to correct his assumptions and makes a remark that Sir Raymond should write a book about it except that he is not a writer.  Sir Raymond is never one to fail a challenge, and so he writes a fiction novel called Cocktail Time.  He publishes it under a pseudonym because he doesn't want such a book marring his political aspirations.  But the book becomes famous and Sir Raymond becomes worried that reporters will find him out.  So at Lord Ickenham's suggestion, he gets his nephew, Cosmo, to claim he wrote the book.

All should have been finished there, but Cosmo owes some money to Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle.  The Carlisles talk Cosmo into writing a letter to extort more money out of his uncle.  Lord Ickenham gets a hold of the letter just as the movie rights to the book are coming up for sale.  And this leads to a ridiculous comedy of errors helped along by Lord Ickenham.

I will admit, I had a bit of a hard time getting into the story at first.  But after the first few chapters, things get moving and Cocktail Time ends up quite the hilarious read!  I'll definitely have to keep Wodehouse in mind the next time I need a break from all the serious and rather depressing reading I seem to be doing lately.

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City

I wanted to read Seven Fallen Feathers before Tanya Talaga's first Massey Lecture, which was happening in Thunder Bay.  I've heard good things about the book, that it is a must read for people living in Northern Ontario. 

Seven Fallen Feathers is the story of seven Indigenous youth who came to Thunder Bay for school and died there.  Most of them passed away in one of the rivers.  Talaga looks at what happened to each of the Seven, humanizing their stories.  She also looks at the circumstances surrounding when the youth went missing (and the lack of response and courtesy the local police department afforded the families).  

I had a hard time rating it on Goodreads because a 5 star review means "I loved it;" I think Seven Fallen Feathers is an important read, but it is depressing (and in no ways a book I would say that I loved).  So in the end I went with 4 stars on Goodreads, saying that "I really liked it" because I thought that was fair.

I think Seven Fallen Feathers is an important read, both for people living in Thunder Bay and for Canada as a whole.  There are some major problems with the way things are and all Canadians need to work towards a more fair and better future for everyone.

Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall is another book from Bustle's list of books that will inspire you to live a more sustainable life that I wanted to read.  My local library didn't have a copy, but they were able to bring it in for me through interlibrary loan, so yay!

Marshall is an expert in climate change communications.  Over the years he has seen scientists struggle to get their message out while climate change skeptics have increasingly banded together.  He also knows that many people agree that climate change is real, but do nothing to stop it.  So he decided to investigate why all of this is.  He met with psychologists, environmental activists, skeptics, people who work for the oil industry, evangelicals, and pretty much everyone else he possibly could to examine the issue.  What he found is that humans look at climate change as a simple problem, even though it is in reality a very complex problem.  Because of its complexity it can be framed in a variety of ways, such as as an environmental issue. Some people will support a particular frame while others will oppose it, and so this divides people on the issue.  He also found that the skeptics are having more success at building their narrative than people who support climate change are.  Humans are hard-wired for stories and narrative, so this means supporters are having a harder time convincing people. 

I found Don't Even Think About It fascinating (full disclosure: I have a background in psychology).  It's rather amazing how climate change happens to work against our brains in a lot of ways.  Most of the book is a bit depressing, but the end is rather hopeful: even though we are wired to ignore climate change, in some ways we're also wired to take action, as long as we can change the narrative from one of competition to one of cooperation.   

I will warn you though: Don't Even Think About It is in many ways a dense read.  I found myself only able to read about 20-40 pages in a sitting before having to take a bit of a break.  Thankfully the book is about half the size of This Changes Everything though, so I was able to get through it a bit faster.

Oh and one really nice touch that Marshall added to the book was a periodic summary of what he has examined thus far.  I don't think I've ever seen that in a book before, but it was great to kind of take a deep breath and have a chance to look at everything a little more in context within the larger narrative of the book.

All in all, I am really glad I read Don't Even Think About It; I'll have to keep an eye out for some of Marshall's other books (Carbon Detox, I'm looking at you!)

Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School

The top book recommended by Barry Choi on his list, The Top Personal Finance Books for Canadians, is Andrew Hallam's Millionaire Teacher: the Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School. Choi called it an "almost [. . .] modern day version of The Wealthy Barber," so after reading The Wealthy Barber I was intrigued. So on payday I bought it for myself on Kindle (it's not available at the local library).

Millionaire Teacher is Hallam's explanation of nine rules he believes everyone should have learned in school about personal finances.  Hallam is a teacher who taught personal finance.  He laments that high schools teach advanced geometry but not basic personal finance, so Millionaire Teacher is really his attempt to spread his knowledge.  Most of what he says is pretty similar to what other people have been saying in the personal finance books (spend less than you make, invest as early as you can, invest in low-cost index funds).  But then he really gets into the nitty-gritty, looking at how you can build your own portfolio, or find good help in building your portfolio no matter where you live (he specifically focuses on the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Singapore).  He has loads of data that he shares, all backed up by studies.  And the studies overwhelmingly support low-cost index funds.

I learned a lot from reading Millionaire Teacher.  So much so that my head was left spinning during a few chapters and I definitely feel like I need to eventually reread the book to better take everything in (and also once I have a slightly better understanding of some things he talks about).  But don't let my need to reread Millionaire Teacher scare you off: it's a fantastic book on personal finance that I really think every Canadian should read.

Oh wow: as a side note, I have now read Choi's top three personal finance books for Canadians: Millionaire Teacher, Wealthing Like Rabbits, and Stop Over-Thinking Your Money!  I don't think I'll be getting through the other two honourable mentions any time soon though because there are a few other finance books I'm interested in reading first.

