Green With Envy: A Whole New Way to Look at Financial (un)Happiness. Why Keeping up with the Joneses Is Keeping Us in Debt
Green With Envy: A Whole New Way to Look at Financial (un)Happiness. Why Keeping up with the Joneses Is Keeping Us in Debt – Shira Boss
Not to flog a dead horse or anything… Green with Envy was quoted in House Lust, so I couldn’t resist reading this book too. Boss starts her book with her personal story. She and her unemployed husband worry over bills and try to subsist in New York on her single income. New neighbors move in and the apartment scuttlebutt tells them they paid cash for their new digs. Boss jealously eyes her new neighbors’ piles of deliveries from Barneys and seethes with envy as they mention they are heading upstate to “antique” for...
Money Changes Everything
Edited by Jenny Offill and Elissa Shappell
Offill and Shappell edited another book I started a few years ago, The Friend Who Got Away, a collection of stories by women who had “broken up” with a best friend and which I found too depressing to finish. Money Changes Everything, while definitely having its depressing moments, also has some wildly good ones too. Twenty-two writers talk about their material wealth (or lack thereof) and how they ended up there. From trust-funds to schooling paid with porn-writing to “the money train” arriving, all sides of the stickiest of subjects are represented here. An engrossing look at one of last still-taboo...
One Perfect Day – The Selling of the American Wedding
One Perfect Day – The Selling of the American Wedding – Rebecca Mead
The short article last fall in Salon on Mead’s book was enough to get me interested in this book. Like being unable to stop staring at a car accident, Mead’s book is grotesquely fascinating. Laying out the modern mania to have the biggest, most extravagant and wedding possible, Americans are spending billions a year on these bloated bashes. Interviewing numerous wedding industry insiders, Mead lays out the insidious ways the wedding retailers lure in brides and grooms. The simple message- your marriage will fail unless your wedding is picture...