101 things to do before you Diet by Mimi Spencer.

The full title of this book is 101 things to do before you diet because looking great isn’t just about losing weight.

I picked up this book expecting a list of things that would deemphasize weight loss. You know what I mean. The title says that looking great isn’t about losing weight. So naturally, I thought the book would not be about losing weight and about loving the skin you are in. I was wrong. The book was absolutely about losing weight in everyway. It wasn’t about feeling good in your own skin, it was about the path of least resistance towards looking, feeling, and eventually being thinner.

Quite a few of the 101 things were just style tips to distract you from hating yourself. They were also awfully specific. Tips like blow dry your hair, wear heels, and wear opaque black panty hose were on the list. These are not tips that people need when they are told to find their own style and love the unique and wonderful person they are. These are the tips that are told when someone thinks that there is a uniform right and wrong for everyone. The right, of course, being skinny, and the wrong, of course, being happy for the person you are without changing a single thing.

The whole chapter two was about how to eat. I skipped a lot of this section. The author talked blood sugar, hormone levels, the importance of breakfast, and eating healthy food. For a self proclaimed not-diet book, this section was all about how to change eating habits to specifically lose weight. There was nothing about eating great to feel great, it was about eating great to lose weight. This chapter made this book a diet book. The only reason they couldn’t call this a diet book proper was because this chapter was extremely ill informed. She off handedly mentioned that one could try the raw food diet as a tip. You would need supplements, maybe, the author doesn’t know.  After reading that, I felt like I could take these tips with a grain of salt.

There was another chapter on exercise. I felt like I had to skim this section as well. She didn’t talk about exercise for fun, happiness, and new life experiences. She broke exercise down into calories. Truthfully, people that think about exercise in a healthy way do not do that. Sad joggers think about calories, not happy ones. This chapter also made me think that this not-diet book was actually quite thinly veiled.

The author is very obviously a magazine contributor. She obsesses about weight, beauty, and glamour in her own life and these insecurities are evident on every page of this book. She skims across useless tips and over the surface of deep topics at the same depth as, well, a magazine would. I’d say to get equally good content, you should pick up an issue of Cosmopoltion or Redbook. At least there would be pictures.

Marry him: The case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb

This nonfiction is about sucking up your pride and lowering your standards about men or you will end up alone, sad, and regretful like the author. Lori Gottlieb offers herself up like she is the biggest nightmare you could imagine. She is the 41 year old single mother  (who in every other respect, has it all). The book picks apart her dating life with the kind of concise pessimistic eye that could only be had in hindsight. She begs the reader not to make her mistakes. She goes in through detail about what those mistakes are, how easy it is to make those mistakes, and how many of her friends have already made them.

I found the content repetitive and the book too long. I think I might have sufficed with the original Atlantic Article that this book sprung from.

It probably didn’t help that I have heard all of this before from my mom. All throughout my life she has said things like, “ [imagine a filipino accent] If you do not find someone to marry, you will be all alone”. And, my mom trying to tell me to act before my ship has sailed, “You better watch out because if you wait too long, the ship will leave you and you will be all alone”. The book went on and on and on. I relived the 20 years my mom preached that any man that does not hit you is worth marrying. The book felt that long. It also didn’t help that a lot of the story was about her friends as well. It felt gossipy, and at the very least, not very scientifically rigorous.

My biggest criticism for the book is that she never really defines her audience. She assumes every woman has the resources to live and work alone and raise a child alone. While she says that she is struggling financially, the fact that she is able to do it at all indicates that she has done well for herself.  Not every woman risks being overeducated, and at the risk for never settling for a man because they forgot they needed one. Gottlieb doesn’t realize it, but she is only speaking to a very well off class of women. She is speaking to the class of women that have the capability of making a choice. In fact the other side of the coin is far more scary. There are lots and lots of women out there that are in physically and emotionally abusive relationships that don’t have the social and economic resources to get out of them. Some women aren’t educated enough to know that they deserve better. She isn’t talking to them, she is talking to well off women like herself.

But it is implied. She tells us to throw a few more dates to the shorter and sweeter men of the world instead of spending that type looking for unicorns. I just wished that she offset some of the time she was telling us that we are far more unattractive than we think we are to explain that there are some universal dealbreakers that we shouldn’t settle for.

She didn’t say however, that you shouldn’t wait for someone you love. She just says that love might be different than you think it is. She likens (what she thinks is) western love to the practice of arranged marriages. Love is something that grows when two people have committed to eachother. That is something she learned from her Indian friend.

I don’t regret that I read this book. I found it convincing, and frankly, just because of the part of my life I am in, the message was something I needed to hear. I just know I should take it with a grain of salt. The author has legitimate regrets that she overassumes that we will have. I am a pragmatic person and I have never had the fairy tale fantasies that she assumes every woman has. As a matter of fact, I think the life she lives doesn’t sound so bad at all. She is a glamorous well educated female author with a son living in the big city. The whole basis of her book is based on a fear, and maybe, just maybe, its not really something to be all that afraid of. 

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

I just read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. The book chronicles the now infamous Chris McCandless, the young man that died during a romantic extended camping trip in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992.  His life has been much considered as there have been numerous essays about his life and motivations.

Here is the plot, briefly. Chris graduates Emory college with honors and defies his parents by not continuing onto Law School.  He instead decides to travel across the United States, taking on the moniker Alex Supertramp. His transition to independence from society is a slow one, as he spends a few years taking on odd jobs under the radar and finding shelter when it comes. His ideals (and ego) are fueled by the fictional loners penned by Jack London and Henry David Thoreau. He eventually hitchhikes up to Alaska to live off the wilderness with embarrassing low provisions. He dies after an impressive 112 days.

The book is written so carefully, so respectfully. The author frequently mentions other writers and outdoorsman who bash McCandless’s inexperience and arrogance who imply that such a lack of respect for nature deserves death. Krakauer goes completely the other way asking us to remember what it was like to be young and idealistic, when we were ready to die for our beliefs. Well, this young man did.

Chris dislikes his parents. The reasoning is abstract and I’m sure the actual relationship is more complicated than the book could even describe. What is for sure is that Chris didn’t have a solid reason to not like his parents. He grew up privileged with loving parents who gave him everything he ever needed and encouraged positive behaviors and life paths. It would be nice if there were a cut and dry reason for Chris to set out on his own, but there wasn’t. If it were me and I had the inkling to do a life adventure like that, I just wouldn’t be able to take myself seriously. That is definitely something Chris could do, and that was take himself seriously.

It is sad that he died. What makes it worse is that he was ready to go back into society with renewed vigor when he realized that he couldn’t. He planned out this romantic trip because he had a problem with his world view that made relationships unbearable. He planned a trip so he could get away from it all for while. And it worked. That’s the crazy part. It worked.  He felt more grateful for the things he had, he missed his family, and he was ready to enjoy being a productive member of society.

My only qualm with the book is that the author spends a little too much time talking about other explorers that met the same fate. He takes it too far  when the author includes his own climbing adventure to the list of other great blunders. That unnecessary portion made the exactly 200 page book a little irksome, like he was rushing to meet his page quota.  It doesn’t help that the few lines of text that the author managed to scrape up from McCandless’s post cards and diaries are repeated multiple times in the book, sometimes to exhaustion. I realize this was necessary to ground the timeline in a circular plot, but after reading the same post card for the 4^th time, it felt like just poor writing.

I definitely recommend this book. In a world where life is so cut and dry, where actions and consequences rule our every decision and foresight trumps every plan, it is amazing to read about someone who rejects the worldview of the ever shrinking room. Sure he dies. I bet that gives us the affirmation we need to stay trapped in our comfort zone. 

Bossy Pants by Tina Fey

I wish I could have done a 24 hour rental with this book. The writing is large with perhaps 1.5" spacing. The pages are so thick and stiff that the paperbacks may last as long as the hardcovers. As you can see in the image, this 275 page book looks as thick as a copy of Moby Dick. (insert penis joke here). All of these things contributed to the psychological effect of a really-quick-read.

