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Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles by Beth Pickens My rating: 3 of 5 stars "Here is my thesis, and it will not be the last time that I tell you this: You are going to die. I will, too. We have to make choices about time because we have the nite gift of one existence. You should make your art." This book is written for artists. Even though the author does an excellent job defining what an artist, I couldn't decide if I was one or not (which maybe means I am not), but I decided to put that aside and just enjoy her solid advice. "The more you give time and resources to your art, the more you’ll understand paid employment as something that supports your art and life. We get this backward, thinking that we are on the planet to work and earn money. Let’s ip it—we earn a living to pay for our lives." The book is divided into different sections that cover different areas of worry: time, work, asking, money, f...

Happy Habits: 50 Science-Backed Rituals to Adopt (or Stop) to Boost Health and Happiness by Karen Salmansohn My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a cute book that's a super fast read and is full of scientific studies that highlight specific habits that would help you be happier. Here's one of my favorite ones: "Don’t want to take time to bake? Take a whiff at your local bakery! Many studies report that basking in the aroma of bread can put you in a positive mindset. In particular, the Journal of Social Psychology reported that shoppers were more likely to tell passersby that they dropped belongings if the shoppers were standing near a bakery smelling of freshly baked bread!" The whole book is full of little gems like this. with gratitude to netgalley and Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed Press for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. View all my reviews

Love Poems for the Office by John Kenney My rating: 0 of 5 stars I love this "Love Poems for..." series so much! If you have worked in an office, I recommend this one wholeheartedly, I laughed and laughed and laughed as I listened to it. Absolutely joyful. View all my reviews

How to Figure Out What to Do with Your Life by Jennifer Turliuk My rating: 0 of 5 stars I am most definitely not the target audience for this book and really should have done more of my due diligence on the author before I requested it. Even reading the introduction would have been enough to see that the author is personally interested in a start-up/VC culture and even though she often says the book is meant to be used for any kind of career journey, as a person who lives and works in Silicon Valley, there's a lot of the jargon and mentality of that culture in this book. Which I certainly am exposed to plenty and didn't really need more of. While I liked the idea of the framework the author puts on the process of figuring out the next steps for your career, so much of this book is just not viable for you unless you're in your twenties or single. Or at least not viable if you have responsibilities like kids and a mortgage and cannot leave ...

The Anxiety and Depression Workbook: Simple, Effective CBT Techniques to Manage Moods and Feel Better Now by Michael A. Tompkins My rating: 4 of 5 stars "The skills in this workbook will increase the flexibility of your emotional system and, in the process, build your tolerance to emotions such as anxiety and depression. Learning that you can tolerate your anxious or depressed feelings is how you recover from the uncomfortable feelings that are limiting your life." This is a fantastic and practical book if you suffer from anxiety or depression. The book is full of specific techniques you can use to move through different ways in which you're emotionally inflexible as the authors frame it. Once you get clear on your values and set goals, the book is divided into different sections to help you build flexible attention, thinking, action, and tolerance. There's also a section on gratitude and self-compassion. "Ultimately, your reco...

Dear Child by Romy Hausmann My rating: 4 of 5 stars What a crazy ride this book was! The blurb said it was a mix between Room and Gone Girl. I absolutely hated Gone Girl with a passion and Room made me super sad so I wasn't sure if this one was for me but then I needed something fast and good and the reviews were so high that I decided I should give it a chance. I didn't stop reading it until I finished. The audio narration was excellent and the whole time I knew there was something messed up but I just couldn't put my finger on it so I kept going, waiting for things to unravel. In the end, this was way better, for me, than Gone Girl though the Room-like parts did make me very sad but because it was in and out of that part of the story, it didn't feel the same deep sadness Room felt like for me. If you like psychological thrillers and weren't triggered by the content of Room, you will like this one. View all my review...

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby My rating: 3 of 5 stars 3.5 stars. I had read that this book was fantastic so even though the blurb didn't sound like my type of book, I grabbed it anyway. In the end, I am glad I read it but I do think it wasn't my type of book. The pacing of the story is interesting because there's so much action but also so much description so it felt both fast and slow. I liked the different characters and how complex they each were in their own ways. I liked how it didn't feel stereotypical. The whole time I was reading it, I thought it would make an excellent movie. View all my reviews

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book was on so many of the lists I've seen in the last few weeks that I felt like I had to read it. It started out really fun but I started to get mixed up pretty quickly and because I was listening on audio and I was only able to listen in bits and pieces throughout the week, I lost track of the story and the characters quicker than I would have liked. I still finished it but I'm afraid I didn't give it its due. I plan to read the next one on paper or listen to it in one sitting. View all my reviews

Mother May I by Joshilyn Jackson My rating: 3 of 5 stars I am usually a big fan of Jackson's novels. I find the pacing, the character development and the plot intriguing and engaging, so I was really looking forward to this one. And while I did read it all pretty quickly, this wouldn't be at the top of my Jackson novels. It's almost as if it's two books. The first one is the plight of a mother whose baby is kidnapped and she's doing what she needs to do to get her baby back and then the second book is the backstory of the kidnapper and the event that led her to it. Either story, fully fleshed out might have been interesting but together it felt disjointed. There are also several trigger warnings that go with this story, so please do look up those before you read it. I am not usually easily triggered but because the second part of the story felt so disjointed for me, I didn't see it coming. Even with all that, I still read this...

Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting by Lisa Genova My rating: 5 of 5 stars "If we want to remember something, above all else, we need to notice what is going on. Noticing requires two things: perception (seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling) and attention." When I first picked up this book, I thought it would be slow-moving as most of the non-fictions are for me, so I geared myself up to "slog" through it. I couldn't have been more wrong. From the first page onward, I was completely hooked. I read the whole book in one sitting and underlined passage after passage. I also told my colleagues about this book and quoted passages from it, shared ideas from it and would not stop talking about the endless ways in which the content fascinated me. "What we remember about the past is also influenced by how we feel in the present. Our opinions and emotional state now color what we remember from what happened last...

The Lowering Days: A Novel by Gregory Brown My rating: 5 of 5 stars What a gift of a book this was. There are so many things that I loved about this book but at the very top of my list is the exquisite writing. There are so many sentences in this book that stopped me in my track and made me rewind the audio to listen again. It's truly exquisite writing. This is the story of a small town in Maine along the Penobscot River. The town is adjacent to where the Penobscot Nation is and the town's mill is harming their land. When the mill is burned to the ground on the eve of its reopening, it causes ripple effects across the town. Most of the book is told from David Almerin Ames' perspective as when he's old and looking back to this time in his life. There is a wide range of issues covered in the book: identity, family, marriage, racism, war (Vietnam) and what it means to be man. This is a quiet, slow-moving book. Even though a lot does ...

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides My rating: 1 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler My rating: 4 of 5 stars testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see how this will work.testing to see ...

The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler My rating: 4 of 5 stars testing to see how this will work. View all my reviews

The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews