Book #17 Completed! "The Financial Life of the Poets" by Jess Walter

Ok I agree - a bit of a weird choice. This is a book that I kept seeing again and again during the madcap Christmas shopping season (aka August - December 24th each year). I kept picking it up and looking at it and saying "oh Hell this looks boring" and putting it back down. Yet, I kept coming back to it. So I finally broke down and decided to read (listen) this book.

So....I guess I'll start off by asking a question: "Say you are a newspaper reporter. What is the one thing you can do that will 100% guarantee to eff up your life?"

Still thinking????

Nope, wrong. Try again...

Ok give up? I thought you might. The one thing you can do in order to guarantee that you are going to screw up your life is leave your cushy newspaper writer job and start a website that provides financial advice in the form of poetry. Yup that's what I said - financial advice in the form of poetry. I would have also accepted "just being a newspaper reporter" alone since it is a dying industry. Seriously, who the hell comes up with that idea as a way to make money? But that is exactly what Matthew Prior does. He leaves his newspaper job in order to run this start up website and of course, this occurs during the time where your dog could have gotten approved for a home loan so he and his wife way over-leverage the excess equity in their house, you know - thinking that everything will work out and houses never go down in value....

Fast forward to the present day. Matthew is out of work. His website never got off the ground. He went back to the newspaper only to get laid off six months later. He has a huge (30k +) balloon payment coming due on his house or they will get evicted. His wife has taken up a online romance with an old high school flame, and his father lives with them because he has dementia. Sounds like fun times!

So one night, Matthew treks out to the local 7-11 to pick up milk and he runs into two teenager-ish individuals who offer to share their pot with him. Of course he accepts (this guy is the king of bad decisions). Then he drives them to a party and they quickly become awesome pot smoking friends. Well, Matthew then comes up with this half-baked (haha) plan to save his home by becoming a pot dealer and selling to all his friends and old co-workers.

Of course, Matthew has the worst luck in the world it would seem and he gets busted. The cops want him to work undercover to nab the growers in the operation. He reluctantly agrees because he does not want to get in more trouble with his spouse. Of course, he can't do that right either because now this mid-40's man is friends with these 20 year old drug dealers and he cannot rat out his friends.

So hillarity ensues and the cops find out that he double crossed them so he goes to jail, his wife leaves him for the high school sweetheart, his kids resent him, his father gets put in a nursing home, their house gets repo'ed, and he loses his car in bankruptcy. In the end, he is living in an apartment at the bachelor arms taking the bus around feeling sorry and also oddly hopeful for himself.

People like this book. I found it ok at best. I cannot say I learned anything from it so that is a minus. The author did use the "f" word a lot so that was a bonus and I give him "mad props" for doing his own audio for the book (or maybe I shouldn't and that should have been a case of foreshadowing, I don't know). Anyway, I am feeling benevolent since my birthday is tomorrow so I will give this book:

Vroom, Vroom, Vroom (3 of 5 "vroom's" on the motorcycle scale of awesomeness)