Sunday, September 11, 2011

Clark Howard's Living Large in Lean Times

HOWARD, CLARK with MARK MELTZER and THEO THIMOU. Clark Howard's Living Large in Lean Times. New York: Avery, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-58333-433-1. Pp. 258. $18.00.

I'll make this short and sweet. This was the hardest (i.e. brought me the least pleasure, even less than George W. Bush's lame Texan quips and Nora Roberts's gender-bending misogyny) book I've had to read for the blog thus far. I was elbow-deep into a chapter on mortgages and actually found myself aching for my high school statistics text book. It was rough. I have nothing against Clark Howard, I don't think. But he has written a book for people in debt, who are also paying a mortgage on their homes and want to buy a car and a new phone. I'm not in debt, a don't own a home, I don't own a car nor do I plan on buying one any time soon. As for my phone, well, I let Mom and Dad take care of that. In return, I use a gadget that's turning six years old this year. That's right. It's old enough to start school.  Granted, if I ever were to take on any of these things--debt, a home, a car, a new phone, a credit card...--this would be a good reference book. What I suggest you do is go to your local bookstore, find the chapter that you're interested in and read it there. You'd be saving money, which would make Howard proud. I had no idea, until this week, that a man could be so passionate about saving money. I felt a bit sad. He should read Balzac.

Another reason to keep this review short is that my overly astute cat Rat Girl, sensing my displeasure over reading this book, tore it up for me. It's still in readable condition, but it would be rude to ignore her hard work. She's already ripped it apart, so why should I have to?

2 comments:

  1. This is an excellent non-review. Your blog-prose is in top form, I think it's time to install a pageview-counter and begging the internet for attention. Seriously, I think people would eat it up, and you'd have a huge base of interested readers, because there's a huge base of people that read the same shitty books.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well done, HG. Hilarious review.

    ReplyDelete