I loved it. Learning about her backstory helped bridge some of the gap between her 30 rock writing and her SNL jokes. It was especially funny seeing some of the same themes come up. The flat footed overeater she portrays in 30 rock was a tragic projection of one her jerk ex boyfriends. I felt her pain, I really did.

My biggest qualm, however, is too salient to ignore. I just wish she knew what she was writing about before she started writing. The book is hilarious, I give you that, but I think it would have been more powerful if she chose which story to tell. A whole book could have been written about her childhood, her rise to fame, and even how she handles being a successful woman today. Having all of that fascinating material glazed over in the book just made it a shallow read.

The lack of message was also evident in the pacing. I was sucked into her backstory for the first half, then sent into a sporadic blogpost style opinion essay about her random thoughts for the second. I was especially annoyed by her should-I-or-shouldn't-I essay about having a second child. It came off as a panicked journal entry and should have ended on the cutting room floor.

But its not often that great books are wonderful books, and this was a lovely and entertaining read. I mean, if I am going to laugh aloud in crowded coffee shops, then I should at least give the same impression of pleasure to you. Go read this book, you'll have fun.

Read the New York Times book review HERE.

One Simple Idea by Stephen Key

I picked up One Simple Idea by Stephen Key because it was recommended to me by Tim Ferriss in The 4 Hour Work Week. I immediately didn't like it because the preface indicated that the author was prompted to write the book after the success that he gained after Tim Ferriss took his class. I suppose there are some people that really make a difference in this world.

Stephen Key's philosophy is that one can become rich, not by making a product, but by thinking of it then selling it. The bulk of the work is getting a company to buy it. He makes his money off of royalties and licensing.

This book made me want to do something. I wanted to go to the mall and watch people buy things, chat up store clerks and figure out what people actually want to buy. It made me want to be an inventor. I wanted to start a design company and cold call companies.

This book is equal parts encouraging and resourceful. It builds you up, telling you that anyone can do this, and then gives you the tools. The only downside is that the tools are a real bummer. Key doesn't lie, its a lot of hard work to play with the big boys and market to large companies. To be inspired you had to shift through 150 pages of procedure on the best way to protect your ideas and what items to put in your negotiation clauses. It wasn't what I bargained for. However, I was convinced at the end that it only took 150 pages of knowledge to start my new dream of being an inventor.

Overall I think this book had a rather high rate of return. I read it in a few days and in return I was empowered with entrepreneurial spirit. People on Amazon seem to think so too, so far it has been getting 100% 5 star reviews.

Women Who Love too Much by Robin Norwood

Today we are introducing an inspirational product suggestion. Women Who Love too Much is a book by Robin Norwood. Use the following  to determine if this product could be a meaningful contribution to your self help journey.

What it's about
This non-fiction is a self help by exposition. The story is driven by the tales of many women who have somehow contributed to their own demise by pursuing and falling for toxic men. The stories are dramatic, but not extraordinary. The author presents them in a way that exposes relationship follies that we make in our own, healthy relationships. We are able to make the conclusions by ourselves, but she also creates a take-away checklist at the end, giving us a few cardinal rules of relationships.

Why it inspires
Women often blame men for their crappy lives. Norwood's book tells us that perhaps it is our own toxicity that is causing our crappy lives. She does it meaningfully and gently, allowing everyone to take away a positive message. It is not just a guide on how to break up a toxic relationship, it could also inspire growth in a healthy relationship by allowing us to recognize our toxic behaviors

Who might be interested
Women in relationships. All women in relationships, especially those that use their relationships like drugs. You don't need to want the change to benefit from this book.

I found this to be an excellent read myself.

Interested in this book? Buy it online here


This is not a sponsored advertisement.

