self help – Life Off Headset

Books Read – December 2024

Last book wrap up for 2024. I have a “Media Consumption Favorites 2024” post coming, but figured I should also recap that last month of reading as well.

First, though, and interesting book-ish post – this article by John Kenney from the Washington Post “It’s a New Year. let’s resolve to rethink what ‘self-help’ means.” The article, coming at the start of a new year, a time for resolutions and bids for improvement, ponders the place of self-help literature in our lives.

John Kenney makes a case that the words that help us grow aren’t just the words in books in the self-help section.
“That is not to say,” he writes, “we don’t need guides, mentors, a bit of direction now and again. I’m just not convinced a book needs the label ‘self-help’ to do that. I find “The Catcher in the Rye” a superb self-help book. It helped me learn empathy and tenderness. Any book by Alice McDermott is a self-help book, helping me to see deeply into the interior life of a strange. Poet Mary Oliver is quite good at self-help.”

And so on Kenney writes, listing examples of how art – books, music, movies, etc. – is sometimes the best form of “self-help” because they help us realize the “self” part of “self-help”.

This article struck me because it paralleled something that I was kicking around in my head regarding podcasts. I was scrolling though my podcast feed a few weeks ago. Feeling like my life was particularly scattered, I was looking for a podcast that might help me put order in my life. I am certainly a “mood” listener of podcasts – I turn to podcasts when I’m looking for information or inspiration or motivation. This is probably why I subscribe to a lot of productivity podcasts – podcasts populated by people who seem to have things figured out – how to wring the most out of life, how to perfectly organize, declutter, schedule, parent, work, manage, and life hack one’s way to a frictionless fulfilling existence.

“This is what I need,” I thought, “inspiration to optimize my life so that I can get it back on track again.”

So I would put one of the productivity podcasts on, hoping to get tips and ideas for how to gather my life back together into some semblance of order. But after a few minutes, I would have to turn the podcast off. Turns out listening to people talk about how they’ve optimized their existence did not inspire me to do the same myself; it merely stressed me out and made me feel like I just wasn’t doing enough. (Ironic that being told “you are enough” makes me feel like I’m not quite enough…) I’m not disparaging self-help/self-improvement podcasts – I think Happier is full of fun and useful tips – I wouldn’t subscribe to so many if I didn’t find value in the advice and words. But for some reason, when life was at it’s most harried, these podcasts weren’t quite right for me.

“But these podcasters are giving me the key to a better life!” I thought to myself.

What I realized, though, is when I’m feeling restless and unmoored and unfocussed, the podcasts that help me are the ones that dig a little deeper than time blocking or outsourcing. It’s the podcasts that contemplate what it’s like to be human that help me through. Podcasts like On Being and House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. I think what I’m learning is that I can’t life hack my way through life if I don’t know why I’m hacking my way through life. Podcasts like On Being remind me that we have capacities for kindness and thoughtfulness, and for doing good and strong things. They remind me that life is full of humans trying to figure things out, and that I’m one of those humans. I love a good list of life hacks and strategies, but listening to podcasts which roll out the advice when I’m feeling fragile and scattered is putting the cart before the horse. Productivity podcasts speak to the “human doing”, but before I can “do” I must “be.” I need to first remind myself that I’m a vulnerable capable, oh so lucky to be alive human being.

Anyhow on to books I read in December 2024:

You Were Made to Be Mine by Julie Anne Long – This is book 5 of Long’s Palace of Rogues series, a series of historical romance novels set in a boarding house in London called the Grand Palace on the Thames. In this book, former spy Christian Hawkes is sent to retrieve a runway fiancée. Said fiancée, Aurelie Capet has fled to London where she is posing as a genteel widow. I didn’t like this one as much as book 4 (After Dark with the Duke – I really loved that book) – I tend to like my romance novels to lean more towards character driven than plot driven, and this one had a lot of intrigue- still, there was much to recommend it – good writing, hero and heroines who weren’t complete nincompoops and had chemistry in spades, a colourful cast of side characters, and some really angsty swoony dialogue. Julie Anne Long is kind of where it is for me right now in terms of writing tension filled scenes between two people who are attracted to each other. The big caveat for me, though (and spoiler alert here) is that I don’t love it when books use sexual assault as a plot point. Not because I don’t want to acknowledge that truly awful things can and do happen to women (and men), but more that sometimes I think sexual assault is used as a convenient way to inflict trauma and cause misunderstanding, and then I feel as if everything gets resolved in an unbelievingly pat way, particularly in romance novels.

