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Tag: self-help

  • Review: My Year with Eleanor: A Memoir

    My Year with Eleanor: A Memoir
    My Year with Eleanor: A Memoir by Noelle Hancock

    The premise of this book is a little bit crazy, but I appreciated it in the end. The author lost her job during the 2008 crash and is flailing over what to do. She decides to live a year with Eleanor Roosevelt for inspiration, facing her fears all the time.

    She swims with sharks, does comedy stand-up, flies a plane, sky dives and a lot of other things.

    I rather liked the concept of facing one fear each day. Interspersed with quotes and Eleanor Roosevelt’s history, it makes for an interesting and dynamic book.

    The writing is easy and fun to read along to. (Must confess I skipped ahead on some pages – turns out that reading about certain aspects set my own fears fluttering.)

  • Review: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

    The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
    The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin
    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    I just finished reading this book. I did not think I was going to like it, and I’ve had it in my “to be read” queue for almost a year just because I could not muster up the interest in it – long live procrastination…

    But I’ve been feeling a bit down lately, so last night when I looked through my Kindle app for something to read this caught my eye. From the first couple of pages, I could tell this would be a book for me.

    It is all about how you have so many things you want to do that makes you happy, but they sometimes get viewed as insignificant and hidden behind the day-to-day activities instead of being a core part of them.

    The experiment of trying different things throughout the year and being the best person you can be to focus your own happiness (which in turn should make those around you happier) is told in an interesting way and I kept coming back to it to read a few pages. I think I bookmarked the whole January chapter…

    I love that she draws in other literature but relates it to her own life. The later chapters also make the book feel more relevant to me, as she is definitely not a super-human who have found the one right way, but lots of little things that work for her life.

    I will definitely try to apply some of the techniques Rubin mentions – first the January resolutions of going to bed earlier, just cleaning up for a minute and put things in their proper place… and then there is the closet…

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  • Review: French children don’t throw food

    Here’s the thing: I don’t have children. I have no immediate plans to have children (though my gynecologist was quick to point out that children can be unplanned) but this book really resonated with me.

    The book is French Children Don’t Throw Food, and to be perfectly honest – I got it for the title alone. It’s not a perfect manual on how to raise children (I would presume), but I found it funny, and interesting.

    At the same time, I recognize that some of those points that Pamela Druckerman noted in the beginning of her book – kids pulling their parents arm to get attention while the parents are having a conversation with other adults and kids not being able to play on their own but having to be activated by adults the whole time is something that annoys me from real life – so I could definitely see some learning points to bring along for when/if I have kids.

    With the caveat that my mother who is a trained pre-school teacher, and had plenty of child-rearing theories to back her up, had the comment after she had kids: Theory and practical application are two very different things, and kids don’t necessarily conform to the theories you’d like to use.

    But all in all, I found it a good read, and I’ve recommended it to several friends.