The Wealthy Barber: The Common Sense Guide to Successful Financial Planning

I've been reading some disappointing fiction lately, so I turned back to nonfiction (and specifically back to personal finance books).  I think it was Preet Banerjee who spoke really highly of David Chilton's The Wealthy Barber: The Common Sense Guide to Successful Financial Planning, so I thought I'd give it a read whenever I got a chance.  Barry Choi noted on his list that it's a bit dated, so I wasn't really sure what I'd be getting.

The Wealthy Barber is told as a conversation between three young adults and the title's wealthy barber. When one of the young adults, Dave, asks his father for financial advice, his dad directs him to his barber friend, Roy; it was Roy who taught Dave's father all he knows.  Dave, his sister, and his best friend end up going to Roy's barber shop every month for seven months; while the two boys get their hair trimmed, Roy imparts his wisdom on them.  The topics include saving 10% of what you earn for future wealth, insurance, saving for retirement, home ownership, general savings, investments, and a few other miscellaneous items like savings for your children's education. 

This being the sixth book on personal finance that I've read, some of Chilton's advice was familiar to me.  But I still got a few new tidbits for which I am quite grateful for.

The major issue I had while reading The Wealthy Barber was that I got really annoyed with Chilton's three younger adults at the beginning of the book.  They kept interrupting Roy as he was explaining things with random questions (yes the questions were generally on topic, but there were a number of times when I thought "shut up and let the man speak!!!")  Once you get through the first few chapters this sort of disappeared though - the three young adults were learning and answering more on point questions (or maybe I was just used to it?) 

While The Wealthy Barber is a bit dated now (there's no talk of TFSAs, and from what I've gathered his talk of mutual funds is out of date), with its unique conversational structure, I think it's still a great book to read if you're new to personal finances and need some help getting started. 

The Showrunner

I read Kim Moritsugu's The Showrunner over the weekend.  Here's the synopsis from Goodreads:

Rising-star showrunner Stacey McCreedy has one goal: to leave behind her nerd-girl origins and become a power player — like Ann Dalloni, her former mentor and current producing partner. Ann, meanwhile, is feeling her age and losing her mind. But she’ll be damned if she cedes control of their hit primetime TV show to Stacey.

After Ann hires Jenna, a young actress hoping to restart her stalled career, as an assistant, the relationship between Ann and Stacey deteriorates into a blood feud. Soon, Jenna must choose whom to support and whom to betray to achieve her own ends. And Stacey will find out if she possesses the killer instinct needed to stay on top.

I haven't watched it, but The Showrunner has been compared to the film All About Eve.

I honestly didn't really like The Showrunner.  I thought all of the characters were horrible people and I didn't really care what happened to any of them.  Moritsugu managed to even ruin one of the love interest characters who I thought was okay.  I almost didn't finish reading it (but because I was already near the end I decided to just suck it up and finish it).

I know that The Showrunner will appeal to some people, but it just honestly wasn't my kind of book so I don't want to say anything more about it.

Binti: The Night Masquerade

Well the library doesn't have the last book in the Binti trilogy, so I bought it on my Kindle and read it right away after finishing Binti: Home.  Unlike the time lag between the first two books, Binti: The Night Masquerade takes place pretty much right where Binti: Home leaves off.

Binti and Mwinyi return to her home to find the building burnt to the ground (and several nearby homes damaged as well).  She discovers Okwu has hidden in the lake and has called reinforcements.  So she calls on the elders to meet with her and asks them to invoke Himba deep culture over the Khoush and Meduse to make peace once and for all.  The elders agree.  But at the time of the appointed meeting, the elders do not appear.  So Binti is left to invoke the deep culture on her own.  Amazingly, thanks to her Meduse DNA and the alien technology she has recently awakened, she is able to invoke deep culture on her own.  The Meduse chief and Khoush king agree to peace.  But one of the Khoush king's underlings fires on the Meduse, restarting the war anyway.  Binti is hit in the crossfire and dies.

The war heads to space, leaving the Himba behind.  Mwinyi discovers that Binti's family is safe - they were sheltered in the living root of an Undying Tree (a root that was part of their home's foundation).  Mwinyi and Okwu ask if they can take Binti's body to Saturn because that's where she was going to next thanks to a recurring dream she kept having with her mysterious alien artifact good luck charm.  The Himba have a funeral for Binti, then a newly born spaceship fish (the spaceships in this world are animals - this fish is the daughter of the fish Binti has been travelling in up to this point of the story) arrives to take Mwinyi, Okwu, and Binti's body to Saturn.  But when they arrive at Saturn, Binti is miraculously brought back to life.  It seems that the microbes in New Fish were able to do it *somehow* because New Fish was just born.

So they all travel back to Oomza Uni where Binti gets to learn about her crazy genetic makeup (and that she can only go 5 miles on land away from New Fish; New Fish can go 7 miles up).  The end.

I found myself disappointed by the ending of this series, even though I kind of had a feeling that Binti was somehow going to come back to life (her death was around the halfway point of the third book).  Binti's death was written very well.  And while she may not have succeeded in ending the war, she brought together two human tribes who looked like they were going to work together in the future.  When she was brought back to life, it just felt like the narrative was cheapened (especially since it really did feel like "space magic brought her back to life." Oh, and she refused to talk to her family right away to let them know she was still alive - that seemed selfish in the way that her siblings accused her of being all through Binti: Home). 

On the plus side, this book felt much more complete than the previous two (the previous two both felt to me like they should have been expanded into full novels).  But that's probably because this book was largely just the resolution of things that had happened in the previous book. 

All in all, the Binti series is an interesting read.  If you love worldbuilding, you will enjoy a lot of aspects of this book because that is very much its strength.  But if you're looking for a deeper narrative (and a more fleshed out book), you should probably give these books a pass.