Review: How to Not Always Be Working

Title: How to Not Always Be Working: A Toolkit for Creativity and Radical Self-Care

Author: Marlee Grace

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Divorce (mention)

Back Cover:

Part workbook, part advice manual, part love letter, How to Not Always Be Working gently ventures into the liminal space where phone meets life, helping readers to define their work (aka what they do out of a sense of purpose), their job (aka what they do to make money), and their breaks (what they do to recharge, to keep sacred, to feel connected to themselves). The book delves into the discussion of what happens when your work and your job are connected or the same, and how to figure out how much is to much, and get the best use of your time.

For the corporate lawyer who is always on email as well as the bread-baker trying to something that’s just for themselves, How to Not Always Be Working includes practical suggestions such as getting a phone box and sleeping with your phone in a different room, and more philosophical prompts that invite readers to ask how they burn themselves out and why they’re doing it. A creative manifesto, this book is above all inclusive – insisting that deep breathing and yoga aren’t just for the 1 percent, and inviting any and everyone to create a scared space in their lives.

Review:

I don’t think the title of this book could have called to me any more if it was titled “Jay Needs To Read This Book.” I am generally always working. Most people assume it’s because I have three jobs. But though I do actually need two jobs to pay the bills, the third one is optional and voluntary. I have the time to not be working if I actually knew how to not always be working. I just have some sort of compulsion towards always doing something, and that something is almost always some variety of work.

I was so excited about the premise of this book that I actually paused when I got to the first exercise to do the exercise (which I’ve only ever done for one other book – generally I read books all the way through and then come back to any exercises). But that actually became the problem here. The first exercise was to write out a list of things that are your work. My list included items like “mending clothing,” “social media” (because, as one of my jobs is digital marketing, I’m hardly ever on social media if I’m not getting paid for it), and “most activities that happen in the kitchen.” Then I looked at the sample list Marlee provided, which included items like “balancing the books,” “posting on Instagram about a new product,” and “uploading a new podcast episode.” And realized that I had fundamentally misunderstood who this book is actually targeted at.

This book was not really written for people like me, who take extra jobs even though we don’t need them and who are always working because we have an undefinable, insatiable, irrational drive to always be “productive.” It’s targeted towards people who are self-employed in creative or hobby businesses or influencer-type gigs and who have a hard time drawing the lines between “I’m doing this for work because X is my job” and “I’m doing this for me because I enjoy X.” It is, fundamentally, about figuring out how and where to draw boundaries when your life and your hobbies are your work. (This is, obviously, not my situation. Besides reading, I don’t really have any hobbies. I was hoping this book would teach me how to change that.)

I’m sure this book would be valuable for people in that particular situation. I did finish it, and though it’s definitely influenced strongly by Marlee’s New Age-style witchy spirituality, a lot of the advice is very good and the exercises are practical. Honestly, I would probably find some of the exercises helpful anyway. But I haven’t done any besides the first one yet because I’m just so disillusioned with this book. I really love the principle and the idea and the concept and the call towards not always working. But I didn’t expect such a narrow focus on specific types of work. I probably will take the time to go back through the exercises and see what ideas I can extract and re-shape to fit my life. But sometimes you just don’t want to have to do that work, you know?

Review: Breaktime

Title: Breaktime: Living Without Work in a Nine to Five World

Author: Bernard Lefkowitz

Genre: Journalism

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), mental illness (mentions), illness (mentions)

Back Cover:

A revolution against conventional work and career is spreading across America. It’s a quiet movement, but sooner or later it may affect you. This dramatic revolt against against the work ethic has led many Americans to break with their careers and to restructure their lives around their personal design.

In the past ten years, many Americans have dropped out of the job market in significant numbers, choosing not to work. These people are rethinking their priorities and are rejecting the pressures that come with climbing the success ladder. These are not the idle rich or the romantic young, but ordinary middle-class citizens who want to make the most of themselves, to live for the present rather than for the future. A social security pension at sixty-five is no longer their goal in life – these men and women will not allow the nine-to-fine routine to interfere with their desires for personal satisfaction.

Bernard Lefkowitz who has talked and lived with people of all ages, income levels, and life-styles, offers a fascinating portrait of the nonworking life. Why have these people stopped working? How do they pay the rent? What do they do with all their time? What options are available to those of us who might also choose to retire early – as early as twenty-five? More than one hundred people have confronted these and other vital issues in interviews with Lefkowitz.

Among the subjects presented in Breaktime are a couple who sublet their apartment and house-sit for others; a loan collector who found that he was more interested in people than in chasing debtors; an ex-TV anchorman who’d had it with corporate journalism; and a former Xerox executive who plotted and planned for his ten years with the company to leave at thirty-two and do nothing for the rest of his life. These and many others have quit early and are enjoying life on their own terms. Breaktime is a revelation and an incentive to find a better way.

Review:

I spent a remarkable amount of time trying to track down this book considering I didn’t know very much about it. I knew the title, and there was a photograph of the paperback cover available on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. (It’s actually the cover image I used on this post, since the copy I finally got my hands on was a hardcover without the dust jacket and therefore was just plain pressboard.) I couldn’t find a description or anything regarding what it was about, and I couldn’t track down any reviews. It probably has something to do with the book being a not-particularly-noteworthy longform journalism piece published in 1979, but even the few places on the internet that acknowledged the book’s existence didn’t seem to care to do more than that.

I eventually located in my local library’s storage archives and had to go request a librarian go into the archives and grab it for me. But in the end, I did get my hands on it. (And I added the back cover information to The StoryGraph, because the part from the dust cover was pasted inside the book itself and I don’t think it’s actually online anywhere else.) Which seems like a lot of effort for something that, again, I knew next to nothing about. But the title caught my interest, and even though I knew I was unlikely to find anything particularly actionable in a book about people opting out of work in the 1970s, I still wanted to read it.

