Books and Me

2019 was an enriching experiment. I read 82 books in total last year and enjoyed almost all of the experience, only having to push myself to finish about five of these.  The outstanding books of the year in terms of impact upon my life were "The Little Book of Stoicism"   ,  "The Real Happy Pill" , " The Memory Book  and "The Chimp Paradox" . I didn't have any expectations of any of these, but they all packed a lasting punch.  It just goes to show that reading widely can pay off since I probably wouldn't have got to them had I been reading more parsimoniously.    The other key read was "The Body Keeps the Score"   as it offers a very fresh take on the old problem of unhappiness and proffers a number of new solutions that are further fleshed out in the "The Real Happy Pill". Other books were profoundly important: " The War for Kindness " and "The Asshole Survival Guide"   are both clarion calls for ...

by Anders Hansen (2017) This is the book I'd been waiting for:  all that walking and running and jumping up and down, which yes, you know it is good for the body, but what about the soul?  There have been hints before, snippets garnered here and there, but sometimes when you don't feel like donning the trainers, you need a veritable peon to the merits of getting out there in the rain and doing that little bit more.  And here it is:  a smorgasbord of reasons to get off the sofa. It really isn't just about endorphins or even endo-cannabinoids either.  There's all the other stuff you will have heard of like dopamine and BDNF and the effects on cortisol, but there's much more, like kynurenine and CCK, that meant absolutely nothing to me, but which only pile on the reasons to get out there. And it works.  It really does.  We should all be doing this.  It is good for the soul. Rating 10/10

Miguel Barclay (2019) Extensive offerings of creatively constructed, original, cheap, tasty meals. 8/10

by Joe Wicks (2018) Great, simple, manageable workouts and great, simple, manageable veggie food.  7/10

By Gary Klein (2017) For reasons that now completely escape me, I started out skeptically with this book  but somewhere in the course of it, I have been completely persuaded and have just finished it in a flurry of committed appreciation.  This is probably partially because it is a less depressing read than many of the behavioural economics books I have been reading lately, but more constructively it is also because I now feel I have a bit more of a handle on how to generate new ideas more easily and often. The author approaches the matter of how insights are generated through naturalistic research - taking 120 examples of moments where insights have occurred in real life rather than from experiments in a laboratory, and as a result, he generates a richness of understanding that more controlled testing would and has missed. In the process, Klein provides a very welcome corrective to the heuristics and biases movement which is often lab based and which is often terr...

Dr Vee Freir (2016) It seems I am becoming a complete sucker for secondary sources.  They often come just so much more neatly packaged than the primary sources which can be a labour of love in comparison. And so it is with this offering.  There is almost nothing here that you won't have encountered before, but it is presented so succinctly and clearly and yet with such a profusion of useful suggestions that then get rammed into memory through such repeated exposure, that really you can't complain. The author advises picking and choosing from the fifty suggestions on offer as some will work better than others for different people. Most of strategies I do already, but I did highlight twelve others that seem easy to incorporate without completely devoting one's time to stress management. These included leveling the chin in order to improve breathing and improving posture and shoulder pain by picturing removing a vividly imagined rucksack. Rating 6/10

By Jonathan A. Levi (2019) One minor quibble I have about "The Only Skill That Matters" is that the title only accurately describes the contents if you take it as meaning, "How to Learn Efficiently", even though this overarching skill is subsequently broken down into quite a few distinct sub-skills that need to be acquired in different ways.   Having said that, all of what the author says makes a huge amount of sense, even if you will have seen most of it somewhere else already.  He rehashes the inspirational work of Harry Lorayne  on how to use visual mnemonics, discusses the various applications of the Pareto Principle, (that 80% of the benefits accrue for 20% of the input), about how to manage motivation, speed reading, pre-reading, the inter-related nature of knowledge, aka cross-pollination, the benefits of the brute force approach, self-quizzing and teaching, all of which we have come across before elsewhere but it is all condensed very neatly and a...

by Mihaly Csikzentmihaly (2002) This is a book of two halves: the first a classic description of a how to live well in more or less any situation; the second, a rather protracted description of how to apply the lessons of the first half to every other possible scenario.  During this second half, I felt rather like a dinner guest trapped by a loquacious guest who, whilst they may be extremely clever, has had one too many and simply didn't know when to stop.  Ironically, I simply couldn't get into the flow of reading this second half however hard I tried, but that shouldn't stop one taking heed of the very important messages of the first half. Rating 6/10 Related links:  https://positivepsychology.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-father-of-flow/

by Sarah Knight (2015) Oh my, this was truly dreadful - a muddled message, poorly communicated and then endlessly repeated to absolutely no particular gain.  The only half-useful message in the entire book could be summed up as "If you are caring about something that it is not worth caring about, stop it" though it did mean I stopped caring about the contents of this book very quickly, though in truth, I still vaguely resent the 99p I spent on it.  On which point, Sarah doesn't help with this conflict between reason and emotion because she doesn't bother to explain how one should actually stop giving a f**k. I think she implies that this congruence just happens when you reason that you shouldn't care, which as I have just demonstrated with my outstanding annoyance for my 99p, just doesn't necessarily happen.  That's not the only problem - the impracticality of quite a chunk of the rest of the content is truly impressive, eg: the mantra "prio...

