Review: Solid ideas, poor presentation
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 7, 2012
I felt torn about this book. It's a book about living frugality with a very cheap presentation; on the one hand, that's the ultimate in practicing what you preach, but on the other hand, the less professional something looks, the harder a time I have placing my faith in it. Hence my mixed feelings. To be as useful as possible, I'm going to separate my thoughts on the content and presentation, and take them one at a time.Content:First of all, a distinction between "commonly known" and "commonsense." A few other reviewers have commented that many ideas presented are commonsense ones. I have no problem with that, because there are all kinds of commonsense ideas out there in the world that I haven't had yet, or that I've had but since forgotten. Commonsense advice can be quite useful. Commonly known advice, on the other hand, is not useful to most of us, because we already know it. Though I did find many of the tips to be commonly known ones, I also agree with others that there were several hidden gems, as well as a few commonsense pieces of advice that I needed reminding of.For example, the tip that it's more expensive to drive around with a ton of extra weight in your car because it's loaded with stuff that doesn't actually need to be there isn't rocket science, but at the time I read it in this book I was driving around with a case of tissue boxes I'd recently bought from Amazon and been too lazy to take upstairs, as well as a bunch of ginger ale cases in my trunk that ought to have come into the garage at the very least. So it was a timely reminder, and I appreciated it. Sometimes you need other people to prod you about these commonsense things.And then there were some bits that don't usually feature in the millions of articles on money-saving that we've all already read, for example the psychological role that decluttering your home can play in your budget. I appreciated that also.Presentation:The presentation is bare-bones, which is A-OK. It fits in with the theme, and I don't feel that anything fancier would have added much to the experience, so that was a good choice on the author's part. What I found really undermined the quality of my experience was the obvious lack of good proofreading. This book was rife with typos ("downside" instead of "downsize"), etc. I've gotten used to that in books that are primarily sold as e-books, but the typos in this book were unusually frequent, and I found myself becoming distracted and irritated by them instead of focusing on the reading experience. I realize this sort of thing may bother some people more than others; I'm pointing it out because if you are like me, you may find this book frustrating.