The 1970s was nearly fifty years ago, so this book felt less like a current events analysis (which I’m sure it was supposed to be) and more of a capture of attitudes of a particular subset of people in a particular time. One of the things I found most fascinating about it, though, was how many beliefs and attitudes were exactly the same as today. Nobody wants to work anymore; people aren’t religious anymore; the government is full of liberals who want to destroy us conservatives; your job is your identity; maybe your job shouldn’t be your identity; these are all familiar ideas expressed at one point or another in this book. Even though economics have changed, societal beliefs about women working have changed, and ideas about the very meaning of work itself have changed, a lot of the attitudes Bernard and his subjects express haven’t.

Another thing that struck me about this book is how un-feasible most of the subjects’ strategies would be in today’s world. One person managed to get unemployment for seven years; several had their formerly stay-at-home wives go to work and support the family on a clerical salary; a remarkable number of them got their employers to say they were laid off so they could get unemployment in the first place. And that’s not counting the ones who were fairly wealthy to begin with and chose to just live on their savings. All of them put a big emphasis on cutting down their expenses, but I can’t help noticing all the ways none of this would work in 2024.

And, interestingly, it seemed that a lot of them didn’t work in the 1970s, either. A majority of the 100 people Bernard talked to for this book ended up going back to work. Many of them talked about the stress of cobbling together money to pay bills. At least one went to eviction court, and several more were close to it when Bernard’s research ended. A few got severely depressed by losing the sense of purpose and accomplishment that working and being the primary breadwinner gave them, and several talked about not really knowing what to do with their time now that it wasn’t going towards work. There’s a strange tension in this book between these people’s desire not to work, to be free from the job and the boss and the alarm clock and spending a bunch of their time doing things they hate or ethically disagree with or just aren’t the things they want to be spending their time on, and the fact that “living without work in a nine to five world” doesn’t seem to be feasible for more than a few years at a time. And the book never actually explores this tension. It covers people who are voluntarily not working with a sense of “I don’t really understand this but it’s the future of work,” but it also never seems to draw the connection that even for these people, it’s not really possible. To be fair, it is possible in some cases – if they already had a ton of savings to live on, if they were close to retirement age and had enough savings to live on until they could start getting social security or their pension, or if they had a spouse who was willing and able to go to work and who could earn enough to support their family. But those are all true today, as well. These people opting out of work hadn’t really found a way to opt out of work entirely. In most cases, it was something more akin to an extended vacation or sabbatical than dropping out of the nine-to-five world. But the book doesn’t acknowledge this. It presents voluntary unemployment and early retirement as the future while never seeming to notice that even most of the people already doing it couldn’t make it permanent.

There’s a point to be made about society’s view on work and how even though technology and automation has brought down the amount we really need to work, societal values have gone the opposite way than what Bernard predicted. Instead of normalizing early retirement and moving towards twenty-hour workweeks, we’ve made working into a moral and ethical good and busyness into a proof of your personal worth. It would be interesting to contrast this movement with today’s FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, which has the same goal but aims to do it by becoming independently wealthy instead of by relying on social support systems. I would also be curious to hear from someone who lived through the 1970s about this book and how it matches up with the values, culture, and societal dynamics of the period. I’m especially interested to hear if the idea of living without work was a more mainstream idea at the time or if Bernard was reporting on an obscure hippie-adjacent subculture he was interested in. I can point out a bunch of things that were really interesting about this book and how it contrasts with attitudes about work in 2024, but my lack of context and historical understanding about this era limits what more I can get from it. As I anticipated, it’s most definitely not an instruction manual for how to quit your job and keep living afterwards in the modern day (or even at the time it was written). But despite that, it was extremely interesting, and I’m glad I took the time and effort to hunt it down.

Review: A Recipe for More

Title; A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease

Author: Sara Elise

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Drug use, alcohol use, self-harm (mentions), religious trauma (mentions), discussions of sexual practices (no actual sex), mental illness, child abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

In this expansive book of compassionate wisdom and self-reflection, entrepreneur and “pleasure doula” Sara Elise uncovers the powerful – and often unexamined – forces that keep us in a state of survival and limitation, and asks us to consider a new way to live.

A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease is an invitation to reimagine the ingredients of our lives, those essential components that make up our days. Have we chosen rest, breath, movement, agency, visibility, play, and pleasure? Or are we trapped in the numbing and violent pattern of self-inflicted suffering? Do we celebrate the unique and precious wiring of our brains? Are our relationships a garden of ever-growing and evolving roots? Do we nourish our bodies with what they require to sense and receive? Are we liberated, awakened, and alive? As a Black & Indigenous, autistic, queer woman, Sara Elise makes a radial argument for dismantling the systems that oppress us. But it begins with the individual, and the simple recipe of our every day.

Groundbreaking, persuasive, inclusive, and warm – and written in the tradition of authors like adrienne maree brown and Sonya Renee Taylor – A Recipe for More brings the ingredients of an abundant life to all readers so that we might honor ourselves, deepen our communities, and finally be present in each miraculous and life-giving moment.

Review:

I had really high hopes for this book. The title and back cover sound exactly like something I’m looking for, and I was excited for the perspective that a queer, autistic, polyamorous, and Black & Indigenous author primarily doing creative-type work could bring to the ideas. And as much as I have some reservations about the entire self-help genre, I am still vulnerable to the appeal of the modern iteration of self-help – the kind where instead of teaching you how to do it all, succeed at work, “win” capitalism, etc., they’re teaching you how to enjoy life, experience inner peace, free yourself from the pressures and hurry of capitalism, etc. I know it’s basically the same ideas repackaged for a generation that cares more about personal fulfillment than career success, but there’s still a part of me that wants a book to tell me how to feel pleasure again.

