Bossypants by Tina Fey

I've always been impressed with Tina Fey. Her sense of humor varies between a thoughtful depth and wisdom to a level of ridiculous absurdity that I truly enjoy. I loved her on Weekend Update, I thought Mean Girls was brilliantly touching while still hilarious, and I eat up 30 Rock. So when I heard she wrote a memoir, I knew I'd be reading it.

The book is mainly a look at her professional life with periodic insights in to her childhood. One thing that comes across very strongly is that she has an incredible sense of ethics that guides her. Given her level of success, it's pretty impressive that she's remained as down to earth as she is. The book doesn't reveal any shocking secrets or say anything ground breaking, but it does offer insight in to the mind of a very thoughtful and hilarious woman. And I found that well worth reading.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

I decided to start a book club here in Great Falls, and in preparation I went to Good Reads and selected some of their top non-fiction books as possible book club books. Everyone voted and somehow this book about sex was the winner. I finished the book last night and I really enjoyed it!

I might have oversold the book to my co-worker who recently started reading it and has surmised that it is kinda boring. To be fair, this is not an erotic book nor a "how-to". It's more a history of the scientific exploration of sex and some of the neat "behind the scenes" findings. It's hilarious to read about all of the various experiments that have been performed. Did you know that Kinsey had literally thousands of people come to his attic and video taped them having sex so that the could study them in detail later? Or did you know that many quadriplegics can still orgasm? This book will tell you how that's possible and what it means about how all of our bodies work. One of the most interesting details to me was that lubricant is actually blood plasma. Who knew?!? Also interesting was that women become physically aroused more easily than men, they just don't realize it. Even watching monkeys have sex will have a physical effect on most women whereas men appear to be pickier.

This book is full of random facts and stories that are just kinda fun. The author's sense of humor made the book extremely accessible to me. Her writing style is fantastic and I now plan on reading all of her books. If you like science books and aren't squicked out by blunt talk about sex, I highly recommend!

The Overspent American by Juliet Schor

I saw this book on my co-worker's desk and asked to borrow it. The book explores our consumer culture and admonishes it. It instead advocates a de-emphasis on materialism and a focus on simple living. While I'm sure I don't always live up to it, the ideals and values espoused in this book are so thoroughly internalized in my way of thinking that I found the book a bit boring.

I do not highly value stuff and I never really have. I have always valued life experiences and financial security more than stuff. While I certainly splurge on occasion and buy myself nice things, it is pretty much always after months of consideration and research and the items receive a great deal of functional use after their purchase. When I moved up here, I sold/ gave away a ton of stuff and it reinforced to me how easy it is to accumulate more stuff than you need- even though I already felt I was pretty non materialistic. I think a good amount of the stuff was accumulated when I had my own apartment and to some extent wanted to "fill it". And while it was nice to have that stuff, I think in the future I'm less likely to buy new furniture/ decorations/ etc.

This year I'm trying to live off of a VISTA living stipend which comes out to below minimum wage. While I'm close to living off of it, I am subsidizing it a touch with savings. I think my lower threshold for a content, non-deprived feeling living experience involves spending about $12,000 to $15,000 a year. When I was making money, I did spend more than this. And when I go back to making money, I'm sure I'll let more expenditures come- exotic travel, maybe a new gadget, etc., but I'd like to make some of my lifestyle changes more permanent. After selling so many books when I moved, I don't think I'm likely to buy books anymore when I know that libraries are perfectly capable of ordering any book I might want. Right now, spending $10 at the movies sounds like a crazy waste of money when I know it will be rent-able on DVD for $1 in just a few months. I very rarely eat out right now- something I spent over $1,500 on last year!!! I've started really thinking about how much gas costs and calibrating that in to decisions about going places- something I never gave any thought to before. And these little things add up. I most certainly want to keep my basic living expenses as minimal as possible. I love the concept of not being owned by your life style and having the freedom to not have money concerns have a large voice in life choices.

If these concepts don't resonate with you, you might enjoy The Overspent American. Otherwise, I say skip it.

The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap by Susan Pinker

I ordered this through Inter Library Loan and unfortunately only read half of it before I had to return it in order to avoid $1 a day late fines. Since I only read half of it, I've debated whether or not to post an entry on it, but I've decided to go for it.

The book makes the claims that the biggest reason for the gender gap in pay has to do with women opting for more emotionally rewarding careers/ lifestyle choices than men. I found this argument to be quite salient. While there's no question in my mind that in some work environments sexism is probably alive and well, it seems to be pretty rare. In my experience, those women who are good at what they do and want to work 60+ hour a weeks seem to receive raises and get promotions just as easily as the men doing those things. But it does seem that there are fewer women willing to do that then men.

Pinker furthers her case by pointing to education statistics versus workplace statistics. More women are educated than men. On average, women do better in school, across the board, than men do. Many ivy league schools now have "reverse discrimination" in that while trying to keep an equal gender balance, the average male resume is less impressive than the average female resume. About half of all law school grads are female, but only about 1/4 of practicing lawyers are female. The academics clearly show that ability is far from the issue, and yet most women do not go after the most lucrative careers.

The book goes further to blame this difference on innate biology. It states that estrogen tends to create minds that are more empathic and social whereas testosterone tends to create minds that are better at single minded focus. She cites many studies that are pretty fascinating to support this. One study measured fetal testosterone levels in boys throughout pregnancy and found a direct inverse correlation between how much testosterone they had and their later verbal skills. Those with the most testosterone spoke later and with fewer words than those with less testosterone.