Blink by Malcom Gladwell

This nonfiction is structured as a series of anecdotes. Each anecdote is about how some snap decisions are magically and inexplicably right and how we rely on them to make the right decisions. For instance, he tells the story of a psychologist that can tell if a married couple will still be together in 15 years from a first impression. He also highlights an anecdote about how a few police officers incorrectly profiled a black man and shot him dead within 5 seconds of meeting him. His point is oblique. The book is entertaining because it frames multiple entertaining stories for us, but it is weak for the same reason. If he really knew what he was saying, he would have told us what he meant opposed to circling his idea with 200 pages of examples. He probably would have only needed one conclusion rather than the three disguised as concluding chapters and an afterward.

The author has a heart of gold, and his optimism shines through. He is telling us that our instincts are powerful and we should find out how to harness them. The anecdotes are simple examples of amazing people that have been able to use their instinct and powers of first impression like magic tricks, and also amazing people who are overconfident in their abilities to mind read. I didn't like how he told the story, but I liked what he meant. He is telling us to trust ourselves.

Who should read it.

• People who are fans of Malcom Gladwell. He is really creating a genre. 
• People who are fans of the New Yorker
• People who are fascinated with amazing people. There is a bit of hero worship with the people in the anecdotes in this book.
• People who think that there is something more than hard core facts and rational when it comes to decision making -- this book will re-enforce your beliefs
• Those left-brain people who discount thier feelings when making decisions -- this book will challenge your beliefs

Are you interested in reading this book? Buy it online here.

4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss lives an awesome life. In this book he explains how we too can change our entire lives by rejecting the common path and forging our own by joining the "new rich". He inspires goals, and gives rudimentary business advice and suggestions.

Although his techniques are unorthodox, it is fun to imagine a life where we aren't stuck in a box, being forced to work until a miracle age when we can stop. You too can travel the world on all the money you need by starting a business that makes money for you. It sounds plausible, and if anything, it can convince you to do something you may never have thought of doing before.

Leadership and Self Deception

Leadership and self deception

Salary.com recommended this book as one of the 13 top business books that could change my life. I almost immediately bought it for 8 dollars from the Barnes and Nobles NookBook store. I laughed when the book described itself as "straightforward". How astute.

It wasn't a great read, persay. The charactors weren't very fleshed out and I had a strange feeling that the reactions the charactors were having were what the writers wanted the readers to be having. The writing sounded  a lot like this:

"Important sentence"

"the charactor thought about that for a moment"

However, the concepts did stick with me. I found the box idea intriguing. I immediately was able to apply the box to people I know now. A person being in a box is an analogy for someone who can't see the bigger picture. Perhaps someone's ego is hurt, or they are being corrected for something unjustly. There must be a box in play, either the other persons or my own. Interesting stuff. It was a gentle analogy that could be used as charactor correction in an office.

My only qualm is that this story about a box isn't really what I thought I was getting into. I thought it was about deciving yourself of your original intentions, say in choosing a career. Oh well. At least now I have the feeling that I can rise above interoffice politics.

The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build, or manage a business by Martha Stewart

I am absolutely not a Martha-hater. I love her, and I see the value of homemaking and entertaining. Still, I was not happy with this book. As most people playing with the idea with entrepreneurship, I want more than anything a close friend to propell me forward towards this task. Martha is not that person. She tells us in the first chapter that she, among her entreprenural minded friends, is the naysayer. That... that just isn't want I wanted. This book was not inspiring, nor did it really have a lot of new information.

The book is organized into "10 essentials" although I could not recall what even one of those essentials was. I remember something about having a "big idea". She presents these essentials by telling stories about other start ups that reinforce her values, namely quality, hard work, doing your homework, and maintaining a pristine reputation. Man, she is the anti-Tim ferriss.

Another thing I disliked was how very small business it was. Martha always refers to the reader of the book as a her and a she, and always indicates that the business in mind was something like a nail salon or a flower shop. Although these life style businesses are the salt of the earth when it comes to women's businesses, it means nothing to the more tech minded female entrepreneur. It really doesn't matter what part of town I put my shop in the age of the global marketplace, Martha.

I have a feeling Martha would hate the likes of me. I am into taking shortcuts, making mistakes, and learning my lesson the hard way to make it into this world. I come from nothing, for goodness sake. Martha makes it sound like only someone with class and background can start a company, let alone make it in this world.