The 16% Solution by Joel S Moskowitz, JD

The original 16% Solution came out in 1994. I just finished the 2009 edition, which has been updated in many ways. The 16% Solution is about investing in tax lien certificates, which is something that I had never heard of before. Basically it involves buying tax liens from county governments, and then rather than the county earning the interest, you now earn the interest. Only 23 states sell their tax liens in this way, but Moskowitz includes all of this information for you.
The major differences between this edition and the first one is the fact that many counties now do their auctions online, or at least have websites that have very detailed information about the procedure. Moskowitz includes web addresses for all of the relevant counties. He also includes advice that is based on the current economic situation, rather than what the economy looked like back in 1994. The world is a different place now.
At first I was wary of tax liens - I felt that it must be in some way bad for the person whose lien is being sold, the person who has been unable to pay their property taxes. I would hate to participate in a system that made it easier for people to lose their homes because I bought the lien on their unpaid property tax. But in many states, it's actually better for the property owner - at the auction, the person who wins the bid is the one who will take the lien at the lowest rate of interest. Granted, some states seem to make it very easy to foreclose on someone, but I was interested in the states that seemed to be the most fair to the property-holder. All-in-all, this book makes tax lien investing sound like a really good deal. I plan on checking it out when I have the extra money ready to invest. And I will have this book read for when I need it.
I am glad I actually own this book, because then I can hang on to it until I am ready to use the information in it. So of course this counts for the RYOB Challenge. As a non-fiction book, it also gets a Dewey Decimal Number, making it work for the Dewey Decimal Challenge. I mostly tend to read history, so I already have my 900's book. The number for this one is 332.6324, so I actually get a 300's book now. And we can't forget about the Pub 2009 Challenge!

The Blue Way by Daniel de Faro Adamson & Joe Andrew

While looking for some books on socially responsible investing, I came across this one - the subtitle is How to Profit by Investing in a Better World. But this book is about more than socially responsible investing. The Blue Way refers to supporting companies that support Democrats. The assertion of the authors is that the Republican party is against everything that socially responsible companies are for, or at least their actions have shown this for the past decade or more. And although it seems taboo to discuss the political contributions of companies and CEO's, that is exactly what this book wants to talk about. Many of the companies that are listed in socially responsible mutual funds donate big money to the Republican party, or to individual campaigns. The authors have identified 76 companies on the S&P 500 that they describe as "blue" - contributing a majority of their political donations to Democrats. The authors then set out to show that these 76 companies are more successful than those that support Republicans.
Adamson and Andrew do get their point across. They have run the numbers, and the numbers show that these companies have done much better than the average S&P 500 company over the past decade. Of course, this book came out in 2007, and much has changed about financial markets since then, but it is still an interesting fact. The reason why the authors feel that they have to emphasize their facts so heavily is that conventional wisdom goes against these results. Republicans are traditionally the party of big business. The other main point the authors make is that the reason "blue" companies are more successful than "red" is that their business model is more progressive, in more ways than one. They spend a tremendous amount of the book discussing the importance of progressive leadership, both in business and in politics.
This book was not really what I expected, and it spent more time on topics other than investing than I would have expected, seeing as how the word "investing" was in the title. But the authors did make some very interesting points, and gave me a lot to think about. They discussed changes that certain very large companies have made to make themselves more socially responsible, companies like Nike and Gap, who I didn't realize had made so many steps in that direction. I'm still not sure that I agree that it makes sense to dig into data about political contributions; I also did not particularly care for the incredibly consumerist take on reality. There was barely a mention of the fact that perhaps instead of purchasing stuff from a "blue" company, we could instead not buy stuff at all. But I guess that wasn't the point of the book.