Friday, September 5, 2008

Warren Buffet Recommendations, Good Morning

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Warren Buffet Recommendations

This is a short list of ten recommendations by Warren Buffet for business books. We have three of them. I am planning on getting the other seven.

http://www.businesspundit.com/10-investing-books-recommended-by-warren-buffett/

Good Morning

I am awake having had my coffee. I'll be doing a little more weeding this morning. I read a little bit of the science fiction romance paperback, Shades of Dark, by Linnea Sinclair. Oo, sexy telepath take me away.

Chris Garrett sent me a link to a free ebook on Twitter. Here it is:
http://www.chrisg.com/killer-flagship-content-free-ebook-to-download/
I think it is about how to improve traffic and blog posts for your blog.

In a few minutes, I should start doing some more weeding. I just ordered a few more business books. My day is starting with a bang.

I took a few minutes to look at Locus Magazine, what is new in paperback and reserved Mike Resnick, Stalking the Unicorn. It is a fantasy detective novel set in an alternate Manhattan. I rather liked Mike Resnick's book Kirinyaga.

Good Evening

I spent some more time weeding social science books this afternoon. Also, a whole lot of new social science books came in.

I read a bit more of Impact by Ken McArthur. I am on page 57. I just did an exercise where I wrote down 100 of my current dreams and then crossed out the ones which did not match with my current goals. This took quite a bit of time to do. I also logged into the website attached to the book and filled out a survey. With the exercises and survey, it took a bit of time to do. It will take at least a week or two to finish reading this book if I do all the exercises.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your blog is tedious and in need of improvement. Why not read some well-written reviews, such as those in The New Yorker, to get a feel for prose that is engrossing and stimulating? You might also forget you ever learned the words rather, a bit, quite and interesting. You choose some decent books to review, but you need to enliven your writing. Leave out the repetitious stuff about drinking coffee, weeding, selecting books. Tell us HOW you decide what books to buy, what in your background qualifies you to make selections, and which books you've bought circulate and which are duds. Put more of yourself into your blog and it will improve.

Book Calendar said...

I actually don't like the New Yorker, it mainly reviews literary fiction which is not what this blog is about. Much of the language in the New Yorker is very stilted. It is written for the literati who have lost a lot of connection to every day readers.

I could not use many of the books listed in the New Yorker because they would not be used in an urban African American, Brazilian, and Italian community.

Patrons from all backgrounds do come up to me with articles cut out of the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. They may also mention books which have appeared on PBS (Public Broadcasting System), or NPR-- (National Public Radio)

The covers on the New Yorker are increasingly of prosaic everyday subejcts. The only thing which remains interesting in the content is the cartoons.

No librarian I know of uses the New Yorker to make selections on books to buy. This is equally true when higher quality literature is sought. The New Yorker is not viewed as s source of reviews. Most, if they want a high quality literary review would go to the New York Review of Books or an academic literary review like The Southern Literary Review.
If I wanted a literary quality review of a science fiction title I would go to:
http://www.nyrsf.com/

The New Yorker is what people talk about in cocktail parties who have not actually read most of the stories. In some ways because The New Yorker is focused on editors and people who write for a living it loses the edge of craftsmanship which exists in smaller publications. Add in prestige from stuffy academics for having written an article and it ceases being a place for literature, but a place for academics and editors.

There is a lot of prestige for a writer to appear in the New Yorker, they can show it to other writers. But, to the reader on the street, it does not have as much cachet as it used to. It is an elitist magazine increasingly out of touch with everyday Americans.



I do not think Charles Bukowski or John Fante would ever appear in the New Yorker. Neither would any avant garde writer. When the New Yorker was just beginning and had people like E.B. White writing and editing the stories, I would not say this. I think the New Yorker is propped up by memory.

But, now with the quality of "literature" being promoted, I have no problem saying this. There are very few venues which currently write anything close to the quality of "classics". I could not see a story being written by Hemingway being accepted in a place like the New Yorker. Maybe Dalkey Archive Press, or some of the presses from Small Press Distributors would produce quality literature. True quality literature that is done for the pure purposes of writing good books often will not be commercially successful.

A lot of the fiction on the New York Times Bestseller list is truly atrocious. We do not circulate as much New York Times bestsellers as many people think. The Ebony bestseller list does a much better job in our community. I also find the American Bookselling Association list of bestselling titles a more reliable source of circulating material than the New York Times Bestseller list. Our communities demographics do not match up with many mainstream communities.


Quite frankly, if you are looking for the great American novel it will not come out of the big presses.

The New Yorker is an example of pure pretentiousness, not literature. I find its writing like listening to yuppie editors talking to each other on the subway going into Manahttan. There is very little that is engrossing in the New Yorkers reviews. Even the New York Times does a better job of writing reviews. Many of the New York Times reviews are truly engrossing because they can draw from a unique set of writers.

The new Yorker has a liberal upper crust bias which at times turns my stomach.

I will probably take out more of the everyday bits and focus more on interesting things that may be happening.

Now that Entrecard is gone, I'll have a bit more time to write posts and thoughts like this.