Each week my mailbox is filled with puffy envelopes containing money books of all stripes. Sometimes I receive several copies of the same title. Other times I walk by the book shelf near my editor’s desk and exclaim “why the heck didn’t I get a copy of that?”

A lot of the books admittedly end up in a large pile on my desk that remains there until the pile falls over or comes close. There’s just not a lot of time to decide which are worthy of my two-shelf cubicle library and which should end up on the “dead book” shelf.

Remember, these won’t be cover-to-cover, full blown book reviews. These will merely be first impressions.

Then you can share your thoughts on the books, if you have them, with other Ka-Blog readers. What do you think?

“The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It.” I’m not going to tell you much more about this book by St. Paul native and former WSJ editor Dave Kansas aside from the fact that I have a couple of extra copies (if you want one, shoot an email to kmcguire@startribune.com). I’m not trying to be difficult. Just don’t want to give away too much because it’s the topic of my column next week. Stay tuned.

“Safe Money in Tough Times.”  Written by the prolific Jonathan Pond. He’s “America’s Financial Planner” according to his web site. The book begins by trying to explain the economic crisis in 6.5 pages of print your grandma can see without her reading glasses. Then he gives us a downright obvious financial “to-do” list that should be followed in any economy with suggestions such as make a budget, assess your debt and have emergency savings. Maybe he’s saving the meat for later, but if I were perusing at the book store, I’d have put it down by now.

“What do do When the Economy Sucks: 101 Tips to help you hold on to your job, your house, and your lifestyle.” OK. I admit I haven’t cracked this book open, I can’t find any mentions online and I’m not familiar with author Peter Sander. BUT I’m pretty sure of two things: 1) This book concept was sold once Adams Media read the title 2)It’s a pretty good title at that.

“I Will Teach You to Be Rich.” Now why would I be jealous of Stanford grad and California techie turned blogger Ramit Sethi? Maybe because the self-made personal finance “expert” started blogging and parlayed that into a book with the same name? Now companies invite him to speak to employees about money matters and reporters call him for quotes. I just got this uncorrected proof and have to run.

But at first glance, I like his conversational tone, the book’s approachable layout and the pithy chapter titles. He promises that readers can optimize their money and become a financial grown-up in 6 weeks. Gotta say that I’m doubtful that it can be done — kind of like those “before” and “after” pictures of fat people that used magic diets and odd-sounding exercise equipment. I’ll take a closer look at this one before it’s released in April.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under The Book Pile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.