Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones - James Clear - ★★★.½

-
AUTHOR: James Clear
GENRE: Self-Help, Motivational Nonfiction.
PUBLICATION DATE: October 18, 2018
RATING: 3.5 stars.


This came highly recommended and that's why I broke my resolution of no self-help books. Now that I’m done with it, I can see why it is so beloved and often suggested as a life-changer. This is one of the better self-help books I’ve read because it’s quite practical. I can’t stand books that spout impractical philosophy without offering concrete and realistic methods of implementation. Most of the tips here are sensible and easily manageable. The anecdotes accompanying every advice help reinforce the point. Clear’s four-way method on how to make/break habits sounds very doable. The neat chapter summaries help in a quick checklist of the executables if you ever need a quick recap.

So it is going to change my habits from now on? Nope! And that’s partly because whatever he suggested is already something I do without even realising it. I’m a compulsive planner by nature and most of his tips rotate around planning your way to success. So, just as always, I’m the stubborn mule who doesn’t benefit from reading a self-help book while everyone else can see the wonders of its content.

Recommended to lovers of this genre and those wanting to give this genre a try.

Comments

Post a Comment

Explore more posts from this blog:

The Book Witch - Meg Shaffer - ★

-
Image
AUTHOR: Meg Shaffer GENRE: Fantasy-Romance PUBLICATION DATE: April 7, 2026 RATING: 1 star. In a Nutshell: A book-about-books fantasy featuring the titular book witch. After the super-interesting start, this absolutely didn’t go the way I expected it to. Too much of insta-love. OTT dialogues, absurd plot twists, and immature characters. I enjoyed this author’s first two novels but simply couldn’t connect with this one. This is an outlier review. Plot Preview: Despite her youth, twenty-five-year-old Rainy March has been a book witch for more than a decade. She follows all the rules of the profession seriously, including the one about ensuring that fictional characters and the real world do not intersect. But when she is sent on assignment into the book series starring the Duke of Chicago, her favourite book character, she forgets all the rules and ends up in a relationship with him. When this is discovered by the head witch, Rainy is forbidden from interacting with the fictional characte...
Read More»

The Ferryman and His Wife - Frode Grytten - ★★

-
Image
AUTHOR: Frode Grytten TRANSLATOR: Alison McCullough NARRATOR: Colin Mace GENRE: Literary Fantasy PUBLICATION DATE: November 18, 2025 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A literary fantasy-fiction set on a fjord in Norway. Introspective, not morbid. Too many characters, too meandering and monotonous for my liking. Some unnecessary triggering and crass content. Better for those who are more about prose than plot. Recommended, but not to all. Plot Preview: One morning, Nils Vik, a ferryman, wakes up and knows that it will be the day he dies. He still wants to follow his routine, so after his morning routine, he looks around his empty house for one last time, walks out, and boards his beloved boat that he has been ferrying on the fjord for many years. As he sets off, his dead dog joins him, and one by one, several other souls also make their way to Nils Vik one by one across each of the ferry stops. Each, including the dog, discusses several things from the past, sometimes offering the ferryma...
Read More»

Giantess - J.C. Deveney

-
Image
Author: J.C. Deveney Illustrator: Núria Tanarit Genre: Graphic Novel Rating: 2 stars. Hello from Outlierland once again! L This simply didn’t match up to that exquisite cover. A farmer finds a giant baby girl in a forest. As he and his wife have six sons and no daughters, they adopt her and name her Celeste. Celeste lives a sheltered life with her brothers for many years. But after they venture onto their separate career paths, Celeste’s true life journey begins. As she traverses new places and meets new people, she comes to an understanding of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal world and she learns through mistakes and mishaps how she can finally make a place for herself and be what she wants to be. This doesn’t flow like a typical giant story. While Celeste is the only giantess in the entire book, her size plays only a minor role in the plot. Her femininity and her self-acceptance gets the major focus. In a way, this is good as Celeste is treated almost as a normal characte...
Read More»

After Life - Gayle Forman - ★

-
Image
AUTHOR: Gayle Forman GENRE: YA Contemporary Fantasy PUBLICATION DATE: January 7, 2025 RATING: 1 star. In a Nutshell: A YA contemporary fiction with mild fantasy elements. Could have been awesome but the FMC is too YA, if you know what I mean. 😬 Basic writing, annoying characters, convenient developments. Minimal and ad hoc fantasy content. The only thing I liked was the plot structuring. Can’t recommend this, sorry. Plot Preview: When Amber cycles home one spring afternoon, the last thing she expects is her mother to scream on seeing her walk in. The reason is horrifying even to Amber. It seems she has been dead for seven years, having lost her life in a hit-and-run accident while riding the very same bicycle she just rode home. But Amber doesn’t feel dead! The return affects not just Amber but her family and other acquaintances who were active in her life when she was alive. A lot has changed in the last seven years and Amber needs to be prepared to face those developments bas well....
Read More»

The Mistakes That Made Us: Confessions from Twenty Poets - Compiled by Irene Latham & Charles Waters - ★★★.¾

-
Image
COMPILERS: Irene Latham & Charles Waters ILLUSTRATOR: Mercè López GENRE: Middle-grade Poetry. PUBLICATION DATE: October 1, 2024 RATING: 3.75 stars. In a Nutshell: A poetry anthology aimed at middle-graders, containing confessions from twenty poets about the mistakes they made in their childhood and the lessons they learnt. Great intent, good execution. Could have limited appeal because of the poetry factor. This anthology contains twenty poems written by twenty poets. Each poem contains a sort of confession about a mistake the poet made during their childhood and the lesson they learnt from the same. I am not a poetry fan, but the theme of this book was too good to resist. The introductory note sets the right tone for the book, beginning by explaining how there can be various types of mistakes but each of them is a learning opportunity. It also suggests that we normalise talking about mistakes instead of focussing only on our triumphs. After all, talking about mistakes is helpful...
Read More»