The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead by Charles Murray -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

The first thing you need to understand is that most large organizations in the private sector are run by curmudgeons like me.

-- from The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life by Charles Murray. 

This little book of wisdom is short and quick, so only took me a couple of hours to read this week. Murray offers common sense advice, and plenty of home truths, to young people starting independent lives as adults. His target audience is college graduates from privileged backgrounds, but it is good advice for all young people. 

The Curmudgeon's Guide is the kind of book I wish someone had handed to me when I was a college senior. It would have provided much needed guidance and saved me some of the embarrassment, annoyance, and grief of my 20s. I plan to give it to the young people in my life, if I think they will read it. 

He offers plenty of serious advice, but ends with the recommendation to watch the movie Groundhog Day over and over. He says you could, instead, study Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but you can get the same lessons from Groundhog Day and it's a lot more fun. 

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your Book Beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the #bookbeginnings hashtag.

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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

From The Curmudgeon's Guide:

But in all cases when you have problems in your interactions with your boss, there’s one more question you have to ask yourself: To what extent is your boss at fault, and to what extent are you a neophyte about supervisor-subordinate relationships? Some of you have reached your twenties without ever having been treated as a subordinate and you are not used to it.

Now that I am in my 50s, I also wish I had read this book earlier so I would have been better prepared to be a boss! I would have had a better understanding of the younger people I supervised.