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A review by pinkmooon
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
4.0
Edit: On 2nd reading, it's among the best self-help books I've read, and it's something I'll likely dip into many many times over the next few years. I'll leave up whatever my original review was trying to say as an example of dramatic irony. Poor young Jack didn't know he would one day eat Too Many Kebabs.
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I kind of want to rate the book lower, but it has a lot of practical value, at least in the first half of the book, and there isn't enough to complain about in this book specifically that isn't a judgment instead on the overall gripes I have with books designed as 'best-selling' nonfiction or self-help. Clear writes as if any hint of style in his prose would literally strip him of his name. Despite his mentioning one of his significant accomplishments being that he's a good writer, I could see the workshopped and formulaic pattern in every chapter of the most standard and banal kind of Ted-Talk Malcolm Gladwell self-help, which gets on my nerves so much because I can also kind of respect it. It is functional, if nothing else. Not praiseworthy, but not actively irritating. There's little harm in reiterating to oneself the most basic advice possible to make life a bit better.
Isn't that the fundamental reason Jordan Peterson is popular, because he tells untidy young men like me to clean our rooms, and we say 'wow I actually didn't think of that because I don't respect the people who typically tell me to do that'? So there's nothing wrong with this book, its aims and how it goes about itself. What worries me is when someone like Clear might be praised for his insight, for 'rendering a complex subject digestible and easy to understand', when really he's making an already easy to understand subject easy to understand, but presented in a format people who think themselves clever place more faith in authority toward. But that's people. I'm no less guilty, of course.
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I kind of want to rate the book lower, but it has a lot of practical value, at least in the first half of the book, and there isn't enough to complain about in this book specifically that isn't a judgment instead on the overall gripes I have with books designed as 'best-selling' nonfiction or self-help. Clear writes as if any hint of style in his prose would literally strip him of his name. Despite his mentioning one of his significant accomplishments being that he's a good writer, I could see the workshopped and formulaic pattern in every chapter of the most standard and banal kind of Ted-Talk Malcolm Gladwell self-help, which gets on my nerves so much because I can also kind of respect it. It is functional, if nothing else. Not praiseworthy, but not actively irritating. There's little harm in reiterating to oneself the most basic advice possible to make life a bit better.
Isn't that the fundamental reason Jordan Peterson is popular, because he tells untidy young men like me to clean our rooms, and we say 'wow I actually didn't think of that because I don't respect the people who typically tell me to do that'? So there's nothing wrong with this book, its aims and how it goes about itself. What worries me is when someone like Clear might be praised for his insight, for 'rendering a complex subject digestible and easy to understand', when really he's making an already easy to understand subject easy to understand, but presented in a format people who think themselves clever place more faith in authority toward. But that's people. I'm no less guilty, of course.