sacrebisous's reviews
12 reviews

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon

informative reflective fast-paced

4.5

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative by Austin Kleon

hopeful informative inspiring fast-paced

4.5

How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis

hopeful informative fast-paced

4.75

Quite honestly the best home-cleaning self-help book I've ever read. Gets right to the point and covers all your bases.

James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media by James Acaster

funny lighthearted medium-paced

3.25

Man I love James Acaster's style of storytelling comedy and this book does not disappoint. Kinda drags in parts, but I enjoyed it! The book is essentially one long joke (think his Repertoire specials, but book-length), so judge for yourself whether or not that appeals to you. 

The Abide Guide: Living Like Lebowski by Oliver Benjamin, Dwayne Eutsey

funny inspiring relaxing

The Big Lebowski is a movie I go to whenever I feel like I'm getting too uptight and need to mellow out, and this book has just about the exact same effect on me. I've never felt more relaxed and eager to plow through a book in one day like I do with this bad boy. Dudeism is quite the interesting religion/philosophy and takes a lot from Taoism (and Stoicism to a lesser extent). This guide asks the avid fan - what spiritual and philosophical lessons can we take from the timeless story of The Big Lebowski? In other words, What Would The Dude Do?

It's not gonna be for everyone. In fact, for most people, this will probably just seem like a lot of pointless quoting of the movie and in-jokes. Personally, I found it deeply inspiring and following the Dudeist way has made me much more chill and content with my life. At this point it makes watching the actual movie feel like a sermon - a much more enjoyable one than you'd get in church, lemme tell ya.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

Books that make the teenage nihilist let go of existential crisis induced suicidal ideation and learn to love life. This may not have been the best choice for me to read in middle school with no prior understanding of philosophical concepts, but damn was it life-changing based on what I COULD grasp. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Suicidal thoughts and Suicide

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

emotional funny reflective fast-paced

What really draws me into this book (other than Holden's narration style that really works with my ADHD brain) is the contrast between Holden's outward behavior and his inward thoughts and feelings on everything. I like that he has some shithead male teenager thoughts and observations as the big cynic he is, but otherwise is a pretty OK guy with how he chooses to interact with the world. Maybe I'm just projecting, but I feel like most people harbor at least some shitty, negative feelings and resentment towards others in their lives (to varying degrees obviously). 

We all believe we're Good People, so seeing Holden openly recording these feelings instead of letting them ephemerally drift through his mind makes us put up a mental block when reading what he thinks. We don't want to connect with him because it means admitting that we have the capacity to be unfairly judgemental and critical of others the way he does. It's like Holden just accepts this is how he feels on the inside and it feels threatening to us on a subconscious level.

I dunno. I'll defend Holden Caulfield until the day I die.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

challenging informative inspiring slow-paced

This is Tyoma from the future warning you that this book is filled with so much fluff - tons of anecdotes, repetitions, and more. You grab onto Newport's point right away but it's like he thinks he needs to spend like 100 pages continuing to convince you when you're ALREADY convinced. Like, let's be real. You probably already agree with everything he feels about technology use if you're picking up a book called "Digital Minimalism"!

That being said, here's a better way of getting this book's message:
1. Read some articles summarizing what Digital Minimalism is.   
2. Find the explainer of the 30-Day Digital Declutter in the book.
3. Do the 30-Day Digital Declutter.
4. Read the second half of the book.

There's good stuff in here but you could cut out most of this book and it'd be a much less tedious read.

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

dark funny medium-paced

• Loveable characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

I'm a Pahlahniuk head, okay? I've since sort of grown out of my enjoyment of his work from my hardcore teenage obsession, but even back then I found this a terribly difficult read. There's a lot of sex-related shock factor stuff in this book, and it permeates just about every page. Like, compared to his better works like Fight Club, this book feels like pure cynicism with no real underlying message. This book just describes things and nudges you every few minutes going "man, isn't this pretty fucked up?" A real "we live in a society" moment. 

Really cool read if you want to have a grimace burned into your face with every successive page. Yeah, just skip this one.

How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens

informative slow-paced

I'm a bit conflicted on this one, because while I do agree that this is a Pretty Essential introduction into personal knowledge management (PKM) and the Zettelkasten method in particular, I shrimply hate the way this book is written. It is extremely repetitive and just about every section includes some repetition of "regular note-taking sucks, but SMART NOTE-TAKING is perfect in every way!" The author spends way too much time trying to convince me of the method when what I'd prefer is for him to just explain how the Zettelkasten works in greater depth.

You're better off reading a summary of this bad boy because it's a pretty tedious book to get through. Also, you should supplement this with other Zettelkasten-related resources, because Ahrens gives a decent overview of the system but fails to explain how you can practically implement it and make sense of it for a non-academic essayist's use case.