Hi there, here comes the list of books that I’ve read at from the beginning of the year till now. I’m trying to post in this new format. 🙂 Hope this seems fine as I don’t have much information to share.
1. The Secret of Positive Thinking – Many good encouraging words but like many books, it was interesting at first but not when read further. It gets boring especially when it list too many points form like a summary. Okay but not a book you would want to keep because there is nothing in detail.
My rating: 2/5
Would I recommend?: Maybe not.
2. Laziness Does Not Exist – It talks about the social stigma that we all have been brought up with: where the society ‘brainwashed’ and guilt-trip us to tie our self-worth to productivity. Even when you needed rest due to illness, doing nothing is seen as being lazy, and therefore you being a worthless person. This kind of mindset ignores the signals from the body telling us we could be suffering from burnout from overdoing things non-stop without rest. There is a reason why we feel unmotivated at times because our bodies and minds are screaming for some peace and quiet.
The author called it the Laziness Lie:
1. Your worth is based on your productivity
2. You cannot trust your own feelings and limits
3. There is always more than you could be doing
Cyberloafing is a term to describe when people distract themselves from stress and exhaustion by browsing social media or shopping online. Research/study found that slacking can help you be creative and reflective. It us a normal part of life as we need idle time to remain clearheaded and healthy. This is the same effect as to how we need bathroom and tea breaks. The brain will always find a way to take breaks when overworked, even if the only method left is staring off into space.
Expressive writing is all about writing out all your troubles/emotions or anything non-stop for 20mins. And then throw the paper away. I didn’t know I actually did this already in my teenage days to my diary. I used to write them out and then tear and throw them sometime later because I want to let go of my troubles. It did work for releasing my emotions. But it was a waste of the fanciful paper that I wrote them on. 😅
Our attention span is limited. We cannot stay focus on watching a video for more than 6mins, and 20mins on a task at work. It was nothing to do with willpower or laziness, but due to how the human brain fundamentally works.
Don’t be too quick to dismiss someone as being lazy but instead be curious to understand the reasons for why they acted the way they do. Even if it seems self-defeating or pointless, it makes sense for the person’s life. Exercise compassion as well to unlearn the prejudices and biases that were ingrained in us.
One last point I wanted to mentioned is that I was shocked to see the words ze and zir in the book because they don’t look like English to me. It was actually pronouns for non-binary persons! I wasn’t expecting this while reading but I guess it’s a thing now in recent published books. Oh well…
Takeaway from this book: Don’t let your job be the center of your life. Have some hobbies you enjoy doing.
My rating: 3/5
Would I recommend?: You can try but I do find it long winded.
3. Self-Love – It contains over 100 quotes but many repetitive points seen again and again that it gets boring. While it does seem a little motivating, there’s nothing new for me to learn about either.
My rating: 2/5
Would I recommend?: Not recommended.
4. Ask Me About My Uterus – I’m pretty sad to say that I was misled by the title of this book, thinking that it would be educational about the female reproductive organ but nope. It’s more like an autobiography of the author but it’s not in timeline order. I find her writing to be very messy, jumping from one topic to the other in the same chapter with no focus at all. Each chapter doesn’t even have a title too! The real deal starts at chapter 6 where she finally talked more about endometriosis. But still, subsequently I didn’t get to learn more about the condition at all as she continued to talk about her uninteresting life story that bore me to death. It’s bad writing to me if you don’t finish talking about the scene at once but added too many unnecessary thoughts, past incidents and other cases unrelated to what happened for the scene you were at earlier on. I have to skip the chapters because forcing myself to read them when they’re irrelevant is kinda like a suicide. It’s so much like an-internal-dialogue-with-herself book. In the end, it seemed like she still has no idea what’s wrong with her body for the pain that she is going through. Which is leaving me hanging in midair as a reader. 🙄 The only thing good is that she has a great vocabulary of words as compared to other authors. But the flow of writing and the focus is more important to get the reader engaged. It’s the worst autobiography book I’ve read thus far. I mean even if I were to review this based on autobiography genre it’s still not well written to me, as I’ve mentioned it was too messy to read. I’ve no idea why it had good praises but I guess I might have different liking compared to most American readers? It’s puzzling, but I’m just stating my honest opinion here.
My rating: 1/5
Would I recommend?: Not recommended.
Kamie's Wave✨ 