While I think she convincingly makes her case that men and women are biologically shaped to be a bit different, I do think she undersells the role that social and pragmatic concerns have on the gender wage gap. If a woman is socially considered to be more responsible for raising children than men, is it any surprise that she's less likely to work crazy hours and is more likely to value lower stress careers and more flexible work environments?

Overall, I recommend the book. I wish I'd read the second half and could more thoroughly expound on her ideas. But from what I did read, I enjoyed the way she meshed her ideas and case studies with genuine scientific studies and statistics. It certainly is an interesting angle from which to look at the issue.

Cancer Milk by Seth Luther

I learned on my first day that one of my co-workers, a former VISTA, had written a book. It was described as being like Kurt Vonnegut's work. Since I read almost everything Vonnegut ever wrote, I figured I might like it and asked to borrow.

It was fun and totally lived up to the Vonnegut comparison. Lots of random stuff happening that somehow comes together to form a quasi-coherent story. The devil's son decides to spread cancer to the world and a boy who talks to goats must go to the goat home planet to find the cure to cancer. It was fun and I enjoyed. :)

Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America by Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas

At my work, there is apparently a list somewhere of recommended reading that will help you understand the business. One of my coworkers had this book in their collection and mentioned it was on the list so I asked to borrow it.

The basic premise of the book is that every place has it's ambitious, non-ambitious, and those in between. In small, rural areas, the ambitious leave and those who stay have few and poor opportunities available to them. The book further comments that the small towns have designed the system in such a way that those from "good" families will be the ones that succeed and others will be looked over.

The lack of opportunities struck me a bit because people really don't make much here. Working the grant department, grants often have people's salaries listed in them if the grant is paying part of their salary. So I know what many people make. People with master's degrees are barely getting $30K. $50K puts you at the top of the pack. Admittedly, this is a non-profit, but my roommate has bemoaned the extreme lack of good paying jobs and it seems to be a common issue. Jobs are key to a successful economy and rural areas just don't have too many. That said, I don't know that there really is a "fix" to it as the book suggests. Let's say you got two really highly skilled companies in to a rural area and supported the schools in such a way that they were making enough skilled workers. What happens when one goes out of business or moves? Those skills aren't easily transferred in a rural area. Since employers can disappear at any time, it makes since that highly skilled jobs are concentrated in urban areas where workers have a multitude of places that they can turn to in case something happens to their employer. It also makes sense that rural areas tend to be concentrated with low skilled jobs that most people could potentially do. While it's unfortunate for those people that technology has made their jobs so extremely low skilled that they now pay very little and have fewer job opportunities in total, I feel like this book is largely bemoaning change. It's important to recognize the downsides of technological advancements and a service based economy and that's what I got from this. There are people out there whose lives are worse off because of things we largely see as positive and it would be great to help them. I am not convinced though that most rural towns truly can be revived to thriving economies.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

This is a truly fantastic book. It's written by a Behavioral Economics professor and is all about the irrational idiosyncrasies of human nature. He explains dozens of fascinating experiments he conducted in which people consistently behave in ways that are "unexpected", at least from a rational viewpoint.

I initially heard of Dan Ariely by reading Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which cites some of his work. While Nudge was interesting, I think that this book has the interesting aspects of Nudge in far greater depth and lacks all of the boring parts. While the first chapter or two was largely a repeat of what I read in Nudge, the rest of the book really expanded on the ideas.

One of my favorite chapters was "The Cost of Social Norms: Why We Are Happy to Do Things but Not When We Are Paid to Do Them". In it, he claims that there are essentially two tracts by which we evaluate things- market norms and social norms. We are all social creatures and are happy to do favors. But if you put a price tag on that favor, we stop seeing the situation as social and we most certainly want to be paid what we're worth. Ariely performed an experiment in which he first asked students to perform repetitive, menial tasks for $.10, then for $.50. As typical market theory suggests, the $.50 group was motivated to work harder and performed more tasks. They then asked a group to do the same tasks as a favor, with no mention of a reward and that group worked the hardest and performed the greatest number of tasks. Which just shows the incredible motivational factor of social norms. He then introduced gifts in to the equation for the unpaid group- Snickers bars, Godiva chocolates, and nothing and found that all groups still performed quite highly and very similarly. Then he did the same, but referred to the gifts as a "fifty cent" Snicker bar and a "five dollar" box of chocolates. This language changed their motivation from a social arena to a market arena and their performance was reduced to what it had been at the cash level. I find this absolutely fascinating and totally believable.

I think that this chapter fascinated me so much because of my current work in Americorp. While I do get a menial living stipend, I am essentially a volunteer. I am operating on a social level. Many people who do Americorp end up in the non-profit sector and so the thought has been floating in my mind about whether or not that is something that I want to do in a year when my service is done. And in general I keep leaning towards probably not. This chapter completely explained why. When I think of working in the non-profit sector as a volunteer, it's social and I don't need real payment. If I were to think of it as a career, I don't think I would feel the same way. I would think of the market value of my time and skills and want to be paid accordingly. And I think that would mean not working in the non-profit arena. What can I say? I'm irrational- and predictably so. :)

Each chapter of this book presents equally fascinating and thought-provoking experiments. I could go on and on citing incredibly cool experiments that he performed, but you'd be better off just reading the book. It's pretty great.