March 2018 Book Reading List

March was an incredible month. I started a major renovation on the master bathroom, which I ended up putting on pause due to a major life update. Due to the incredible busyness, I was only able to finish one book.

I’m not too bothered by the fact I only finished one book - after all, I didn’t finish any books in February. The last “book report” blog post I published was for January. And it’s not like I haven’t been reading anything else - in addition to the book I did finish (which I’ll mention later), I’ve been reading Cryptography And Network Security for school and Husband-Coached Childbirth.

Oh, and I read magazines, too. I tend to stick with magazines I can get for free. The ones I’m currently subscribed to are Game Informer and Popular Mechanics.

Onto what I actually finished reading in March:

The Richest Man in Babylon

This book is considered a classic. Originally a series of pamphlets, it was published as a book in 1926.

For some reason, the book is in the public domain. The author, George Samuel Clason, died in 1957. Going by the current copyright rules, that means the copyright should expire 70 years later in 2026. Apparently, that rule didn’t exist until 1978 after the passing of the Copyright Act of 1976. Anything published before that date goes by the old rules - which, I think, was 95 years after publication. Even though 95 years after 1926 is 2021, the copyright date would be based on the publication dates of the pamphlets - which I’m not sure anyone really knows the exact date, other than they were printed before the book was published.

What I’m getting at with the previous paragraph is that the book is widely available for free on the internet. You can purchase a hard copy if you wish, or better yet borrow it from your local library. I found a PDF version on the internet and read it on my phone.

For those that don’t already know, the book is written as a series of parables. I’m more familiar with Jesus’ parables as written in the Gospel of the Christian Bible, so I expected each parable to be at least somewhat independent of one another. Instead, they all contained some of the same characters, particularly Arkad.

I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know from this book, but it was interesting to read some common advice that was given almost a hundred years ago that is still useful today - pay yourself first, you should save (at least) 10% of your income, and you should make your money (gold as it is called in the book) work for you.

Hopefully next month I’ll have finished more than one book, so I look forward to writing that post.

Have you read The Richest Man in Babylon?