Anyway. That’s what led me to pick up this book and expect to enjoy it immensely. But reading it is such a strange experience. Sara Elise clearly has some deep, interesting ideas and thoughts on how best to live life. But I couldn’t really identify what exactly she was trying to say in this book.

Sara Elise is very deeply into things my skeptic husband describes as “woo” – energy healing, astrology, higher powers/Universe Energies, manifestation, Earth wisdom, drugs as a method of spiritual healing, that kind of thing. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but I get strong “Tumblr witch” vibes. (Admittedly, I myself spent a few years as a Tumblr witch, so I at least didn’t have any trouble parsing some of the unusual phrases and ideas here.) Though I’m still open to some woo, she is way beyond what most people would consider a reasonable amount of it. It’s obviously working really well for her, which is great. But if you’re not as far as she is on the skeptic-woo spectrum, you’ll probably be weirded out by some of this.

Although honestly, there’s a lot in here to be weirded out by that’s not woo. Sara talks about her commitment to being open and vulnerable. And that includes being extremely, uncomfortably open in this book. If feels like the book form of that person who you just met five minutes ago but is already telling you about their childhood trauma, the years when they did as many drugs as they could get their hands on, and how much they’re into BDSM. (All things Sara talks about in this book.) There is a place to be open about your personal struggles and/or sexual proclivities in your book, and that can be done really effectively. But since very little of it seemed to connect to an actual point, I ended up with the same very-uncomfortable-but-don’t-want-to-be-rude feeling that you get when someone starts talking about how their parent abused them on a first date. I barely know you and I’m trying to find out if this connection is worth pursuing – why are you telling me about your BDSM parties and how your father used to beat you?

I think my biggest criticism of the book is that I am really not sure what it’s trying to say. The chapter titles and subheadings have some standard self-help concepts (“Give Yourself Permission to Change,” “The Myth of Productivity”) and some slightly more interesting concepts (“Invest in Your Pleasure,” “Allowing Good Feelings”). I think if you took the headings and used them as an outline to write a longform article, you’d get something with more clarity and a more direct point. There’s so many different types of content packed into 220 pages that it’s hard to combine the variety into something cohesive.

And when I say “types” of content, I do mean types. This isn’t just Sara Elise writing a book about a topic. That part is definitely there, but it’s also interspersed with a lot of other things.

• There are short essays written by other people, several of whom I think are her romantic partners, which range from actually quite interesting (“A Journey in Black Minimalism”) to vaguely incomprehensible (“Natural State”).
• There’s a black-and-white reproduction of an oil painting self-portrait of someone else.
• There’s a literal recipe (for a Roasted Squash and Garlic Ricotta Buckwheat Galette).
• There’s instructions for how to eat something delicious. I actually read this one to my husband, and he described it as “woo meets vore.”
• The second-to-last chapter is almost entirely a “minimally edited” transcription of a conversation between Sara and some of her friends, but it feels more like a literary device than an actual conversation. (One example, starting on page 190: “Our queered model and practice of friendship defies the way that freedom gets defined by whiteness and by capitalism, so the dominant culture that we’re living in defines freedom as an island and that being free means unaccountable and being able to do whatever you want.” Interesting philosophy? Yes. A sentince I can imagine a real human being saying while talking with friends? No.)
• There’s a ton of other people quoted in this book. These include bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah, books like Wintering and Do Nothing, various Instagram accounts, and assorted podcast episodes. It gave the whole book a strange sense of trying to be academic by including a bunch of citations, but also failing because half the time the citation is just something somebody said on social media.
• There’s also a variety of reflection questions scattered throughout the book, and they’re the only actually actionable thing in it.

I think my fundamental problem here is that I went in thinking this was something it’s not. I was expecting and hoping for a how-to – for Sara to give me the ingredients for me to cook up my own life of abundance and ease. But that’s not really what this book is about. I think it’s more a combination of life philosophy and memoir. Despite what the title seems to imply, Sara isn’t here to tell you how you can do this for yourself. Instead, she’s here to share her philosophy on living, experiencing life and its sensory pleasures, working within and embracing the unique constraints of an autistic and ADHD brain, feeling abundance, and adding more ease into existence, and also share a radically open story of how she built this philosophy and uses it in her own life.

Despite how critical this review has been, I don’t want to be overly hard on this book. Most of my complaints came from my own expectations and desires for a how-to manual. I think if I had known in advance that it was more a work of personal philosophy, I would have looked at it with different eyes and maybe been better able to see what’s actually there. Because I do feel like there’s something worthwhile here. I just wasn’t able to grasp it.

Review: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

Title: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get it

Author: Barbara Sher with Barbara Smith

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Cisnormativity, heteronormativity, parent death (mentions), spouse death (mentions), child abuse (mentions), emotional abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

If you suspect there could be more to life than what you’re getting, if you always knew you could do anything—if you only knew what it was—this extraordinary book is about to prove you right. No matter what your age, no matter how “unattainable” your dreams, you can create and live a life you love.

I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was reveals how you can recapture “long lost” goals, overcome the blocks that inhibit your success, decide what you want to be, and live your dreams forever. You will learn:

• What to do if you never chose to be what you are.
• How to get off the fast track—and on to the right track.
• First aid techniques for paralyzing chronic negativity.
• How to regroup when you’ve lost your big dream.
• To stop waiting for luck—and start creating it.

