The Literary World of Thrifty Thora
“Writers are readers. But not all readers are writers.”
Jenn Pazdor
I’ve read or listened to numerous books over the years. Some I remember; others I don’t. Here are the ones I’ve enjoyed — for very different reasons.
Five shelves: money, fantasy, history that startled me, communication, and religion.
The Old City of Jerusalem on a 2023 trip. Where will the exciting adventures of a book lead you?
Coming January 5, 2027
Money…from Newborn to
Nearly Dead
A Money Autobiography & Financial Navigation Guide Over a Lifetime
By Rosie Jameson, AKA Thrifty Thora. Yes, the title is long. No, she will not be shortening it.
Exemplary and terrible financial decisions, all from real life, arranged in the order they happened — which is rarely the order that makes sense.
Book, eBook & Audible on Amazon. Not financial advice. Just plunder.
Money Books
These books were crucial in my quest to learn about money. There are exemplary and poor financial decisions in many real-life stories in Money…from Newborn to Nearly Dead, which make accountants cheer or cry. You’ll see quotes and concepts from some of them sprinkled throughout Thrifty Thora writings like fiscal breadcrumbs.
Thomas J. Stanley
I loved reading about people living way below their means — clipping coupons, driving ancient cars, and quietly investing like financial warriors.
Meanwhile family, neighbours and friends were blissfully unaware. Nothing like discovering the “boring guy next door” is secretly a millionaire to make you rethink your life choices.
In The Millionaire Mind a junkyard owner is worth $10 million and pulls in $700,000 a year — then drives something that barely survived the apocalypse and dresses like he’s on his way to unclog a drain. People kept mistaking him for the laborer. Stealth wealth, achieved.
“I see people at Christmas time at four o’clock in the morning lining up in front of stores. They wouldn’t get up at four o’clock in the morning to go to work.”
Dave Ramsey
A couple bought a total beater of a car — the kind of vehicle that rattles, wheezes, and prays its way up a hill.
Instead of financing the shiny dream car they wanted, they saved the would-be monthly payment like a financial ninja, then walked into the dealership a few years later and paid cash. No loan. No interest. No crying in the parking lot.
Then there’s Tiffany in Baby Steps Millionaires: a single mom buried under $60,000 of debt who didn’t just pay it off, she obliterated it, built a net worth of $1.85 million, and retired early like it was no big deal.
“If you live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.”
Frank Abagnale
Reads like someone dared Frank Abagnale to pick a career and he just said, “Yes.” He cashed over $2.5 million in fraudulent checks while impersonating a pilot, doctor, lawyer, and university professor.
He was finally caught in France at age 20, which feels rude, because most of us were still trying to figure out laundry at that age. In jail he helped the FBI work fraud cases for free — one way to build a résumé, though some of his claims have since been disputed.
Forty years of fraud prevention later, Scam Me If You Can breaks down identity theft, cybercrime, social-media traps and sketchy debit-card schemes: a survival guide for anyone who has ever had a text from a “bank” spelled with three K’s.
“What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier for the bad guys of today. Technology breeds crime.”
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Fantasy & Adventure
I love to journey to a far-off place where creative imagination awaits — pirates with dramatic facial hair, oceans made of killer spores, and at least one character who should not be trusted with a sword.
William Goldman · Cary Elwes
I watched the movie first. The storyline was a fairy tale and the lines were so funny that I had to read the book.
Buttercup’s hobbies are horseback riding and aggressively ignoring her true love. Prince Humperdinck’s personality is best described as “red flag in human form.” Then Westley returns as the Dread Pirate Roberts, masked, smoldering, delivering “as you wish.”
As You Wish is Westley spilling every inconceivable story from the set: a toe broken between a gear pedal and a rock, Inigo training for his sword fight like it was the Olympics, and a director who kept ruining takes because he could not stop giggling.
“Have fun storming the castle… It will take a miracle.”
Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson
A prequel to Peter Pan that weaves star stuff into how Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys and Wendy came to be. Phenomenal writing.
Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, so I never wanted to stop reading — the same trick the Harry Potter books pull. Peter has the résumé of a Victorian street dog: hungry, scrappy, but never grows up.
Molly Aster is a brilliant, bossy twelve-year-old Starcatcher apprentice keeping magical star stuff away from villains and idiots. Black Stache is a pirate with a mustache so dramatic it should have its own agent.
““You might have mentioned this to me, Molly,” said Leonard. “The fact that there are hostile natives on the island.” “I forgot,” said Molly.”
Brandon Sanderson
Written during COVID-19 as a secret gift for his wife, Emily, inspired by The Princess Bride. Way to go, Brandon.
Tress collects cups and avoids death until her almost-boyfriend Charlie is whisked away with the danger awareness of a decorative fern. She sails an ocean of killer spores with a crew of delightful disasters: a captain who is technically dead and a talking rat who is the smartest one aboard.
In The Rithmatist, Joel desperately wants to be a magical chalk warrior but is merely Olympic-level at watching other people draw circles. Real Rithmatists fight chalklings — angry doodles that come to life and bite. Art class meets mild horror.
“Tress didn’t have a lot of experience with lying, but paradoxically, the ones who are most successful at it are those who don’t do it very often.”
Kalaoa, Hawaii, November 2024.
History That Startled Me
I learned about historical events I didn’t even know were on the menu — and the way people behaved had me gasping like it was a reality horror show set in 1900. Money is usually the motive.
David Grann
Oil made the Osage the wealthiest per-capita community in the world in the 1920s. Then people started dying.
Headrights could only pass by inheritance or marriage, so Osage members with one disappeared in car accidents, shootings, explosions and poisonings at an unprecedented rate, while local police, hampered by incompetence and corruption, found nobody.
Tom White of the Bureau of Investigation put four agents undercover in the county — an insurance salesman, a cattle buyer, an oil prospector and a herbal doctor. He solved some of the murders; others remain unsolved. The case was so tangled I listened to it twice.
“Some day this oil will go and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father.”
Lisa Wingate · Judy Christie
From 1924 to 1950 the Tennessee Children’s Home Society posed as an orphanage. Georgia Tann arranged over 5,000 adoptions and collected more than $1 million in fees.
The children usually came from poor families and single mothers — taken from hospitals, told the baby had died, handed surrender papers they could not read, or lifted from front yards and schools. The novel follows Rill, twelve, and her four siblings, and Avery, a lawyer decades later finding clues about her own grandmother.
Before & After collects readers’ histories from the same organization. Tann destroyed the records, so DNA testing did the reuniting: unknown triplets, separated siblings, a twin who always knew. The separation was sad. The reunions were not.
“A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music.”
Erik Larson
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago drew 27.5 million visitors and lit the White City with Tesla and Westinghouse’s AC system.
World’s fairs ran three to six months and were stages for national prestige — the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1889, the Ferris Wheel in Chicago in 1893. They still exist; we call them World Expos now.
Two men who never met worked the same fair: Daniel Burnham, the architect who made the impossible deadline real, and H. H. Holmes, born Herman Mudgett, a pharmacist and conman who ran a “Murder Castle” from 1889 to 1895 — getting engaged, taking control of the money or the life insurance, then killing.
“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root.”
Thanksgiving Point. Lehi, Utah, August 2011.
Communication, or How to Not Argue
Communication can build bridges between people, from a young boy with dirt on his feet to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Lack of it burns them. Choose words wisely.
Dale Carnegie
Published in 1936 and still the starter pack for being a functional human: look people in the eye, use their names, ask questions and actually listen.
Also: a firm handshake. Not too limp, not too bone-crushing. Just “hi, I’m friendly, not a villain.” Then deploy the ancient technique known as acting like you’re actually interested in other humans — questions that don’t begin with “anyway, back to me.”
Remember their name like it’s the Wi-Fi password. Admit when you’re wrong, which is rare and mythical and melts tension faster than a marshmallow over a campfire. Then make them feel important — genuinely, not “wow, Chad, your fantasy football strategy is groundbreaking.”
“Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.”
