Ebola by David Quammen. About the terrible African disease. The book is excerpted from by Quammen's larger book Spillover. Looks like a good read.
I used to rent from a woman who was considered a slumlord. I think the reason for that was she had around 40 properties, which was way too much for her to manage. If she'd had four properties. . . we'd probably never have bought a house.
Those people need to actually have a property management team, or use an established one. A good friend of mine here is one of the top real estate agents in the area, pays his mortgage on a huge house off of his own rental properties, and is a certified property manager with a full team working for him.
Kudos to you; that is the exact bold step my wife and I keep contemplating taking the leap and then gingerly tiptoeing back from taking.
One of the best tips in this thing is about finding a good market to buy houses in. The couple lives in Silicon Valley, but he and his wife built their rental house portfolio entirely in Fresno. They did so while both were working full time jobs, and now both have retired before age 50. Here in Lubbock, I'm in a ridiculously cheap market, especially for a college town that's growing rapidly. Decent sized 3/2 houses in my neighborhood, and a few of the ones surrounding them, have gone on the market recently for anywhere between $106k and $130k. I bought mine in 2018 for $93,500 and it's currently valued at $127,700. This is a neighborhood where you're 5-10 minutes from the campus and the medical district, but far enough away that you're not near student rental housing. These houses typically rent for $1000-1200 a month in this area, and with the equity I've got in my house I could probably use a cash out re-fi to buy two of them and rent them out with enough cash flow to cover the mortgage on all 3 houses with enough left over to quickly build a good sized fund for repairs. Meanwhile, in huge metro areas like Dallas and Houston...
Makes sense. A few years ago, I really wanted us to consider buying property back in Lincoln, Nebraska. Wish I'd done so; rents and property values have gone up quite a bit since we lived there over two decades ago, and while I don't know how much they'll continue growing I very much doubt they'll go down. Nebraska's aggregate population isn't growing all that fast, but Lincoln & Omaha draw the lion's share of new residents; as well as draining internal migration from smaller towns across the state. I wouldn't feel comfortable owning property from over 1300 miles away. As it is, I'll likely inherit some from my parents--my sister and I could very well end up co-owning 320 acres in northwest Kansas (the farm our father grew up on). Dealing with that should be fun.
Fanning the Spark: A Memoir by a late-blooming Alabama author Mary Ward Brown, whom I had not heard about until Paul Theroux mentioned meeting her in the book I read a couple months back, and he said she's a writer of a couple dozen really good short stories collected in two volumes, and this memoir, written when she was around 90 (her first volume of stories appeared when she was 69). Good tip from Paul Theroux.
It's George V. Higgins at his best. He's not everybody's cup of tea--I think you either love his style or find it maddeningly obtuse--but if he is, this is a good one.
Not this semester. She sounded interesting and the book is about 180 pages, so it wasn't a huge commitment. This one was pretty short, too: and it showed up at my house the same day my wife and I watched the Jim Jarmusch movie, Paterson, wherein it made a couple of cameos... The Walk a novella about, well, a writer going for a walk, by the Swiss writer of strange fiction, Robert Walser.
Speaking of memoirs . . . The Distance Between Us – Reyna Grande Childhood in Mexico and then US after crossing the border. Well worth reading
At Play In The Fields Of The Lord by Peter Matthiessen. It's a 1965 novel about a missionary and a mercenary dealing with an Amerindian tribe in South America. Made into a movie starring Daryl Hannah, which I haven't seen. Seems like a good, deep book.
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, a 2021 biography of the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and pretty solid writer, Dorothy Day, cowritten by John Loughery & Blythe Randolph, both of whom are authors of previous biographies of subjects who are pretty much NOT like Dorothy Day. But it reads pretty well and isn't one of those biographies that goes on for 1100 pages because the biographers have accumulated a warehouse full of notes and DAMMIT, they are going to use each and every one.
A few more key people die, a Martian invasion is stopped (maybe), the takeover of a nuclear silo is thwarted, and the string of great sitcom names for the volumes continues to match up with the content in an amazing way.
Not as good as Wicked, and it takes too long to get interesting, but it's a solid read and worth the time. The smartest part is the epilogue from an unlikely character. My only real issue is that Maguire spends and unhealthy amount of time and detail (in both books I've read) discussing young girls going through puberty. It's creepy at this point.
The Immortal Irishman by Timothy Egan. About the 19th Century Irishman Thomas Meagher, who lived a fascinating life. Details the horrors of the English occupation of Ireland.
Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, a book which explores a handful of insights and innovations that have added about 20,000 extra days to the lifespan of the average human by Steven Johnson.
Jezebel by Lesley Hazleton. About the vilified BIblical queen. A revisionist history, it argues that she was a misunderstood polytheist. I read this in the library.