by James Wong (2019) In this follow up to his excellent "How to Eat Better" , James eases one into the idea that 10-a-day is not only desirable, given that the reduction in mortality from eating a lot of fruit and vegetables is dose dependent, but also that it is very manageable.  His strategy basically involves throwing fruit or veg at absolutely everything, from pizza bases to pumpkin dressing.  If you've been a vegetarian for a bit, you've probably been doing  quite a lot of this already.  However, James may push you that little extra bit further, and whilst some of his dishes are meat laden, these would be easily adapted by vegetarians. He also introduced me to some ingredients with which I wasn't familiar and which I will try out, orange blossom water, tinned mango puree and vanilla bean paste, for example. I was slightly concerned about how many calories this enterprise would involve.  10-a-day when added to pizzas and custard might be fine for a 6 f...

by Jamil Zaki (2019) This is a clarion call for maximisation of the very best of human qualities, and given the increasing alienation, unhappiness and general antipathy that ail us, along with the global problems we face, this call doesn't come a moment too soon. It is an essential read - important for everyone - parents, policy makers and leaders of all sorts. Rating 10/10. 

By James Clear (2018) The author really does live up to his name with this superbly clear book .  The secret is in the structure.  He creates an unforgettable scaffold upon which to hang the ideas, so that they are not only beautifully signalled, obvious and graspable, but are also memorable and actionable. I can see why he garners so many 5 star ratings on Amazon.   Get this book!  Rating 10/10

by Katie Hurley (2019) With news that 9/10 teens are worried about their mental health, and that a third state that they feel helpless, sad and or fearful frequently and this problem far outstripping any help that is offered by others, these sorts of work books would seem to have a big and important function. This one does the job efficiently enough. There isn't anything you won't already have read before in other places, but it puts all the strategies in one neat place succinctly and clearly, and even if you don't have any mood disorder, often seems to offer very sensible strategies for life. Whether a teen would actually engage with it in the first place, let alone actually benefit from it, is another matter altogether. Rating 6/10

by Simon Sinek  (2011) Oh blimey, thank heaven that's over.   It was dire!  The repetition was so all engulfing that it felt as if I'd fallen into a roiling sea of nearly identical sentences which burbled around, sapping me of my last ounce of energy and breath. To tell the truth, after the millionth time of being told that Apple (whom I dislike) are amazing because they have a great big WHY (in capitals), I started skipping and dipping to see if new sections of the book had by chance got any new sentences that I hadn't seen before.  The really annoying thing was that just occasionally a new idea would be introduced, which did mean that I felt I couldn't just fling the whole thing in the nearest canal, fire, cesspit. (Sorry, imagining what to do with the thing has been the only entertainment I've had in a while.) Whether these new ideas were worth having is a moot point, however.  The central theme - that it is productive to have an ins...

By Jason Fox (2018) This  is a gripping, convincing read for which the actual writer, Matt Allen, should take a lot of  credit, not least because until I got to the acknowledgements right at the end, I had managed to persuade myself that Jason's voice was largely authentically his.   OK, so you could see that the book was beautifully structured and that this sort of level of writing skill isn't something people normally acquire when they've spent their entire adult life busting through doors and shooting the threats that lie behind it, so I guess I should have just got on and accepted this fact - but in some regards, it still sounded like the Jason you hear on  Who Dares Wins,  so I just wanted to believe.  But really, duh, in retrospect what was I thinking! One regular feature of PTSD, to which Jason bravely admits, is that it closes down Broca's area - the part of the brain that is responsible for speech.  It is quite possibl...

by Jennie Marie Battistin (2019) One of the biggest problems with selling mindfulness to teens, in my experience, is that it just sounds hokey.  Why should they bother with it? It doesn't sound as if it would work and there are better things to be doing with one's time.  Plus, don't try to whitewash problems.  If there is an issue, solve it directly.  Don't try to make the poor victim just accept that this is how things are whilst deluding themselves that everything is hunky dory.   And the awful thing is, they may have a point.  I mean, there are quite a few recent studies out there which suggest that mindfulness is not all it's been cracked up to be.  And yes, perhaps mindfulness is occasionally used coercively as a cover for appallingly stressful situations. I remember an example of this in the NHS a while back: nurses who were working on desperately understaffed wards being taught mindfulness in nursing school in order to manage their a...

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