Books and Me

by Meik Wiking  (2016) The author of this book attributes the fact that the Danes regularly top world happiness charts to the fact that they take Hygge or Danish cosiness of the soul seriously in many areas of life.  It is not just that cosy feeling when you sit around a roaring fire with friends and candles as a storm rages outside, you can apply hygge to meals, Christmas, skiing, pretty much any social occasion.   Of course, the Danes also do have generous government support, pretty reasonable GDP, a generally trusting population, and a great work/life balance.  These things probably help, but hygge does sound like a lovely idea and I've gone out and bought candles as a result. Rating 6/10

by John Connelly (2014) This was indeed a speed read. Took about ten minutes in fact.  That might have had something to do with the fact that I had just read another book on exactly the same subject, and knew what was coming next, but it is also very short, succinct and to the point.  As with "Essential Speed Reading", we are told how to overcome word fixation and subvocalisation and there are suggestions about margin restriction and prohibitions against rereading.  Some things in the first book are omitted here but, on the other hand, it also contained a few ideas the other didn't, so all in all, it was ten minutes well spent.   The latter section of the book is all about study skills, which was a bit of a surprise, as it isn't announced on the cover and I had no idea that was coming, quite frankly, but hey ho. Most of these suggestions seemed sensible too.  The only real gripe is that writer and his editor were clearly reading too quickly to no...

by Thibaut Meurisse (2019) This is yet another of those books that takes a lot of its material from primary sources and reworks them into a succinct package so that it is pretty straightforward to extract and retain the take home messages whilst not worrying about the history of the explanations or the intricacies of the arguments, and really, for that we should be grateful - it's a quick and punchy read with a bundle of good ideas on the issue of motivation, even if it didn't solve the problem of how to magic motivation out of thin air, recommending instead that one act on whatever minute morsel of motivation one already has.  The only other quibble: the author consistently addresses the reader directly as "you" and as I personally don't have any issues with a lack of motivation just now at least, I kept feeling the urge to shout "Hey look, not a problem mate!".  However,  if the reader is stuck in a rut, this probably wouldn't be a probl...

By Katya Seberson (2019) Well, the proof is in the pudding.  I started reading this book at my usual pace, and ended up reading at nearly twice the speed.   Unlike a lot of speed reading apps which flash the word at you one at a time in a completely unrealistic fashion, this explains how to read proper lumps of text as quickly as is humanly possible.   There's talk of saccades, fixations and parafoveal vision, along with physical exercises and practice tests. All in all, if my faster reading speeds are anything to go by, the science behind it must be sound. Rating 6/10

by George S. Glass and David Tabatsky (2014) This was happily a very quick read: happily because it was mostly pretty depressing, and quick because it was both banal and repetitive by turns.   You could get a broad idea of where the argument was going as soon as you saw the subtitle on each page, and there wasn't much to be gained by doing more than scanning the rest.  On top of this, a lot of the references that supported the major arguments weren't to research papers, which whilst being admittedly pretty unreliable in themselves, are nonetheless probably better resources than the "How To" website or NBC News upon which much of this book relied. The authors seemed hell-bent on haranguing parents for all manner of perceived crimes of over-parenting, from being too anxious about injury to doing a child's homework.  As a parent, one is likely to spend the whole book thinking "Is this me?  Perhaps, I dunno.  I think I might have done that once or tw...

by Chip and Dan Heath (2011) You have to love this  simply because it proffers such a plethora of sensible sounding solutions to the problem of how to implement change and it does this with so many vivid examples, and within such well organised framework that you really won't forget the broad outline of the ideas, from which is it possible to recall the finer details and therefore will be able to actually use what you've read.  It is, as with the "Asshole Survival Guide", a must read in that it would make the world a better place. OK, at some points, you may begin to wonder if some of the research might not have survived the replication crisis .  Carol Dweck is quoted with reverence and questions were hanging over her "Growth Mindset" argument, but I see that as of August 2019, a large study has confirmed that it does work, and even if the effects were small, were still significant.  Research aside (!), intuitively, every change-facilitating method i...

by Robert I. Sutton (2017) This i s, just as Daniel Pink says on the cover, a contemporary classic. If everyone were to read it, take it to heart and act on it, our planet would be an infinitely better place.  Sutton explains not only how to identify an "asshole", (sorry, there is no other satisfactory word -believe me, I've dug around in thesauri and the darkest reaches of the minds of friends and relatives, and have not yet come up with a satisfactory replacement), he also provides numerous ideas about how to deal with them, some of which strike me as inspired, (the Benjamin Franklin effect being one of these), but for the icing on the cake, he also requires that the reader look in the mirror in order to make sure they are not the asshole in the room! So it works for everyone, the asshole as well as the victim.  And of course, most of us have our moments.  It takes a masterful saint not to lapse at some point, though we might as well aim high, I guess. A must rea...

by Martin Meadows (2015) There is nothing startlingly new here.  If you've read around a bit in the self-help category, you will recognise most of the ideas in here, but it is nonetheless helpful to have them all bunched neatly and succinctly into one place and almost all of what he says makes very good sense.  A useful precis. Rating 6/10

by Tom Wainwright (2017) This is proving tricky to review!  I loved the writing style and the presentation of the numerous arguments, and indeed I was completely convinced, in the end, that specific forms of legalisation of drugs would be the best way to go, but I kept being struck by a terrible ennui.  The thing is, I just am not terribly interested in either illicit drugs or economics. This is wrong of me. I should be more concerned, not least as what we do with drugs in this country has implications for people all over the world. If you do happen to be interested in these subjects, and want a very slick exposition as to why the war of drugs is bound to fail, and what we should do instead, this is very much the book for you. Rating 8/10