Review: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

James Clear has taken an old topic - forming good habits, breaking bad ones - and breathed new life into it. He breaks everything down to its simplest components, hence the "atom" in Atomic Habits, but he keeps it interesting. The best parts were the strokes of powerful and inspiring observations, like this:

You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Wow, that hits home.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become . Again, this will come back to me every time I consider taking a dubious action.

This book will help you see how the seed of every single habit is really just a single, tiny decision. If you can control the tiniest of decisions, you will become the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.

This book was pure, pure inspiration!

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Review: Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you are like me, you read this book because you are striving for a deeper understanding of the roles of mTOR, IGF1, sirtuin pathways and the like, and how they impact longevity. This book will surely help with this goal, but it could have done so much more. It certainly had ample opportunity to keep the reader immersed in the science content, but the author derails himself continually with social policy proclamations.

Any person who picks up a book like this to read in their spare time — something so evidently NOT a beach read — does not need the author to talk about which governments do the best job and what the world’s most important issues ought to be, and what governments really need to do.

Readers of books like this seek the science. This book was a little short on science but rather long on virtue-signaling implications of the science. I think the readers of books like this are perfectly capable of extrapolating their very own ideas about the future and the potential outcomes and what should or should not be done.

I enjoyed Part 1 and Part 2. I found Part 3 unnecessary. I am not interested in being told how to think about this - I simply want to understand the science. Take out all the public policy and political admonishing, and take out all the USA trashing, and throw in another unit on the actual lab studies and I would have found this a far better read.

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Review: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I bought this book over a year ago and have finally read it. Anyone who can discuss the systems needed to define goals (not the same thing as to-do's) and identify all "next steps" has accomplished something remarkable. This book is well organized and oddly soothing to read.

All of the things that can overwhelm us on any given day are broken down into manageable pieces and explained at the same time. I felt like this was a meditation exercise (!)

I ordered some of the products(pdfs) which support the organization of the activities in one's life, so that everything gets "captured" and put into it proper place on an action list. The whole inventorying activity is cathartic and calming.

This takes the idea of working from lists and puts it on steroids. Mr. Allen treats organization and productivity like a topic in science and this goes a long way to creating that calm approach to ... Getting Things Done.

This is a book I will return to often.

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Review: The Time Traveler's Wife

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a whimsical and often sad story offering lots of tools for looking at relationships from a fresh perspective. This was my favorite thing about it.

I always find the mechanics of time travel tedious, preferring a linear path to all others. At times I was perplexed and a little impatient.

Some of the unexpected wonderings I had while reading this:

Are any two people, lovers or not, ever truly in the same place at the same time with life and all of its dramas?

Isn't it true that we are always (in our present moments) coping with our partner's history? Their childhood and what happened or did not happen? Aren't we thrust into their pasts by way of present dramas, anyway, and how is this different than time travel?

The book was a good read. It struggled a little under the weight of its most original construction. While not exactly my cup of tea, it offered a change of pace and it rearranged some of the furniture of relationships in my mind. Pretty neat.

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