A life without direction is a life without passion. I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was guides you not to another unsatisfying job but to a richly rewarding career rooted in your heart’s desire.

Review:

I had some reservations about this book, as I read Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose! several years ago and found it occasionally insightful but overall unimpressive. But the title of this book called me so dramatically that it might have well have been called Jay Needs to Read This Book. I have often said that my biggest problem in getting anything done is that I genuinely could get good at almost anything, I just don’t know what I want to do. So I decided to give this book a try.

I’m not sure what Barbara Smith contributed to this book, because the writing style is most definitely Barbara Sher’s. Like Refuse to Choose!, it spent the first part of the book establishing the idea and laying general ground rules, and then the rest of the book examining detailed ideas for different people depending on what specific issue they were dealing with. And I think it did it significantly better. Refuse to Choose! felt like it was introducing a concept, but this one felt more like it was providing advice and solutions, so the whole book worked better. The book uses a ton of specific examples of people Barbara has helped work through the processes she recommends, which solves my biggest issue with the other book: I still don’t know where Barbara gets her ideas, but at least the examples provided some authority. Whatever other kind of expertise and experience she has, at least the examples show her methods do work in some cases. It’s also packed to the gills with practical exercises no matter what is really holding you back, which I deeply appreciate.

And now I’m done with the comparison part of the review, and we can actually talk about what’s in this book. Because there’s a lot.

Barbara identifies ten different reasons why you might be struggling to pursue or even identify what you want:

• Fear of leaving less-successful loved ones behind
• Too many interests to make progress on any of them
• Busy making a lot of progress, but not on something you want
• What you really want is something you don’t think you “should” want
• Recent graduate intimidated by choosing the course of the rest of your life
• Radical life change (good or bad) and you aren’t sure what to do in general
• Already achieved your dream, then lost it forever due to circumstances out of your control
• Never find anything interesting
• Doing anything other than your dream (even the work to get to your dream) is too frustrating
• Trying really hard to want something even though it’s not really what you want

Personally, I relate most to the second one – way too many diverse interests to really focus on any of them. (If I spend all my time writing, I’ll never sew; if I sew all the time, I won’t have the energy to grow my business; if I focus on growing my business, I won’t have time to study for a Master’s degree; if I’m studying for a Master’s degree, I won’t feel like studying IT … you get the picture.) But I read every section, and all of them have great advice.

I really appreciate how Barbara focuses on the underlying emotions. You can’t force yourself to feel (or not feel) something, and you don’t get a whole lot of say in what your heart desires. Some of the reasons you’re struggling to find what you want and pursue it she ties back to childhood trauma (which, as a person who’s done a lot of reading on trauma and its effects, made a lot of sense to me.) Others she tied to family dynamics, emotional states, or thinking patterns you didn’t realize you learned. And she provides so many exercises to do, some by themselves and some sequentially, to help you feel and process your emotions. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a self-help book about hobbies and careers be this emotionally aware, and I am impressed.

I even paused reading for a bit to actually do one of the exercises in the “too many interests” chapter. As much as I appreciate exercises, I very rarely do them while reading – generally I read the whole book and then go back. But this one I did stop reading to do, and it was enlightening.

The funniest thing about this reading experience is that even though this book is astonishingly insightful, emotionally-aware, and almost therapy-like, very little of this is actually revolutionary. Barbara’s main skill here is helping you get in touch with your own feelings about things or pointing out the obvious that an impartial observer can see much better than someone close to the issue. I’ll use the most dramatic one for me, from chapter six (“I Want Too Many Things; I’m All Over the Map”). The problem here is the person who likes too many things to stick with one. Barbara outlines the issue, and then says, “Hm. What if you did everything you want to do, just not all at once?”

When you think about it, that’s extremely logical and fairly obvious advice. None of the things I want to do are mutually exclusive, and there’s no rule that says I have to focus on only one of them. But somehow that idea had never occurred to me before. So much of self-help content is about doing everything, and we tend to assume that if we’re not actively doing something we don’t like it. So it felt revolutionary for someone to say, “Yeah, you can not write a word for several months while you focus on sewing a bunch of stuff, that’s fine.” The exercise I did had me make a list of all the different “lives” I would like to live (I came up with 12) and then analyze what I could do in a year, two years, twenty minutes a day, and other timeframes. And you know, it turns out I can do everything I want to do – just not all at the same time.

For as great as this book is, there are some parts of it that I don’t love. One is that it’s very career-focused – it pays lip service to the idea of finding a low-effort job and using your free time to do things you love, but the vast majority of it equates “finding what you love” with “finding your dream job.” As someone who doesn’t really have a “dream job” (I simply do not dream of labor), I found that irritating, but as the content was generally good it wasn’t a dealbreaker.

Also, this book was published in 1994, and sometimes it shows its age. There’s a whole section about how getting on this newfangled Internet thing is actually pretty cool and how to find someone to help you out if you don’t think you can get on the internet by yourself. It also includes stories of people with jobs like “word processor,” which apparently in 1994 was a business job held by a person and not a type of software. I would love a 2023 update of this, but since Barbara Sher died in 2020 that seems unlikely.

My final criticism is a general lack of acknowledgement of mental illness. I’m sure it had something to do with the time it was written, but for a book that is as astonishingly emotionally aware and cognizant of issues of grief and childhood trauma, there’s a whole chapter that’s basically “I don’t know what I want because I have chronic/severe depression that includes an inability to experience pleasure in anything” and never once considers depression as a potential issue. Barbara assumes that some sort of childhood problem stymied your ability to be enthusiastic about your career and that is the issue. For some people, it may be. But the way she describes it – “chronic negativity,” “everything looks pointless,” “genuine despair” – sounds a whole lot like a person with clinical depression. She does at least mention that it might be worth seeing a doctor, but the rest of her prescription – exercise, introspection, and “just do something” – may not be incredibly helpful if your issue is mental illness.

