THE SNOWBALL: WARREN BUFFETT AND THE BUSINESS OF LIFE By Alice Shroeder – Reviewed

Despite this being an epic book, I expected more.

How can you sum up the Oracle of Omaha? The most successful investor in the history of investing?

For a man over seventy years old, having his life described in a little over 700 pages gives us about a 100 pages per ten years. Even though the first page is so awash with description (of Buffett sitting in his office) that it’s difficult to read, what we don’t get in the full Warren Buffett. We get a version, the tight-fisted, thrifty, intelligent, teacher, who’s more at ease with numbers than he is with human beings, and certainly more comfortable dealing with a class room full of students than he is with his own children. A man obsessed with making money and keeping it. To the point where much of the time his family acted almost, but not quite, as a distraction, and Buffett doesn’t particularly like distractions.

The failure of this book is the lack of detail about some of Buffett’s investments. Probably the most important part of his life, not only for him but also for most of his readers. We get the glamorous stuff, and we also get the dirty stuff, but where’s the detail of the stuff that made him his money?

Most of the information contained in the book can be found on Buffett’s wikipedia entry. The details of his earlier life are interesting, and the milestones he achieved in his early years are quite extraordinary. But I want a map. I want to see what he invested in, at how much and why: I want a description of how he made his billions. I don’t understand how a book so huge and detailed about Buffett’s life but be so bereft of such important details.

For a financial analyst Shroeder doesn’t seem very interested in the money.

This is certainly an interesting book, and Warren’s life as a self-made man certainly holds your attention. But the missing details of his investments, the things that are skipped over, or just not even mentioned, serve to give us only half an image of this great investor.

Buffett is still my hero, with the knowledge gained from this book even more so. We share much in common, he had a paper-round, as did I. Buffett was making money as a child, as did I, once getting in trouble at school for telling my friends toys. Buffett also skirted a bit too close to the law, well, I’m refusing to comment on that! He was also buying shares before he was sixteen. I bought shares in my mother’s name because I was too young to have them in my own. Unfortunately, and I really don’t know what happened (perhaps discovering horror novels), but our paths diverged and I’m not a billionaire.

This is a personal and probably the most detailed of the books on Buffett, and yet it still doesn’t manage to capture the complete man. It does capture most of him, and it’s a moving story, but I almost feel short changed.

Amazing book, and yet still slightly disappointing.

Credit Crunch: A Survivor’s Guide – Budgeting

Budgeting is not scary, it’s not difficulty and it doesn’t take a genius to do it. You don’t need a degree in finance, or 25 year experience as an economist, nor to you need a financial advisor or book-keeper do it for you.

Budgeting is about knowing what your incomings are (wages normally), and your outgoings (mortgage/rent, utilities, telephone, cable, shopping, credit cards, etc).

Start out by printing off your monthly bank statement. If you haven’t got internet banking then sign-up now. The easiest way to have control of your money is to know how much you have and how much is coming out. This is budgeting.

Make a list of your income:

To make it simple and give you an example we’ll say you receive £1000 wages a month and you have no other income.

Now make a list of your direct debits, standing-orders, and any other monthly payments that you can’t get out of, this should not include any spending on shopping or food:

Rent:               £300.00

Electricity:             £100.00

Gas:                £100.00

Water:                         £20.00

Taxes:             £50.00

Insurance:             £10.00

Travel:             £20.00

So you start with £1000

When you’ve paid all of the above you’re left with: £400.00

This is your working budget. Spend more than this and you’re going into debt. Debt is the enemy! You should always try to spend within your budget. Food, clothes, going out, holidays, petrol, everything that is not a regular bill will come out of your working budget.

Check your bank regularly, internet banking and telephone banking are very helpful in making sure you are aware of your spending.

Budgeting is the opposite of dieting, but both work in the same (although opposite) way: there are only two ways to improve your situation, get more money in or spend less money. (Dieting is use more calories up or take less in).

Being aware of your financial situation, however bad it may be, is always helpful. Remember that knowledge is power.

Next time: Bills

Ridiculous Reviews, Fascist media, and Antichrist

I was on a British Airways flight back from a weekend in Stockholm, lovely city by the way, plenty of museums, clean, efficient, and loads of ice cream; when I picked up the Daily Mail, a traditionally English tabloid, often lambasted for its view on johnny-foreigner, who are obviously to blame for all the ills of England.

The paper was free so I thought I’d flick through, the new is invariably bad so I tend not to watch or read it often, I find the several stabbing a day, rising crime, cheating and fraudulent politicians, all rather depressing. Most of the articles I barely read, more exciting staring out the window and waiting to get off the plane, it’s only just over two hours away.

When I got to the media reviews I found an article on Lars Von Trier’s new film Antichrist and read that with interest, and then rising disgust. The film is apparently sexually graphic, but that’s not what I found completely repugnant. It was the fact the reviewer had never even seen the film or intended to, he started off the article saying that he wouldn’t bring himself to watch such filth (I should have stopped right there), and then proceeded to say how evil, wrong, and corrupting the film was. How the film was not only a moral hazard, bound to turn even the most angelic of children into rapists and murderers, but also a sign of the liberal attitude of British Board of Film Classification. A Board which banned the erect penis from all films and kept hardcore pornography illegal until only a few years ago, British still has one of the strictest classification systems in the world, and certainly the strictest in Europe. Barring Albania obviously.