How to Tame a Wild Rogue by Julie Anne Long – book 6 of the Palace of Rogues series. I’ve been on Julie Anne Long binge lately, clearly. This book is about Lorcan St. Leger, a privateer who is stuck in London during a storm. He runs into Daphne Worth trying to climb out a window to escape her employer, and they end up pretending to be married in order to takes the last suite of rooms at the Grand Palace on the Thames. Boom. Forced proximity, fake marriage. All the tropes. Character heavy and just enough plot to keep things moving, but not so much plot that I have to keep track of things. I liked this book so much, for all the reasons I enjoy Julie Anne Long’s books. They are so well written – funny and touching and smart – the characters are really good people, no one is making choices that make me want to throw the book across the room, and I’m always rooting for them to figure out that they love each other. Tension in spades. This one is up there with After Dark with the Duke as my favorite in this series.

Counsel Culture by Kim Hye-Jin, translated by Jamie Chang – This was a book, translated from Korean about a therapist and television personality whose career goes up in flames when she makes a scripted negative comment that leads to devastating consequences. I picked this up while browing the library shelves, looking for a thin book to read. This is kind of a slight book, following the main character as she floats through life in the lonely aftermath of everything. The book was a little meandering for my tastes. It was fine, but lacked momentum. There is, however, an excellent plotline involving feral cats. I also find it intriguing that most of the reviews of this book on goodreads are not in English.

Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan – I read this book while in Taiwan because when I travel I like to read books of the places I’m going. This novel by Taiwanese American writer Shawna Yang Ryan follows the Tsai family beginning with the birth of the narrator on the day of the 2/28 massacre of 1947, follows her family as they fled Taipei following her father’s arrest, and details how her father finally returns to them and the aftermath of his return. The story then takes the narrator (who I didn’t realize didn’t have a name until I started writing this.) to Berkeley California where she settles with her husband, but where they cannot escape the reaches of the KMT government. This book felt very personal to me. The 2/28 massacres were an uprising where the people of Taiwan revolted against the occupying KMT government from China. The uprising was violently squashed and martial law was declared. This is the Taiwan that my parents grew up in; my father’s brother was jailed for five year by the KMT. He was fifteen when they arrested him. On our trip to Taiwan, I asked my mother what it was like living under Martial Law and she said, “You had to keep living life. What else could you do? But you never knew when someone was going to be arrested. You’d go to a party and later on find out that the police came for your friends because they were at that party.” Which is all to say, I don’t think I can be objective about this book because it’s the story of my family – Of growing up in an occupied country. Of immigrating across the ocean for better opportunities. Of raising kids in a country so different from the one you grew up in. Of working tirelessly for Taiwan’s independence. Still, I think this is a well written and compelling book. It reads partially like a memoir, partially like a political thriller. If you are interested in Taiwanese history, I would recommend this book.

On My Proverbial Night Stand:
We’ll Prescribe You A Cat by Syou Ishida- I saw this book in Taiwan and the premise made me laugh. It’s charming so far

The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers – My big (700 pg.) read this winter. It’s moving very quickly, though.

Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman- Not the book I thought i was going to be. I want it to be more crossword puzzle history and less memoir.

The Phoenix Bride by Natasha Siegel- Book set in 17th century London about a grieving widow and the Jewish physician trying to help her. I picked up from the library solely based on the beautiful cover.

What the Dead Know: Learning about Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher – listening to this on audio. It’s riveting. I just try not to listen to it at night.

and with the kids:
Bob by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass- reading it out loud together. Charming and mysterious story about (no so) imaginary friends.

Books Read July – September 2022

I feel like I got a lot of good reading in this summer, though September itself was not a big reading month because of work. I’m now filling my book queue with some books that I hope will be page turners, so I’ll be encouraged to read even when I’m having long days at work. But these past few months:

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes, read by Daveed Diggs. This sci-fi novella centers around a group of water-breathing people who were descended from pregnant African slaves thrown overboard from slave ships as they crossed the Atlantic. It’s inspired by a song produced by the group Clipping for an episode of This American Life called We are the Future, which in the aftermath of George Floyd explored the concept of Afrofuturism. The Deep is a beautiful, raw, and evocative story which centers on Yetu whose role in her community is to hold the collective memory of her people since it is too painful for them all to remember themselves. She eventually leaves her people in order not to carry this burden. The way the novel’s water dwellers have created a world that is very different from the world we inhabit on land, I thought was a really thought provoking lens through which to think about things like race, gender, and collective history. Also Daveed Diggs of Hamilton! Apparently I will listen to any audiobook narrated by Hamilton cast members

Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss – This is a non-fiction book about the YA fiction genre of the 80s and 90s -Sweet Valley High, Babysitter’s Club, The Sunfire Series – pretty much the books I grew up reading. This book was a pure nostalgia trip! There were also some great interviews and details with the people who wrote these books and also an interview with an artist who did some of the cover art. That inside peek at how formulaic these books were was fascinating to me. The book does end somewhat abruptly, but before then it brought back so many memories of some of my formative reading years. Also, I definitely made notes of some books that seemed really interesting that I never read when I was a tween and which I might be interested in picking up now.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell – Novel that imagines the life of Shakespeare’s wife and children during the plague of 1596. I loved so much about this book – the elegant precision of the writing, the details of life in the 1600s, the way the characters were so fully drawn, the relationships, the Shakespeare references (even though he is never mentioned by name and indeed was a somewhat shadowing figure on the sidelines throughout), the exquisite sadness of the book. The ending – the beautiful, cathartic ending. I’m not a book crier, but this book brought a lump to my throat.

The Love of My Life by Rosie Walsh, read by Imogen Church and Theo Soloman – Domestic suspense novel of the “Woman in Peril” genre. This book was not what I expected, and in a good way. Without giving away anything, I’ll just say that I really liked how this book explored how love can be so complicated and so simple at the same time.

The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson – Larson recounts the first year of Winston Churchill’s term as Prime Minister of Great Britain and the beginning of WWII. This book looks at that time not only through the political and military lens, but also through the domestic and personal one. The book reminds me of the Virginia Woolf quote, “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” Larson shows that war and drawing room feelings are both equally important – even against the backdrop of war, people still continued to live their lives, fall in love, have affairs, worry about their children. Even as history is being made, lives continued to be lived. I also felt there was a certain similarity between Londoners living through the Blitz and us living through COVID – the unrelenting tension of living life in a constant state of caution.

The Great Green Room by Amy Cary – I heard this biography recommended on the podcast What Should I Read Next. This is a book about Margaret Wise Brown, who wrote, among other things, the classic Good Night, Moon. I thought the book itself rather methodical and workman like in its prose, but the details of Brown’s life were interesting, particularly her ideas of what would appeal to children – insights that were I think notable given that she didn’t have children. Or maybe it’s because she didn’t have children that she was able to have such a unique perspective on what would interest them in a book.

Well Met by Jen DeLuca – This past summer, I read this blog post that broke down Goodread’s list of most popular romance novels of the past three years. Anyhow, I thought it was a hilarious analysis of the titles included in the list – most of which I haven’t read because I tend to read historical romance, and most of the titles were contemporary romances. But only three titles on the Goodread list made her “Loved” list. One of them was Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore, which I also loved, so I figured the other two books would be worth checking out. This was one of them. It did not disappoint. Well Met is set against the backdrop of a Renaissance Festival – so already it is sprinkled with my catnip. Anyhow this is a charming and sweet and funny book. I don’t always love first person narrative – which is probably why I don’t read a whole lot of contemporary romance – but the heroine in this book had such a hilarious personality that I didn’t mind much.

News of the World by Paulette Jiles – Spare yet perfectly pitched novella about Captain Jefferson Kydd, an elderly widower who makes a living going from town to town reading the news to people in the American Frontier in post Civil War America. He takes on the task of bringing a girl, Johanna, back to her relatives. Johanna’s parents had been killed by Kiowa raiders and she has been living with the Kiowa for the past four years and life with them was the only thing she has known. The journey Kydd and Johanna take is dangerous and without comfort, but along the way Kydd and Johanna, form a special bond even as they struggle to understand each other. Jile’s prose is so very good. The end left me a little teary eyed. One of my favorite passages:
“No, my dear, he said. He put his hand over hers, once again placed the fork correctly, and once again lifted it to her mouth. Then he sat on his own side of the wagon and saw her struggling with the fork, the knife, the stupidity of it, the unknown reasons that human being would approach food in this manner, reasons incomprehensible, inexplicable, for which they had not common language. She tried again, and then turned and threw the fork into a box stall.”

