Achieving Prosperity: A Realistic, Ethical Guide to Building Wealth

By Todd Lipscomb

Everybody want’s to be prosperous. I have a bit of a vested interest in it as I write about personal finance at A Penny Saved.

Achieving Prosperity is about making sound ethical investments over the mid to long range based on taking advantage of economic swings and the regular ups and downs of the stock market. The advice given is very basic and doesn’t really give any true specifics. It’s a beginner level investment book that has the very basics of Todd’s investing principles.

While I was impressed with the basic principles that Todd gives in the book I had a very hard time actually reading the book. Todd self-published the book. This is something that I do support, but in this case, the book could have most certainly used the help of a human editor. It is obvious that Todd used spell check and grammar check, but as anyone who’s written a term paper knows, they don’t catch everything. In Achieving Prosperity, I found that there were hardly any pages without simple grammar mistakes that a computer check might not have found. These made it very hard to read the book.

While I would suggest reading this book as an investment book, try to gloss over the grammar mistakes and take the information in.

Buy a copy on Amazon!

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Magic Kingdom for Sale

By Terry Brooks

If you’ve read any of Terry’s Shannara series books like I have, you’ll go into this book expecting to read all about elves, druids, dwarfs, and the lot.  Don’t.

Magic Kingdom is about Ben, a talented but burnt out lawyer who decides to buy a Magic Kingdom out of a Rosen’s holiday catalog.  One million seems a small price to pay for the throne of a fantasy kingdom.

Little does he know that there are odd things afoot and the kingdom he just bought is in sad disrepair.  Not to mention the fact that none of his supposed subjects recognize him as the king of Landover.

In typical Terry Brooks fashion, I was sucked into the book immediately and found the entire book very readable.  Magic Kingdom is a fantasy book on a whole new bent from the Shannara series of books.  It’s well worth the read.

Buy a copy at Amazon!

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Eldest

Written by Christopher Paolini

Eldest picks up where the first book, Eragon, left off in the Inheritance Trilogy.  We catch up with Eragon in Farthen Dur with the Varden and the Dwarves.  What follows is a tale of nearly epic proportions.  I say epic because at times the plot and pace seem to slow down quite a bit.  I believe that the author might have been trying to flesh out the characters a bit more but didn’t quite succeed as well as he most likely hoped.  Not to take anything away from him as it’s quite the feat to have published a second novel of this size by the time you’re twenty one, but it also seems like there are some things that a little experience would have helped him out with.  A seeming lack of realism in places.

If you’ve read the first novel and any of the reviews of it, you know that there are some that have found similarities between these novels and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  I must admit that while I own the Rings Trilogy, I have yet to actually read it.  I have seen the movies though. I know it’s no excuse.  The similarities are certainly there.

I don’t have a problem with that.  In any one genre, there are very seldom any stories that are completely unique.  Some similarites exist between that story and some other story.  The best authors do it.  Of course, I believe that they also tend to use more obscure stories to borrow from, but they do it nonetheless.  What truly makes a story is how the author weaves(Thanks Guy Gavriel Kay for that concept) the plot, characters, and story  elements together.

The author acheives that here.  He makes you look past the more glaring similarities into the characters and story that he is weaving and you become immersed.  Paolini has a talent that few have.  And at a early age at that.  Look for much more exciting literature from him in the future.

Pick up Eldest at Amazon.

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