Strive to find authors that are credible and reliable. This advice applies to any feng shui book that you read.

A reliable author is consistent in their account of the truth. There is a pattern of information that you can verify from sources supplied by the author, and in turn those sources can be verified. This openness gives you confidence that any unverified information is likely to be true as well.

A credible author has consistent tone and reliability. Authors who convey by their tone that they are not neutral about a subject may have a vested interest in not portraying a subject accurately. Authors who are inconsistently truthful have no credibility.

Some authors who seem quite credible may be completely unreliable. Some reliable authors may not always be credible. Some content by an author may be more reliable and credible than other content.

About the bad stuff

Sadly, none of the books listed as Bad have been fact-checked or peer-reviewed. The author has merely signed a legal document that states, to the best of their knowledge, the book is accurate.

What you and I think “to the best of their knowledge” means is not what some of these authors think it means.

It is all too easy for some of these authors to sign that paper and spout all sorts of spurious stuff — which is how so many bad books appear on the shelves of bookstores.

Own them if you must, but their information isn’t reliable (you have to wonder about the fengshui expertise of the authors when their books contradict and steal from one another).

You probably will find these books more interesting for the insights they offer into New Age marketing techniques and psychobabble.

If you rummage through used-book stores or online services that list used books, these are the books most often listed in the “feng shui” section. If you frequent stores that stock remainders (books that were returned from bookstores because they did not sell), you will also find a lot of these.

Obviously not everyone thinks they are any good.