How to Keep House while Drowning by K.C. Davis – My house feels like a constant state of mess, so of course this book was appealing. Davis, who is a licensed profession therapist, approaches keeping house from a mental health standpoint and there were so may wise and gentle ideas in her book. My two main takeaways:
– “Care tasks are morally neutral.” I really needed to hear this because often I think of my inability to keep things clean and tidy as a failure of some sort. And, I admit, I feel like I pass that feeling on to my kids. We are raised on the “Cleanliness next to Godliness” adage, but Davis reminds us:
“You can be a fully functioning, fully successful, happy, kind, generous adult and never be good at cleaning.” Taking away the feeling of guilt and shame associated with keeping a clean house helps me focus on the why I want to keep my house clean and how to achieve that goal, rather than wallowing in the parts of cleaning I find hard.
-Think about what it takes to make things functional, and start with that as your baseline. She also re-frames cleaning as “re-setting”. In thinking about how to reset my space every evening so that future me can function in the morning proves a really helpful framework for when things are overwhelming. So, for example, the dining room floor might not get swept, but the kitchen counter is clean so that I can make breakfast in the morning.
“Cleaning is endless. Resetting space has a goal.”
Even aside from the deep thoughts about cleaning and how to organize your life, Davis also has some really practical tips and strategies that I like. I found this book really helpful.

Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile, read by Brandi Carlile – When the Husband and I were first dating, he would listen to Brandi Carlile’s self titled debut album every single morning. We called it breakfast music. I thought Carlile’s memoir was a really great read/listen- she has a straightforward easy style of writing as one would expect from her music, and I really enjoyed hearing about her life. I was also really struck by how humble and hard-working she was. She doesn’t hide the hustle nor her good luck. An added bonus of the audiobook is that between chapters, she performs songs that she talks about in the previous chapter – it adds so much depths to hear Carlile sing a song after finding out what it meant to her.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – I usually really like Ishiguro, but this book took me a while to get into and I still don’t think I fully understand it. Ishiguro’s rather detached and naive prose style is probably quite suited for a story told through the eyes of an Klara, an Artificial Friend – an AI creation who goes to live with Josie, a very sick girl. Like most Ishiguro novels, the narrator doesn’t quite understand the whole picture and I actually found it frustrating in parts. I understand the narrative device as a means of exploring the idea of humanity, but the book just didn’t mesh for me like a lot of Ishiguro’s other books.

When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill – I picked up this book because it is set in Montreal and I like to read books set in my destination city when I’m travelling. This book was certainly well written – smart and satirical with characters all slightly off kilter. Set in late 19th century Montreal, it tells the story of two girls, Marie Antoinette and Sadie, who come from different backgrounds but both live in a wealthy section of Montreal. They become friends but then are separated after a tragic incident. They both grow up to tackle ideas of feminism in very different ways. This book really skewers men and the way they take women for granted and underestimate them. I thought the book very clever, but overall the style was a little heavy handed and stilted and I didn’t love it. A notable quote, though:
“The truth was, she had always liked being alone. Women never got to be alone. That was too much of a luxury. Women always had someone to take care of. She had o one to take care of. She got to really do what she pleased. She left her clothes on the side of the bed. There was no one who would yell at her for leaving them.”

Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall – This was the other book on NGS’s list of “loved” romance novels from the Goodreads list. I, too, loved this book. It was funny and swoony and heartfelt. It tells the story of screw up tangentially famous Luc O’Donnell who needs a fake boyfriend to save his career so his friend sets him up with the unimpeachable and slightly uptight barrister Oliver Blackwood. Slightly uptight and unimpeachable heroes are kind of my romance novel catnip so I enjoyed that aspect very much. But even aside from that this book balanced humour and sincere emotion perfectly. Such a good read.

Lovely War by Julie Berry narrated by Jayne Entwistle, Allan Corduner, Julie Berry, Dion Graham, Fiona Hardingham, John Lee, Nathanial Parker, Steve West – This novel had quite a clever framework – two intertwined love stories set against the back drop of WWI, told by Aphrodite. Yes, that Aphrodite. The Goddess of Love has been caught in an affair with the God of War and she must argue her case. Other also gods drop in to help tell the stories of love in time of war. The premise of the novel is quite clever, but the heart of the story lies in the journeys of hope and resilience the pair of lovers take – I thought it a really touching and engaging story. The audio version had different actors voice the different gods’ contribution, and I really enjoyed how each person brought a unique voice to each god.