Books and Me

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 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 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 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 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 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 Katherine Andler (2013) This is a twenty minute read at most, but extremely helpful nonetheless.  As it happens, I am simultaneously reading three other  books  on related subjects, one of which mentioned EMDR therapy for PTSD and anxiety in early chapter, and frankly, I couldn't wait to know more about the technique that seemed to promise so much and so went in search of something that could explain it a bit more. Andler's short tract didn't let me down.  She explains EMDR succinctly and memorably and provides useful links to youtube and further reading at the back.  I tried the technique on myself using a minor source of anxiety along with  this video , and OK, so I am hardly terribly traumatised and have worked on my stuff with various tools over the years, (CBT, mindfulness, yoga, attachment theory etc) but, let's face it, sources of at least some level of trauma are ever present, so it wasn't terribly difficult to think something up....

By Tabatha Chansard (2019) There is nothing new here, but the book is nonetheless an efficient, well-written summary of evidenced-based approaches for tackling teen anxiety, along with exercises designed to encourage the reader to implement the theory.  I'm sure these approaches work, but the teen has to believe it possible and to engage with the suggestions fully.  This might be difficult.  You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Rating 6/10

by Amy Morin (2019) While most of this makes great good sense, is well researched and referenced, the format made reading it sequentially a teensy bit tedious and unmemorable.  It is probably best to dip into it, and finding the chapter that is relevant for the moment as it is otherwise pretty difficult to retain all 13 things one must do in order to stay mentally strong. Rating 6/10. 

by Rick Wilson (2018) This is an eviscerating account of the idiocy that is the Trump presidency.  Trump is skewered with perfectly targeted prose, along with all those who, one way or another, aided and abetted his election and continue to believe in him. Despite the richness and laser-like accuracy of the character assassinations, it is all a bit relentless and hopeless and could have done with a bit of editing as it does get repetitive.  Let's face it, there isn't much suspense.  You know how disastrous it all is right from the off - it's in the title after all, and it is therefore rather hard to stick with it through the close examination of the respective failings of a whole bundle of Trumpian lackeys, many of whom are not terribly familiar to us this side of the pond.  However, a curiosity about the vocabulary kept me going for quite a bit: for a Brit like me, it is was an education and I am now up on  "doofy" "chickenhawk","pudknock...