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hello and welcome back to the bliss bean let's talk about books baby my reading this
year has been very on and off i'm either binge reading books at a rate of one book per day
or i am letting my kindle sit on a shelf and gather dust for weeks there is no in between
my goodreads goal was to read 30 books in 2021 and so far i have read 15 so i think i'm doing pretty
well in this video i'm going to tell you about the highs and the lows of this experience and rate
every single book that i've read so far this year and the category that we're starting with
is fiction because there are only two books in this category i do not read enough fiction the
first book is the midnight library by matt haig so this was the winner in the fiction category
in the 2020 goodreads choice awards basically the concept of this book is that there exists
this library somewhere where every single book is an alternate way that your life could have gone
had you made different choices when you pull a book from the shelf you're transported into that
alternate world at the age that you currently are so i am 20 years old right now let's say i wanted
to find the book where i decided to stick with my childhood dream of being an astronomer so i would
open the book and bam i get to experience what life would be like as a 20 year old
in college studying physics or astronomy i don't even know what that career path is i would say it
can be a pretty heavy read emotionally but it is kind of quick and light in that there's not a lot
of characters or storylines to keep track of and i don't think it's very long either but the message
is very powerful though i feel like maybe part of the reason why it won in the 2020 awards is
because that was a year when everyone was feeling very uncertain and wondering did i make the right
decisions in life and i think this book delivers a very comforting message that yes you did make the
right decisions don't worry so yeah thousands of people on goodreads loved it i loved it my friend
loved it her roommate loved it five stars the next fictional book is ask again yes by mary beth keen
so this was definitely longer and more complicated than the midnight library but i really enjoyed
it it follows these characters back from young men training at the police academy all the way
through when they got married had kids something really bad happened to both of their families and
then eventually their kids have kids i really like the central love story it was beautiful
but also not perfect and so it felt realistic they had family problems mental health problems
substance abuse problems so this one is also quite a heavy emotional read at times very dark
but it is very very moving so five stars and now we move on to the excessively large
non-fiction category the first book is smarter faster better by charles duhigg i don't know
this one felt kind of disjointed it was just a bunch of techniques listed one after the other
it kind of felt like one of those listicle blog posts but very very long basically the thesis in
this book was like here are eight techniques that will make you smarter faster and better
some of the things applied more to working individually other things to working with teams
still others to managing other people and so at the end of the book i was just like
i don't really know what i'm supposed to feel or do i think my favorite part of the book
actually was the ending where he talks about how he has applied these eight techniques to his life
and tips for how to apply them to yours but it felt like an afterthought it was literally called
appendix a reader's guide to using these ideas like shouldn't the reader be guided
to how to use these ideas throughout the book i don't know i'm not telling you how to do your
job i just that's a suggestion three stars for this book the next book is the bullet journal
method by writer carol and i know i have said that bullet journaling is not really my thing
but i read this book for research purposes i felt like as a personal development youtuber i
should brush up on my stuff and know about all of the techniques that are out there and i wanted to
learn more about the method than just looking at pretty bullet journal spreads on instagram because
while they are beautiful they don't really show you how the system is utilized on a day-to-day
basis it's written by the creator of the bullet journaling system so it's pretty much the most
straight from the source guide that you can find it first lays out the rules of the system and then
each chapter will explore guiding philosophies from a variety of traditions and teach you how
to put them into practice with the help of your notebook i really really liked it i thought it was
a great reminder of why we do all this planning stuff in the first place and even though i don't
want to bullet journal i felt like there were tips and advice that i could pull from it and apply to
my own system i tweeted this quote from the book i rarely tweet but i tweeted this anyways we briefly
interrupt this episode about books to bring you a message brought to you by squarespace so as you
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all right burnout by emily and amelia nagoski this book is obviously about burnout and stress
it's mainly directed at women it talks about things like how to complete the stress cycle
why it's important to have connection in our lives how a big reason that women have this