All told, this book does have its issues (most of them likely stemming from the fact that it is nearly thirty years old). But it’s also astonishingly useful. This book is everything Refuse to Choose! tried to be – at least a little authoritative, packed with examples, filled with actually useful and compelling exercises, and explaining not only a new idea but what to do with it. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s great for a very particular type of person. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: If you feel like you could do anything if only someone would tell you what you want to do, this book is for you.

Review: 30-Second Religion

Title: 30-Second Religion: The 50 Most Thought-Provoking Religious Beliefs, Each Explained in Half a Minute

Editor: Russell Re Manning

Genre: Religion

Trigger Warnings: None noticed

Back Cover:

Sikhism, Lutheranism, Islam, Judaism, and Spiritualism? Sure, you’ve certainly heard of them, but do you understand enough about these religious beliefs to quench your thirst for enlightenment or join a dinner party debate on the diversity of world religions?

30-Second Religion demystifies the key beliefs of the world’s major religions, denominations, and less widespread sects, and explains them to the general reader in half a minute, using nothing more than two pages, 300 words, and one picture. Whether you want to understand the key differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism or take in a brief overview of Buddhist philosophy, this book is the quickest way to walk the paths and recognize the key signposts of the world’s diverse and fascinating faiths. Travelling from Animism to Zoroastrianism, and including features on seven key religious texts, 30-Second Religion offers an engaging guide to 50 fascinating belief systems.

Review:

I want to preface this review by saying that I bought this book when my interests were slightly different. I still find religions fascinating and enjoy both learning about real-world religions and reading stories with rich fictional religions. However, my interest now is less general and academic and more about specific things about religion that I find neat (e.g. rituals). So I was already primed to like this book less than when I first bought it.

I do commend this book for the wide variety of religions it discusses. There were even some (like Shenism) that I had never heard of before. So if you’re looking for a general list of world religions to explore, the table of contents here would be a good resource.

You may notice that I said “the table of contents” and not “this book,” and there’s a reason for that. I’m not opposed to simplifying things for people with only a casual interest or who want to know about a religion not because they really care but because they met someone who practices it and don’t want to put their foot in their mouth or something. But this book simplifies things so far as to be practically useless. Let’s face it, there’s really no way to distill several millennia of religious writing, debate, and practice into a single paragraph without either ignoring the multiplicity of traditions or being so general as to say hardly anything. 30-Second Religion chose the incredibly general route. This is probably more fair to the religions being presented, but is definitely less helpful to the reader. There was also no real consistency of what information was covered. Some entries were about the religion’s founding and history with very little about beliefs, some purely theology, and some only about important people involved. It also does not even mention any of the current controversies around any of these religions (e.g. the Catholic child rape scandal, the Baptist Abuse of Faith crisis). If its goal is to make you dinner-party conversational like the back cover claims, these seem like glaring omissions.

To make matters worse, the highly-simplified information presented isn’t even always correct. Even judging only the sections I’m qualified to judge – the selection of Protestant Christian faiths presented – it’s full of inaccuracies. The book presents Calvinism as its own denomination/sect even though it’s really a set of “add-on” beliefs that are added in addition to other denominational beliefs. At one point it contrasts the Qur’an and the Bible by saying the Qur’an is believed to be the divine words of god and therefore perfect while the Bible is believed to be written by humans and therefore fallible – while if you know anything about Christians, you know there is a significant portion (possibly a majority) who believe the Bible is the divine and inerrant word of god. If entries for Christianity, the dominant religion in the places this book was marketed, are so full of errors, I can only imagine how many factual inaccuracies are to be found in entries for lesser-known religions.

This book also uses terms like “evangelical” and “cargo cult” without ever defining them, even in the glossary. The terms are used correctly, but the fact that it assumes a basic level of knowledge with the subject’s terminology demonstrates how despite its simplification, this book is not as accessible as it wants to be.

I’m really grasping at straws here, but I do give the book points for being pretty. Each entry’s facing page is a full-page collage of illustrations and photographs of important things to that religion, although some of the images included are strange (on the Christian Science entry, for example, they include a picture of the founder right next to the same picture with colors inverted). The cover has sparkly golden foil, the entries themselves are laid out nicely, and the paper is thick and glossy. And like I said earlier, the table of contents is useful because it’s a pretty comprehensive list of major world religions. But unfortunately, the content ranges from simplified-to-the-point-of-uselessness to just plain incorrect. I legitimately think you’d be better off just reading a Wikipedia article about whatever religion you want to learn. At least Wikipedia has links so you don’t have to Google so many things. It’s impossible to summarize any belief system in just thirty seconds, and if you really want to learn something, it’s best not to try.

Review: The Myth of Normal (DNF)

Title: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Author: Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté

Genre: Psychology/Health

Trigger Warnings: Chronic illness, terminal illness, pedophilia/childhood sexual abuse, rape, incest, domestic partner abuse, abandonment, war (mentions), cancer

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 25%

Back Cover:

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, The Myth Of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

Review:

I have read a LOT about trauma and its effects over the past few years (e.g. here, here, here, and here). This is a topic of personal interest for me, as well as one where, at this point, I feel fairly well-versed. From the emphasis on the back cover, I thought this was going to be about the many small and not-so-small traumas we face every day because of how society is set up (the “toxic society” promised in the subtitle) and how those affect our health. I expected something more along the lines of Sedated than anything.

I’m going to refer to author in the singular here because even though the book tries to emphasize that Daniel also had a large hand in the writing of the book, the concepts and ideas are obviously all Gabor’s.

