Books, Professional Development

Book 830: 10% Happier – Dan Harris

Book cover of "10% Happier" with Amazon Affiliate linkI honestly had zero expectations going into this book. During the pandemic my employer provided us free access to the 10% Happier app which I took advantage of and have used sporadically (really need to get better at that). I enjoyed both Harris and Joseph Goldstein’s insights on mediation in the various getting started sessions and was curios if there was more out there.

I vaguely knew Harris had written a book, but it was never an OMG I have to read this type book, but when it randomly came across my screen one day I requested it from the library and saved it for a vacation read.

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Book 778: The Mosquito – Timothy C. Winegard

Book cover of "The Mosquito" with Amazon Affiliate linkWell if I wasn’t already so jaded from having lived through the last nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d be terrified mosquitos were coming to exterminate all of us!

I accepted this galley back in April when the pandemic was just really kicking off.* And then I promptly forgot about it for a few months, followed by avoiding it for even longer because it just didn’t feel right to read it with the way the world was going. I finally decided I needed to clear my galley backlog and this was the oldest so here we are. This particular quote caught me with all the rumors flying about where COVID-19 came from:

Zoonosis rates have tripled in the last ten years, and account for 75% of all human diseases. The goal of health researchers is to identify potential ‘spillover’ germs before they make a zoonotic jump to humans. (Ch. 18)

After reading this book, I feel like wherever coranavirus came from it was like “hey Mosquito, hold my beer,” and then it seriously underwhelmed when you look at the stats in this book!

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Book 664: The Cost-Benefit Revolution – Cass R. Sunstein

Cover art of The Cost-Benefit Revolution with affiliate link to Amazon.comWhat. A. Doozie. Seriously, why do I decide to read the densest books EVER at the holidays and the beginning of the year? Really, I should’ve read this last year when I requested it from the publisher after seeing an advertisement for it on the train, but I kept pushing it off until now.* I requested this because having read Nudge, I assumed all his works were super approachable, but that wasn’t the case for this incredibly dense book.

Honestly, this compares more to last year’s kick-off read, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. I mean just reading that title makes me exhausted again (it was 700+ very dense pages). This year’s kick-off, though roughly 1/3 the size, was just as dense and basically tried to look at how to make government regulation more even and effective by removing politics and opinion and replacing it with cost-benefit analysis. It’s no wonder it took me roughly three weeks to actually get through this one.

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Book 597: Let Go of Emotional Overeating and Love Your Food – Arlene Englander

Toward the middle of last year I started accepting fewer and fewer unsolicited review requests, but periodically a few come up from publicists or publishers I’ve worked with previously and this was one of them.

As a larger guy, (are guys plus sized?) I’ve always been curious about over eating and overeaters anonymous, but there are so many other books to read that I never looked into them. So when the publicist reached out to me about this back in July 2017, I figured why not.* That being said, I should be ashamed I didn’t get around to reading it until early 2018 though.

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Book 536: The Self-Love Experiment – Shannon Kaiser

I received an unsolicited copy of this from the publisher and aside from the title making me giggle continuously (seriously it took about 200 pages before I stopped giggling), I figured everyone needs to be more “kind, compassionate, and accepting of [ourselves] so I thought I’d give it a go.* Unfortunately, it wasn’t for me.

It’s not even that the book was poorly written or that the subject matter is a bit too hokey for me it’s not. I’ve ready hokier things. I think for me it was the repetitive monotony of Kaiser’s vague references to things that she chose not to discuss (i.e. her former drug problems?). Why allude to them constantly and then not talk about them? Maybe she discusses it in another book, but for the number of times she mentioned it I kept waiting for that story and it never materialized.

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