One thing about Netgalley is that it really highlights trends in my reading - in particular, the fact that I read a lot of self-help books. Even more particularly, I like self-help books about how self-help books and positive psychology are the worst. Someday I will find one that asserts that self-help books are the worst because they rarely plumb ( Read more... )

I think Diana Athill must be a famous travel writer, because otherwise I’m not sure why else her youthful travel journal of her trip to Florence in 1948 would have been published. It’s not that it’s bad - in fact it’s rather charming in a gentle sort of way - but it is very much a travel journal: We did this and did this and saw a superb ceiling ( Read more... )

I finished Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, which fulfills my first challenge for the 2017 Reading Challenge! *pause for cheering and kazoos* This book has been on my TBR list since 2008, so I'm glad I finally read it, but I have mixed feelings about it as a book; it spends more time musing philosophically than I think any novel that is not Sophie's ( Read more... )

I found G. A. Bradshaw's Carnivore Minds a great disappointment. For a book that purports to be about the fact that carnivores of all kinds are not unthinking automatons but in fact have lively and variable personalities, there's very little about individual animal personality at all, and quite a bit of repetition of the fact that animal brains ( Read more... )

I found John Kim's The Angry Therapist: A No BS Guide to Finding and Living Your Own Truth super frustrating, possibly because I took the title too literally and believed that he was going to be angry about something. The growing trend toward giving patients medication without therapy? The high cost of mental health care? The fact that American ( Read more... )

After a string of subpar books, I was beginning to lose faith in Netgalley - is a title and a couple of short descriptive paragraphs truly enough information to make an informed reading decision? - but Joe Moran’s Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness restored it. The book is a melange of anecdotes from the lives of famous shy people (lots ( Read more... )

Lenore Newman’s Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey suffers from the same problem as Kelsey Osgood’s How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia: both books have theses that undermine their own existences. How to Disappear Completely is an eating disorder memoir that hypothesizes that eating disorder memoirs actually help ( Read more... )

I finished Debbie Corso's Stronger Than BPD: The Girl's Guide to Taking Control of Intense Emotions, Drama, and Chaos Using DBT, which I thought was very useful. I wanted to gain a greater understanding of how DBT works, and indeed, it gives a thorough, accessible, and entertainingly written introduction to that, so if you're looking for an ( Read more... )

I had high hopes for the hilarity of JP Sears How to Be Ultra Spiritual, because the cover on Netgalley amused me so much, but unfortunately the rest of the book was never as funny as the cover; I didn't laugh out loud once. Possibly I haven't read enough fatuous New Age-y self-help manuals for a satire of them to really speak to me ( Read more... )

I need to be pickier in the books I get from Netgalley; I've hit a whole string of duds in a row. The latest one is Debra A. Shattuck's Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers, which is both boring and unconvincing. How do you write a boring book about early women baseball players ( Read more... )