The main premise of The Myth of Normal is that modern medicine’s fundamental assumptions about human health are wrong – that the mind and body are not and can never be truly separated, and that trying to treat illness as separate from the person’s life circumstances is short-sighted and misses essential underlying factors that affect a disease’s onset, progression, and treatment. All of which I do agree with. However, for all its emphasis on challenging fundamental assumptions, the book itself refuses to challenge or even acknowledge the fundamental assumptions that drive it:

1. There exists a state of perfect health which is possible for humans to achieve;
2. Achieving this state is both possible and essential for every human being;
3. Therefore, the ultimate goal (or one of the ultimate goals) of every human being should be to work to achieve this state.

To be fair, Gabor is a doctor and he likely doesn’t realize he is making those three assumptions in this book. These are underlying assumptions of our society as well – just look at any health, diet, or weight loss claim. Once you know to look for them, you’ll see these assumptions everywhere. So I don’t really blame Gabor for writing from that perspective. It’s great that he’s on board with the growing body of evidence about trauma’s effects on physical health. I think he just didn’t go far enough in the “challenging society’s assumptions about health” aspect.

There is a lot of research presented here, so I do give him credit for that. It’s not really anything I didn’t get from The Body Keeps the Score (Gabor even quotes Bessel van der Kolk several times), but if you’re not familiar with the concepts and the research, I think it would be a good introduction. Where I had issues was all the parts that weren’t research. The anecdotes and stories were incredibly sensationalized. It was always someone with a horrible and fatal disease going from being bed-bound to living a pretty much normal life due to healing from horrific childhood sexual abuse. Nobody was healing from schoolyard bullying or their parents’ divorce and as a result seeing improvement in their back pain or having fewer headaches. It was always people with something dramatic and incurable who healed their trauma and therefore fixed their disease.

As someone who is disabled/chronically ill, I’ve heard all of the “one weird trick to heal your incurable disease! Doctors are amazed!” stuff. And if you strip away the scientific trappings, what Gabor is presenting sounds exactly like the “natural cure without drugs!” bullshit you find in weird alternative health circles. Take out the fact that Gabor is a doctor and cut the parts where he cites research and you could replace “trauma healing” with “kale,” “yoga,” “unpronounceable exotic herb,” or whatever else in every single anecdote and it would sound exactly as outlandish. Gabor is pretty much promising that healing your trauma will fix anything and everything wrong with you, up to and including incurable and fatal conditions.

I don’t want to deny the fact that there is research. Unlike most “cures” in this non-medical modes of healing space, the trauma-health connection actually has a lot of promising research around it. Which I think is why I take such issue with the way it’s presented here. Could healing your trauma help your physical health? Absolutely, and there’s research to back that up. Will healing your trauma cure your cancer? I can’t bring myself to believe that, no matter how fancy the credentials of the doctor telling me the story.

This book may have fallen prey to the whims of marketing, ignoring scientific nuance in favor of something that will sell – and sensationalism sells. Or maybe Gabor completely believes in trauma healing as a miracle cure. I don’t know. But regardless, I don’t recommend this one. The concepts and research are good, but you can get the same information in other books (I recommend The Body Keeps the Score and It Didn’t Start With You) with many fewer issues. The effects of trauma on physical health are worth learning about. But not from this book.

Review: Running on Empty

Title: Running On Empty: Overcoming Your Childhood Emotional Neglect

Author: Dr. Jonice Webb

Genre: Self-Help/Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, child neglect, mental illness, suicide, suicidal ideation, self-harm (mentions), moralizing about food, diet talk, emotional abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

Do you sometimes feel as if you’re just going through the motions in life? Are you good at looking and acting as if you’re fine, but secretly feel lonely and disconnected? If so, you are not alone. The world is full of people who have an innate sense that something is wrong with them. Who feel they live on the outside looking in, but have no explanation for their feeling and no way to put it into words. If you are one of these people, you may fear that you are not connected enough to your spouse, or that you don’t feel pleasure or love as profoundly as others do. You may drink too much, or eat too much, or risk too much, in an attempt to feel something good. Running on Empty will give you clear strategies for how to heal, and offers a special chapter for mental health professionals. In the world of human suffering, this book is an Emotional Smart Bomb meant to eradicate the effects of an invisible enemy.

Review:

Before we get into the actual review, I have to add some context. This review is probably going to come off significantly more scathing than I intend, and I’m hoping by providing some context to my comments and the book itself, you’ll have a better idea of where I’m coming from.

First, I’ve been working on the whole “dealing with childhood trauma” thing for eight years, which includes reading a ton of internet articles and many books on related topics. So I’m already incredibly familiar with not just the basics of mental health, childhood trauma, PTSD, and trauma treatment and recovery concepts, but also things like generational trauma, the physical effects of emotional trauma, and interpersonal and capitalistic factors affecting mental health. I would even go as far as to say that there are very few layperson-accessible concepts around mental health and trauma that I haven’t read at least a little about (although if you want to introduce me to something new I’d love to hear about it). So I’m already going into this with a strong foundation.

Second, this book was published in 2012. I didn’t start my journey to work on my childhood trauma and mental health until 2014-2015, so I’m not very familiar with what was going on in that space before then. For all I know, this book was groundbreaking and revolutionary at time of publication. However, I’m reading it a full decade after it was published with eight years of mental health and trauma reading behind me. All of which strongly affected my opinions.

Now let’s do a review.

The whole idea of the first part of this book seems to be built on convincing readers that emotional neglect is an actual thing. It has a “quiz” asking if you’ve experienced any of these symptoms that are common with emotional neglect – although I noticed that many of the questions were phrased so broadly that almost anyone could legitimately say yes. Then there were examples. So, so many examples. Part one discussed the different types of emotionally neglectful parents, and each type was illustrated with examples, often multiple examples.