Jefferson Fisher
A personal injury trial lawyer by day and a communication superhero by night, who looked around the legal world, saw everyone arguing like caffeinated pigeons, and thought: people need help.
He’ll say something wise like “stay grounded,” and you’ll sit there remembering the time you tried to win an argument by talking louder, and louder, until you became a human car alarm.
Boundaries. Not taking things personally. Staying calm in conflict. Neutral statements — unlike “let’s all just relax,” which has never relaxed a single human in the history of Earth. Then someone says “can I give you some feedback?” and you consider moving to a new city.
“When you tell someone that they’re wrong, they become more convinced that they’re right.”
John Gray
Why men and women sometimes communicate like they’re on two completely different Wi-Fi networks. One of the biggest relationship guides of the 1990s.
The book uses broad rules that don’t fit everyone, but it helped me realize something important: men really do need their space and their caves, and understanding that made married life smoother.
Meanwhile my husband learned that sometimes I don’t need a solution, a blueprint, or a twelve-step action plan — I just want him to listen without trying to fix the universe. Women’s emotions move like waves; men’s self-esteem snaps like a rubber band. Both need time to reset.
“To feel better, women talk about past problems, future problems, potential problems, even problems that have no solutions.”
Salt Lake Temple. Salt Lake City, Utah, 2004 — a temple, as mentioned in the Old & New Testaments and the Book of Mormon, that helps people and their ancestors return to God through Jesus Christ.
Religion, the Quiet Reminder
Even in this chaotic world, Jesus Christ still knows your name, no matter your choices. He’ll talk to you if you listen.
Moses, Joshua, Matthew, Paul & Others
God’s dealings with His covenant children, from the Creation with Adam and Eve to 400 years before Christ was born — then the Gospels.
Moses walked the wilderness with Israel for forty years, a distance a solo hiker covers in two weeks. Slow learning curve. The lesson was to keep the focus on the Lord rather than on idols, and God never gave up on people even when they struggled.
Adam and Eve built a home from scratch with God’s help. Noah engineered a boat. Joseph was sold as a slave, dreamed, saved his family, and now has a Broadway musical. Rahab hid the spies. David slew a giant and wrote Psalms. We may not keep statues, but phones, hobbies and work distract just as well.
“Choose you this day whom ye will serve….As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
Nephi, Alma, Mormon, Moroni & Others
Lehi, a prophet, leaves Jerusalem around 600 B.C. — during the time of Jeremiah, just before the Babylonian destruction — and his family settles somewhere in the Americas.
Family differences created two nations: the Nephites and the Lamanites. My favorite section is 3 Nephi 11, where Christ visits the people in the Americas after His resurrection.
Enos prays for hours, is forgiven, and sees miracles. King Benjamin teaches that when you serve others you are only in the service of your God. Two thousand stripling warriors, taught by faithful mothers, go to battle and not one of them is lost.
“And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.”
Sheri Dew
One of the first surgeons to perform open-heart surgery, back when the common understanding was that touching the heart would stop it. His lab and his operating room proved otherwise.
Forty years of surgery, ending with a famous Chinese opera star in Jinan. Then 34 years in the Quorum of the Twelve and seven years as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Fluent in Spanish, Mandarin and Russian, a student of ten more languages, and a beautiful pianist.
He was prompted to leave a building that then blew up. In 1976 a plane engine burst into flames and the spiral dive somehow stopped. In Mozambique in 2009 a gun was held to his head and did not fire. His life was a miracle for everyone who knew him.
“A century of experience has taught me this with certainty: anger never persuades, hostility never heals, and contention never leads to lasting solutions.”
Chapters Finished Somewhere With a View
Investing money instead of spending it bought the plane tickets. Every stop below started as a paragraph.
Westminster Abbey — coronation site for royalty since 1066. London, England, April 2024.
Thanksgiving Point. Lehi, Utah, April 2016.
Thanksgiving Point. Lehi, Utah, August 2011.
Salt Lake Temple. Salt Lake City, Utah, 2004 — a temple, as mentioned in the Old & New Testaments and the Book of Mormon, that helps people and their ancestors return to God through Jesus Christ.
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