I don’t mind a film being completely ridiculed or critically torn apart, if it deserves it all the better. What I can’t stand, really can’t stand, is when someone gives an opinion, which will be taken seriously by many of the Mail’s readers, without one ounce of knowledge.

You cannot and should not be allowed to write a review of anything without having actually seen or read or heard some of it. Fair enough if the whatever is so bad you couldn’t make it all the way through, I wish I hadn’t wasted two hours of my life sitting through the hideousness that was Crank. But you must try, you must, with all integrity, attempt to watch the film.

To review it after reading what sounds like a brief plot summary from the publicists aimed at stirring up controversy, is prejudice of the highest order and really shouldn’t be allowed.

The fact that this non-review, a basic, hypocritical, bullying tirade is allowed to be published in a daily newspaper just makes me cringe. It makes me angry that such idiots, I say this without ever having met the reviewer, but obviously that isn’t important in making an informed decision about their intelligence, are allowed to spout such nonsense in a legitimate avenue of so-called journalism.

I haven’t watched Antichristso I won’t try to defend it or review it,  although I might get it on dvd, all that sex makes it sound very much like home-viewing material.

Rejection… A Writer’s Tale

Rejection is a hideous thing to deal with. For writers we have to deal with it regularly, unless we’re lucky. Stephen King used to collect rejection letters by the hundred, he used to stick them to the wall on a spike.

I find it difficult to take pleasure in my rejection. It doesn’t inspire me to do better. It feels like it’s another nail in the coffin. And what’s being buried, apart from my self-esteem, is my dream of becoming a writer.

On a forum a group of writers discussed how they dealt with rejection letters. In the old days, when paper was required and emails were yet to be invented, people set light to them, or kept scrap books, or stuck them on a spike on the wall. Modern technology has denied us these pleasures.

Email rejection letters I file. There’s something a lot less satisfying about filing an email than burning an actual rejection letter.

But what gets me is the lack of imagination, the lack of understanding that many editors have. “Thanks but we can’t use this.” “Not for us, thanks anyway.” “We’ll pass.” Yes, because passing is not really rejecting, is it! The euphemisms for rejection are just as bad. It’s like the editors get out their thesauruses, they’ve probably got that page marked, reject, decline, deny, discard, repel, scrap, renounce… pass!

It’s hard enough that I’ve created my masterpiece and put my heart and soul into it, then rewritten it, and possibly rewritten it again and then formatted it all nice and neat, and sent my work off into the dark wilderness of the slush-pile.

And then I wait and wait.

I know editors have a hard time, some of them read hundreds of submissions a week. Most of which are probably rubbish. But please! Give us a chance. A standard rejection letter is absolutely no help. I know, I know. Hundreds of submissions. But if there is anything I can do to improve my story, oh wise editor, let me know. Knowledge is power, sure enough, but how about sharing some of that knowledge? A hint here, a tip there. It can go a long way. Help me please!

Stephen Fry…. Genius? Bastard?

I’ve just finished reading Fry’s The Hippopotamus. Yes, I know I shouldn’t be reviewing a booking that was first published fifteen years ago, and don’t worry, I’m not going to. It’s a little difficult to think of Stephen Fry, and much of his work, in a critical light.

I was never a fan of Fry and Laurie, or Jeeves and Wooster. Neither particularly floated my boat.

My fascination, my love, of Stephen Fry and his work started when I read his first novel, The Liar. A deeply personal and semi-autobiographical coming of age novel. A kind of English, middle-class Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a comparison I’m sure he’d hate. But it’s a personal equivalent, both of them touched me and helped me to identify who I am in a way I still find difficult to put into words. Without experiencing either The Liar or Ferris Bueller I would be a very different person, in the same way that if I had never read that first Conan novel when I was fourteen, I wouldn’t have discovered fantasy, horror and science fiction and very probably wouldn’t even be writing this now.

Stephen Fry is one of those people with an incredible memory, with such written skill and humour that it makes you hate his talent. He’s one of those people you would love to meet and have a conversation with, but when faced with him, you probably wouldn’t be able to mutter a single word.

I know Stephen Fry only from his work – including his Blackadder appearances – I’ve never met the man, so I can say all this in complete ignorance. I set my Virgin + box to diligently record QI, Stephen’s current dispensary of knowledge, a quiz show for those less intelligent than the great man. Which is all of us.

Fry’s novels make me weep, not only because he draws you into the lives of his characters in a way few people can, not even because his books are sometimes so funny that tears drip from the corners of your eyes, but because it sickens me that I don’t have half the talent he does. That’s why I have to hate him, envy.

If you’ve never read a Stephen Fry book then you’ve deprived yourself, and you should remedy this immediately.

The Hippopotamus is a funny, irreverent, and highly enjoyable read.  To review it would be to do it a disservice.  Fry’s poet and critic Edward Wallace is my hero, as is his creator.  Enough said.