The book states at the beginning that it’s written for both patients and clinicians. (It clearly also has a third audience of parents who don’t want to emotionally neglect their children, who get a whole chapter in part three but don’t get mentioned as an explicit audience for the book.) I have to assume that clinicians are familiar with many of the concepts involved, and I imagine that patients who seek this book out have some level of awareness about the problems going on. The excessive examples got annoying fast.

This book also implicitly contradicts itself almost constantly. It’s a “do as I say, not as I do” situation – the stated opinions are completely opposite to the tone and attitude of the writing. Part one states to not blame your parents, but then spends the rest of the section teaching you what specifically to blame your parents for. It kept claiming that you don’t have to be perfect to be a good parent, but everything else about the book seemed to say that if you aren’t a perfect parent your child is doomed to loneliness and suicidal ideation.

It keeps telling you that just because you were emotionally neglected in childhood doesn’t mean you’re irreparably broken, but it spends so much time talking about all the different ways emotional neglect damages you that it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that you are irrevocably doomed. It may claim you can heal the damage, but the ratio of “discussion of the damage” to “here’s how to heal yourself” is significantly skewed towards descriptions of the mental anguish and shattered relationships that result from emotional neglect. It spends so much time describing the problem that the solutions feel inadequate, like offering a band-aid for a bullet wound.

The few solutions provided seem better described as “paltry advice” – inspiring but vague, more concepts than action plan, and incredibly meager compared to the sheer volume of pain the book describes. Most of the ideas are things I recognize from the concept of re-parenting yourself. And all of the practical advice is worksheets. Literally all of it. Jonice has some worksheets available on her website and that’s the one tool you get to help overcome a childhood of emotional neglect. I actually was curious about the enjoyment worksheet and went and looked it up, and it turns out they’re not even worksheets. They’re tracking forms. The enjoyment one has boxes for every day of the year and asks you to count how many times you prioritized enjoyment each day. That’s it.

This book really feels like it was trying to introduce a brand new concept into the public consciousness. And perhaps in 2012, it was. But I was aware of the concept of emotional neglect long before I heard of this book (so I guess if that was the goal, it did its job) and found this book-length definition depressing and unhelpful. Emotional neglect is a great concept for both personal and clinical work to identify and describe a particular type of childhood trauma. But while the idea is good and useful, the book itself is not.

Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning

Title: The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Author: Peter Zeihan

Genre: Current Issues

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), climate crisis, existential dread, war, genocide (mentions), animal death (mentions), natural disasters

Back Cover:

2019 was the last great year for the world economy.

For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days – even hours – of when you decided you wanted it.

America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going.

Globe-spanning supply chains are only possible with the protection of the U.S. Navy. The American dollar underpins internationalized energy and financial markets. Complex, innovative industries were created to satisfy American consumers. American security policy forced warring nations to lay down their arms. Billions of people have been fed and educated as the American-led trade system spread across the globe.

All of this was artificial. All this was temporary. All this is ending.

In The End of the World is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging.The list of countries that make it all work is smaller than you think. Which means everything about our interconnected world – from how we manufacture products, to how we grow food, to how we keep the lights on, to how we shuttle stuff about, to how we pay for it all – is about to change.

In customary Zeihan fashion, rather than yelling fire in the geoeconomic theatre, he narrates the accumulation of matchsticks, gasoline, and dynamite in the hands of the oblivious audience, suggesting we might want to call the fire department.

A world ending. A world beginning. Zeihan brings readers along for an illuminating (and a bit terrifying) ride packed with foresight, wit, and his trademark irreverence.

Review:

I don’t remember if I knew what this book was actually about when I put it on hold at the library. The library had a multi-month wait, and if I ever knew, by the time it was my turn for it I’d forgotten. I thought it was going to be about climate change.

The tone of this review is very calm, but after reading this, I am anything but. (Please picture me curled up in the corner and sobbing “It was supposed to be about climate change, it was supposed to be about climate change …”)

There is so much in this book. Economics, demographics, geography, politics, geopolitics, oil, shipping, transportation, global trade, energy, agriculture, manufacturing, military, industrialization, colonization … this is a book about how the world is ending and climate change doesn’t even come in until 89% of the way through. The world we know is in the process of ending and climate change isn’t even a major factor.

I knew the situation was dire in a vague, faraway sense. The only real threat I was aware of was climate change – where scientists can never seem to agree on how long it will take to kill us – and a vague concept of “unsustainability.” This book made it real. I didn’t realize how badly, how thoroughly, and how imminently the world is screwed. Climate change barely comes into play in this examination. There is so much more poised to go wrong – and it’s already started.

There are no solutions here. Peter gives us no advice and no ways forward. He just describes what’s happening, explains how we got here, and predicts what might happen and why. Many of the disasters in progress have already passed the point of repairability. The collapse of our current way of life is real, possible, and imminent. And yet the book is also vaguely hopeful, strangely. Our current way of life and many individuals won’t survive the upheavals, but humanity as a whole probably will. And if Peter’s predictions are right, the worst of it will be over in less than 30 years.

This book gave me a better understanding of economics, geopolitics, and the global supply chain. It shattered everything I thought I understood about clean energy. It made me rethink the future – both the world’s and my own. I’m terrified, but I simultaneously feel a little better about the end of the world. If I can’t do anything about it, at least I know what’s coming.

I don’t know where I, or the world, can go from here. What do you do when you learn the apocalypse has already started? I don’t think there are answers, and even if there are they sure aren’t in this book. Reading this won’t help you escape the coming apocalypse, but at least you’ll feel better informed along the way.