stress and burnout in their lives in the first place is because of the patriarchy and because
of something they call the bikini industrial complex so i like this book it was a good book
i think mainly i was confused about the structure part two was titled the real enemy that was the
one that talked about the patriarchy and the bikini industrial complex i don't know why
it was sandwiched between parts one and three i don't know exactly how parts one and three were
different which i think made the message less effective sorry four stars the richest man of
babylon by george s classon class-on i don't know i like to imagine he's french classon
this book basically tells the fictional story of this guy named arkit who became the richest man in
babylon it's a good book super repetitive but good basically all it says is save 10 of what you earn
don't trust advice from people who don't know how to manage their own money and invest your money
that's it there you go you don't need to read the book it won't have any confusing terms like when i
open up twitter and my brain explodes because i don't understand cryptocurrencies or nfts
this is basically just common sense very very straightforward financial advice
four stars i guess i don't know bad blood by john kerry you guys this book was fascinating this
book is the story of elizabeth holmes who dropped out of stanford because for some reason everyone
thinks that getting into a good college and then promptly dropping out of it is the path to success
anyways she dropped out of stanford she started a company a startup that created blood testing
machines it was called theranose this company came to be valued at nine billion dollars but
the problem is this teeny tiny problem is that their product basically did not work it was all
an illusion it was a mess so for example when investors would come to visit their company and
want to try out this magical blood testing machine instead of having the machine display an error
message as it normally would because it was not working they had to display a super slow progress
bar so they could basically be like sorry it's taking really long for some reason wee can endkend
and the meeting and we'll send you the results afterwards and then as soon as the investors
left they take out the blood sample send it to an actual blood testing lab and then send them
those results it really does read like a thriller even though it is a non-fiction book so
five stars one star to elizabeth holm she's kind of terrible person alrighty how to win
friends and influence people by dale carnegie the title says it all that's exactly what the book is
about the problem is i read it way too quickly so i think this book made some great points i
just don't really remember what those points were pretty much all i remember from it is this quote
remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any
language i'm definitely going to reread this book but four stars for now the next book is dear girls
by ali wong i was introduced to ali wong by my mom because my mom is a really big fan of her netflix
comedy specials i thought they were okay i wasn't a huge fan of them so i actually misunderstood the
entire concept of this book before i read it i thought dear girls girls was referring to just
all the world's girls for some reason but ali wong actually has two daughters named mari and
nikki and this book is sort of a series of letters to them to those girls her girls in the beginning
of the book she actually says mari and nikki do not read this book before you are 21 because it is
there is no filter and obviously i read the book when i was 20. i heard you like bad girls well i
read dear girls before i was 21. even though it is very raunchy it was very entertaining
i liked it a lot i liked the afterward by her husband some people said it was cheesy but i
love that stuff bring on the cheese five stars building the intentional university edited by
stephen m costlin and ben nelson so you may have heard of minerva university it has been kind of
trendy on youtube it is the university that unjaded jade attends it's probably
most well known for the fact that students literally like all pack up and move together and
study in seven different cities around the world throughout the course of their four-year program
and fun fact i became really really obsessed with this university for a very short period
of time i honestly was about to apply there even though i've made two tuition deposits
and one housing deposit at ie university i was ready to throw all that away but in the end i
decided that i could not handle moving around so much i also could not handle the academic rigor
um especially now that i have my youtube channel so i decided against it but in that brief period
of obsession i wanted to learn everything about it so this book is basically a guide
by the people who created the university about how they did that it's really cool to see how
people are innovating and transforming the education space i guess i'll give it four
stars it accomplishes its purpose it is kind of boring but it's not supposed to be interesting
so i don't know if it's fair to take away a star for that but this is my video so i get to
rate it however i want let's move from education into politics this is the war on normal people by
andrew yang this book was just randomly available at the library so i picked it up i really did not
know anything about andrew yang's platform um on which he was running for president in 2020.
