U-Turn:What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You were Living the Wrong Life?
U-Turn:What if You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You were Living the Wrong Life? - Bruce Grierson
The epically long title of this books reflects the equally massive amount of information in this book. A hair under 300 pages it manages to pack in a dense, and truly fascinating, amount of information. A u-turner is someone who makes a radical change in their life – often swinging 180 degrees to a full polar opposite of their former beliefs. Many of the u-turners switch on strong stances as religion – becoming Christian on a walk, leaving Evangelicalism to become an atheist writer. Some swing wildly on politics – one day an ardent Republican, the next ...
Helping Me Help Myself
Helping Me Help Myself - Beth Lisick
When I cracked open Helping Me Help Myself my first thought was “Oh, this is EXACTLY the same as Jennifer Niesslein’s Practically Perfect in Every Way.” While the premise is identical – woman decides to get her act together via self-help books and write a book about it – the voices of the two are very different. Equally as amusing and Niesslein, Lisick takes a crack at getting her finances together, clean up her house, exercise and stop her son’s tantrums. Unlike Niesslein, Lisick and her husband have a much more precarious existence. She is mouthier, louder, ruder and much more likely to take ...
Practically Perfect in Every Way
Practically Perfect in Every Way – Jennifer Niesslein
In high school I had a friend who decided to try some experiments out on himself that he had read about. He simultaneously ate only brown bread and apple juice and slept 2 hours at night and another hour in the afternoon. According to his science journal, this was all the body needed. After a week of this regime, he hallucinated his thigh muscle falling off and decided to call it quits. Niesselein’s book could serve as an equally strong warning on being your own personal guinea pig.
Deciding that she was happy, but not “happy enough”, Niesslein created a list of areas...
A Perfect Mess
A Perfect Mess - Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman
Abrahamson and Freedman attempt to dispel the myth that mess is time-consuming and a sign of a lazy person. Mess, they argue, is in fact conducive to creativity, time-saving and a sign of a healthy mind. Using examples of everything from the ease and ability a messier person has in finding files readily at hand on their desk – as compared to someone who has spent hours filing everything away, to brilliant scientists like Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin after forgetting a petri dish on his desk over vacation. Mess, disorder, chaos all create random connections in the mind, fostering creativity and creating visual...
Paint it Black: A Guide to Gothic Homemaking – Voltaire
Paint it Black: A Guide to Gothic Homemaking - Voltaire
The Glue Gun: If you have never used a glue gun before, then I am honored to introduce to you a tool that is going to make you Gother than you could ever imagine. Why, you ask? Well, I have been using glue guns for nearly twenty years now and I have never met a glue-gun user (including myself) who hasn’t at some point squirted a heaping dollop of blazing, molten glue into the palm of his or her hand. And let me tell you that as Goth as you think you are, you have never known the unfathomable depths of excruciating anguish and despair than will be revealed when you’ve done this… Suffice to ...
In Praise of Slowness: How the Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed
Carl Honorè
Honorè starts this book by recounting how he came to be interested in writing about time and the Slow movement. While waiting for a plane, he read an article in the paper about a series of new one minute bedtime stories. He gleefully thought to himself how he could whip through story time with his son in less than ten minutes and get to watching the news. Fortunately, he came to his senses and realized how skewed his perspective on time was.
Those of you with a co-op in your area have probably heard of the slow food movement – the idea that food is better and better for you when it is cooked from scratch, rather than...