Review: The Righteous Mind

Title: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Author: Jonathan Haidt

Genre: Philosophy/Current Issues

Trigger Warnings: Racism (mentions)

Back Cover:

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain.

He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

Review:

This book was recommended to me somewhere. Potentially it was mentioned in another book I read. I don’t really remember. I don’t really know what got me to check it out from the library, either. It may have just been random.

But regardless of why, I’m so glad I did. This is a spectacular, remarkable, eye-opening book. From the back cover, it sounds like a book about politics. It is, in a way, but it’s about so much more than that.

In less than four hundred pages, Jonathan covers a lot of ground. He covers the general idea of morality – how we conceptualize morality consciously and subconsciously, how human “moral minds” work, probable reasons why we evolved to have a moral sense in the first place, why different cultures end up with different moral values, how morality affects society. By far the most revolutionary concept of the book, though, is the moral foundations. He identifies six different foundational values that systems of morality can be built upon, and explains how placing varying levels of importance on each foundation can lead to different systems of morality. And relating to the political bent of the back cover, he goes over in detail how American liberals, American conservatives, and American libertarians give different priority to the six foundations, leading to each group thinking the other is not just politically stupid but morally corrupt.

It was fascinating, and it explains so much. I don’t like books about politics, and I enjoyed this because it’s not about politics – it’s about the foundations behind political beliefs. The fundamental disconnect between liberals and conservatives causing America’s extreme partisan politics just got thoroughly explained to me in this book. And honestly, I think I can see the other side’s point.

We humans have a tendency to get immediately and defensively furious when someone criticizes a group we belong to. And no matter where you are on the political spectrum, there will be something in this book that will get you irrationally angry. When that happens, stop reading and take some time to cool down if you need to. Because if you can get past that anger and really listen to what this book is saying, you’ll learn a ton. So many things will make so much more sense. You may even start to look at people with different views in a new light.

I hesitate to say that one book could single-handedly fix partisan divides. But if everyone read this book and understood the ideas, it might help make some major progress towards less partisan politics. If nothing else, it will help on an individual level.

I learned so much just reading this straight through without stopping to think or take notes. But this is the kind of book that I want to reread and reflect on. The emphasis is on politics, but the moral foundations can explain so much of the world. I feel like my eyes have been opened. I legit think I need to rethink my political positions … and moral thoughts … and lots of things.

Review: Tired as F*ck

Title: Tired as F*ck: Burnout at the Hands of Diet, Self-Help, and Hustle Culture

Author: Caroline Dooner

Genre: Memoir

Trigger Warnings: Dieting, fatphobia, medical content, eating disorder, medical trauma, body shaming, alcoholism (mentions), chronic illness

Back Cover:

Blending memoir and blistering social observations, the author of The F*ck It Diet looks back at her desperate attempts to heal her hunger, anxiety, and imperfections through extreme diets, culty self-help methods, and melodramatic bargains with the universe.

Offering a frank and funny critique of the cultural forces that are driving us mad, Caroline Dooner examines how treating ourselves like never ending self-improvement projects is a recipe for burnout. We have become unknowingly complicit in perpetuating our own exhaustion because we are treating ourselves like machines. But even phones need to f*cking recharge.

Caroline takes a good hard look at the dark side of self-help, and explains how she eventually used a radical period of rest to push back against cultural expectations and reclaim some peace.

Tired As F*ck empowers us to say no to the things that exhaust us. It inspires us to carve out time to slow down, feel okay about doing less, and honor our humanity.

This is not a self-help book, it’s a cautionary tale. It’s an honest look at the dogma of wellness and spiritual self-improvement culture and revels in the healing power of rest and letting shit go.

Review:

I picked this up because, like How to Keep House While Drowning, the title called to me. I am, indeed, tired as f*ck. I also was very intrigued by the “radical period of rest” mentioned on the back cover. I wanted to do something like that, and I hoped this book would tell me how to go about that. My enthusiasm was only increased as the book started out by saying that Caroline set aside two whole years for a radical period of rest. I was very excited, because that is exactly what I need. Just tell me how to do it, Caroline!

My library categorized Tired as F*ck as self-improvement and psychology, which I think is how I got the idea that there was going to be some how-to in this book. This book is, in essence, mostly memoir. There are some parts at the end where Caroline talks about her two years of rest experiment, but most of it is how she ended up at that point. It covers her medical problems, the medical fatphobia that led her to believe all her problems were from not losing enough weight, her attempt to obtain perfect health through diet and weight loss, her struggles with food, her undiagnosed eating disorder, and her career stress as an aspiring actress. A good 80% of the book is just covering all the stressors that led up to her needing those two years of rest.

And I completely get it. Extreme diets are stressful and make life harder at the best of times. Caroline somehow managed to go raw vegan for something like six months, which sounds like absolute hell the way she describes it. There is quite a bit on the stresses of becoming an actress and her attempts to force herself to become one despite disliking a lot of the process, but most of the story focuses on her weight and diet struggles. At some points it started to feel like a whole book advertising her first book, The F*ck-It Diet. (And it comes with a VERY severe trigger warning for eating disorders and dieting.) The self-help and hustle culture that the subtitle hints at takes a back seat to her struggles with diet culture.

It was an inspiring book, overall. Though most of it was just about her eating disorder struggles and did sometimes feel like it belonged in The F*ck-It Diet instead, towards the end when she actually started talking about her rest was good. I think if I’d gone in expecting a memoir, I would have appreciated it more. It was still very good, but I had expected (and wanted) a little more how-to. Because I also am tired as fuck and need to take some extended rest.