A manic reading manifesto from an unpolished writer.
Hutchison presents a guide to optimizing reading.
The author, founder of the marketing agency BookThinkers, advocates for increasing and maximizing reading time: Replace 15 minutes a day of social media scrolling or streaming Netflix, and you could finish as many as 20 books per year, he argues. Rather than turn to books for pleasure, Hutchison believes readers should seek books that facilitate transformation. “Life is too short to read books that are not going to serve their intended purpose,” he writes. With this in mind, he offers many tips and strategies for making reading time count. He recommends note-taking to improve recall and advises readers to listen to an audiobook while simultaneously reading the text. In addition to providing reading tips and tricks, he reports on healthy habits that he’s learned from books, sharing his experiences with each. These tips include drinking water, tracking sleep, spending time outdoors, drinking a morning cocktail, exercising in the morning, and chewing gum. He also touts standing desks, weighted blankets, white noise machines, air purifiers, Epsom salts, supplements, cold showers, intermittent fasting, and breathwork. Hutchison concludes with “wealthy habits” for financial planning and “happy habits” that focus on one’s mindset. The author covers a wide array of topics, from neuro-linguistic programming and the butterfly effect to SMART goals and the Stanford marshmallow experiment, all in simple language. But his guide presents books as just another commodity, and reading as a means to an end—given that life-changing books only cost around $20, Hutchison raves, “the potential return on investment (ROI) is insane!” (It’s even better if you source reading material from the library for free, but Hutchison’s only mention of a library is as a place to donate books you’re not reading.) Some readers may question the validity of statements such as, “Personal experience is a great teacher, but another person’s experience can be even better because you can learn the lesson without feeling the pain.” The use of bold and all-caps text, as well as the author’s desperate pleas for readers to leave him a review and share his book, detract from a sense of professionalism.
A manic reading manifesto from an unpolished writer.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798988090908
Page Count: 287
Publisher: The Reading Revolution Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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