all i knew basically was that he wanted to give people a thousand dollars a month and i was like
what how a thousand dollars but after i read this book i finally understood how universal basic
income might work and why we would do something like that one of the things that really stuck with
me from this book was he described the median american so basically if you took everyone in
america and you lined them up shoulder to shoulder based on their education wealth and occupation
and you took the person right in the middle that person would have a high school education
and be living paycheck to paycheck and that was just a shocking reminder of my privilege and also
the bubble that i live within like you can live in a section of america and just have no idea
how the rest of the country actually lives one of the recommendations he made in the book was that
he would like to see every high school student have the opportunity to take like a fully funded
gap year after they graduate to live in different parts of the united states with host families
and just get to know how different types of people in the country actually live so i thought that
was a great idea that probably won't happen and universal basic income is also a great idea that
probably won't happen great ideas i just really hope we actually get to see something like that
in the world five stars talking to strangers by malcolm gladwell so i gave this book four stars
because i remember thinking that the central point just didn't seem as clear or strong as
the one in his other book outliers i actually did not take notes on this book but if i were
to write a summarizing statement i'm trying to think what i would have written like we are very
easily fooled by people and not as good at judging intentions as we think we are i don't know i did
enjoy reading it i like how malcolm gladwell's books take all of these stories that are crazy
and seemingly unrelated and then somehow sort of weave them together in order to prove one point
but after doing some googling and interneting it would appear that i am the one who is too
trusting i tend to take things at face value especially when i read books i'm just like
yeah this all makes sense i agree with this no need to cross-check it but apparently malcolm
gladwell has a lot of criticisms especially for this book so with talking to strangers
specifically people have criticized the way that he handled the issue of sexual assault in the book
they have pointed to the lack of a thesis in the book and other issues so with the input of other
smarter people on the internet i have decided to downgrade this book from a four to a three
alrighty it doesn't have to be crazy at work that's the title of the book it doesn't have to be
crazy at work by jason freed and david heidemeyer hansen so this book is basically a collection of
short essays on how they run their company base camp in a calm rather than a crazy way
the people who brag about trading sleep for endless slogs and midnight marathons are usually
the ones who can't point to actual accomplishments it's pathetic they're not messing around and i
love it the extent to which someone reading this can apply their advice to their own life varies if
you're working in a lower level job position and the people managing you insist on a crazy style of
work you probably can't just give them a copy of this book and be like let's do things this way now
stop emailing me in the evenings but i do really like the points they presented and it's a very
short and punchy read so four stars when breath becomes air by paul kalanithi
this book was incredible this was also goodreads choice awards winner in 2017 in the memoirs and
autobiography category so paul kalanithi had nearly completed his training as a neurosurgeon
something that takes like 10 years to do he was 36 years old he and his wife were about to start
a family and he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer as you might expect this is a
really sad and really heavy book to read it's very thought provoking that question of what do you do
when you are told so suddenly and so early in your life that your life is going to end as someone who
really likes having a plan and having a general direction that i know my life is going in
this quote really resonated with me and it really painted a picture of how lost and directionless
paul felt in his life definitely five stars for this book and finally the last book is
a world without email by cal newport this one didn't quite hit a spot for some reason the way
that deep work and digital minimalism did and i think that is because i myself i guess luckily
have not truly experienced the kind of work environment that cal describes in this book
so the book actually really isn't against email necessarily it's more against what he calls the
hyperactive hive mind like yeah i still use email and yes it's sometimes slightly annoying but for
the most part i spend my day in focus blocks of scripting shooting editing and i'm not interrupted
that much so i guess i'm just not really the target audience for this book but i love reading
about how email makes us less productive and miserable cal's words not mine and also about
how we adopted this technology very similar to the way we adopted social media which is
very quickly and without thinking about the long-term consequences and it kind of ruined
the way that we work these days so overall not my favorite cal newport book but i still liked
it i do recommend it four stars as a final note these are two books that were really very good
i just for whatever reason did not finish them i read about half of each so technically i've
read 16 books this year not 15. so thank you so much for watching this long ramble about books
here's to more good books for the rest of 2021 and reaching 30 books by the end of the year bye
you