the buzz log

News for the silver-lining crowd: The credit hysteria has triggered an outbreak of widespread reading.

Bookseller behemoths are seeing a run on the finance and personal finance shelves, according to the Wall Street Journal. Window dressers for Barnes & Noble and Borders have been going giddy laying out tomes like "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown" and "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets."

The latter must-read is by liberal billionaire George Soros, one of many sought-after financial names on the Web: His online stock surged 127% over the past 7 days (although the jump might be due to a recent Saturday Night Live skit). He also just crunched out his latest, "The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means." You can probably get the gist of his financial prescription in his Sunday article for the Financial Times. The column advocates a stronger government role in banks, and illuminates how British newspapers spell "recapitalisation" and "programme."

With the shift from summer beach potboilers to autumn waiting-in-the-bank-line reads, book reviews are percolating within the Buzz. The suggestions below might satisfy searchers who've been going online to make "financial sense" out of the "global financial meltdown," seeing what the new "office of financial stability" is going to do about it, and what "personal finance advice" can be had at this late stage.

• The Austin American Statesman finds itself impressed with "The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough."
• The New York Observer waded through a spanking new examination of Goldman Sachs—the investment banking house that once employed Secretary Treasurer Henry Paulson and which aims to evade collapse by becoming a commercial bank.
• A biography's out on the popular Warren "Buying-Spree" Buffett (+19%), weighing in at 960 pages.
• WSJ thinks some oldies are still goodies, and lists the five best overviews with titles like "Manias, Panics, and Crashes," "Bailout," and "When Genius Failed."
• The New York Times and Slate don't think financial messes necessarily make for scary bedtime stories. NYT culls tips from the Moneyology series on teaching kids a financial education, while Slate presents a fun-filled slideshow of "Great Kids' Books About Financial Ruin." Ah, to be young and informed.