This was a big year of me reading nonfiction, particularly in the latter half of the year. With my whole life going to absolute hell this year, finding some advice to create structure was something that I ended up gravitating to. Also, nonfiction was a lot easier on the brain than fiction as I was recovering.

Here are the top 5 nonfiction books I read this year! These may not be the best for everyone, but these are the ones that stuck with me the most and the ones that I could find myself recommending to others.

Be Scared of Everything

I don’t read many essay collections, mostly because I don’t understand why these exist. But I finally gave one of them a chance and was pretty entertained by some of the winding thoughts that came out of this! It’s a new format for me, and one that I’m actually pretty intrigued by. I will probably pick this one up again, but I’m feeling like I might give others essay collections a shot just to see what else might be out there.

One Year to an Organized Work Life review

Of all of the organize your life books I read this year, this was probably the best. Most of the advice in these books is pretty repetitive, but this one gathered most of the concepts together and put them into a very clear, structured plan. Not a quick fix, but a year long, week by week slow process that you can follow and adapt into your life in a manageable, more long term way.

Designing your Life

This book was probably the one that impacted me the most this year. Not because I followed what it said, but because it was the framing device I think I’ve been looking for in all the self help books. It was a framework to build methodologies off of to figure out how I could approach my own journey, and for that it was probably the best thing I read this year.

Measure What Matters

I didn’t read as many business-specific books this year, but this one was delightfully practical. I did just read it so that I could throw it at coworkers instead of having to sit down and explain this concept over and over again, and I am pleased to say that I fully intend to now throw this book at just about everyone who asks me about metrics and analytics so they can get a base understanding.

The Virtual Self

As someone who is now tracking far too much of their personal life in spreadsheets and other digital formats, this was a pretty interesting look at some of the other motivations and uses of tracking. I am not necessarily up for sharing private data about my recovery publicly, but it is good to hear accounts of how that level of transparency can be used for good rather than just advertising and varying degrees of evil.

I thought I had read this book before when I took it out, but there was no history on it. Upon closer investigation, this appears to be a part 2 to his previous book: Hooked. And it is weird.

This book largely focuses on different strategies to take back your time and how to not be so distracted by the world around you. And if you are reading it for that purpose, it is awful. The useful stuff appears on just about every productivity tips list, and there is a complete lack of nuance or acceptance that different people have different lives and needs. The work section in particular really requires that you have control over your own schedule, and he advocates for making your friends and family feel bad for looking at their phones.

But as a sequel to Hooked, it is fascinating. He previously wrote a book about how to use psychology to make addictive products, and in this one he’s putting the onus on the user to not fall for the things he pushed for in the previous one. The first one was from the perspective of the product, this one from the user, and he never puts together that he is remotely responsible for creating the problem in the first place.

And that’s really a larger tech and design issue that I am not getting into right now.

Overall, if you are looking for ways to become better at controlling your own attention, not this one. But if you read Hooked and you want to watch the author completely avoid any accountability in creating a world where technology is specifically designed to be addictive and blame the user for allowing themselves to become addicted to technology and the world at large around them, including I think using several of the same studies from the first book reframed as a bad thing, it’s actually pretty interesting.

Am I having some bad brain times that have made me unable to really read anything fiction, so I’m going to be on a bit of a nonfiction kick for a while? Yep! You have been warned. But this one isn’t self help or about how to better yourself this time! This one is about personal tracking. Which… well, very relevant given all the brain stuff for the moment.

The book explores the people who track their lives digitally and how that impacts both themselves and the world around them. There’s the more traditional things you might expect, like using that data to better optimize your day and otherwise use it for the purpose of improving their lives in some way. But there’s also the lesser talked about portions about people who share this information and develop an audience that are interested in the data they can get about others mundanely shared online, from comparing steps with peers to social media posts documenting the food you eat.

Below all of those levels, I really liked the reflection that a lot of this data collected is not matched with the level of reflection about the meaning of it. It’s definitely something I have seen in previous attempts to otherwise optimize various aspects via data tracking. Also interesting is the more positive social aspects of data sharing, such as being able to more accurately put together the day a pipe bomb went off in Oregon. We hear plenty about the negative aspects of data tracking and putting your information out there, so it’s refreshing to see something positive come of it.

Overall, I thought it was a really interesting read! I liked the discussions around the reasons behind tracking, where there were opportunities, and where it was maybe not accomplishing what people really intended.

Today in taking out random books from the library, a book about Cirque! I have never been myself, but have always wanted to go. There’s a tent that I can see from the train when they come into town, but I haven’t been yet. So obviously I had to check out a book about it, even if it looks oddly like a business book.

It’s not a business book, though, not really. It’s a motivational book about how to improve your life, but told through the framing device of a sports talent rep discovering the world of Cirque and having the people who work behind the scenes give him life advice via telling him about the intricacies about their job and how inspired they are by it.

It’s clearly fictionalized if not entirely fictional. There is no way that everyone in Cirque speaks in quotables, I am sorry. But I did find it to be a very effective and entertaining way of getting the message across of finding your passion and understanding that the risks are worth the rewards of happiness in the end. It is a little heavy handed at times, but I still enjoyed it.

If you’re looking for something a little different in the motivational self help genre, this one is certainly an interesting read. It’s also a very quick read, and you’ll be able to get through it without much trouble.

Do I want to try and make my art into a business? Yes. Do I want to do what I’m required to do in terms of marketing and getting an audience to do it? Do I want to create a solid brand presence, niche down, get rid of half the stuff I’m doing so I can be consistent, build a loyal following off of that, and then diversify back out later? Nope! But I will read a business book or two in order to feel like I’m actively doing something to help my cause!

This book is very much what I expect a girl boss business book to be. It feels 85% empty platitudes about how you can do anything, you’re awesome and amazing! There’s about 5% advice that is presented with the same kind of framing, with “Put it out into the universe” language without pointing out that getting your idea written down in a way where you can look at it and revise it is actually a good and practical thing. And then there’s about 10% actual business advice that I’m pretty familiar with in terms of how to find your target audience and be a brand.

Also, there were pitches for her course throughout it and I am not a fan of that inside my library books. Make me look you up, don’t try to grab my email address in exchange for information you keep alluding to and never getting to.

I like a lot of very concrete and practical advice, so this was very much not the kind of book I think I was ever going to be compatible with. The little bit of useful information that’s in there is pretty widely available elsewhere, but if you need a bit of that emotional support in your entrepreneurship journey, maybe it will work better for you.

I’m starting to realize one of the problems with posting these reviews once a week and post dating them to the next Friday is that it’s tricky to tell where my brain is in the healing process. It is not far enough, which is important to know for me talking about this book.

This book is a series of essays, which I have only just learned is written works on a topic and not arguments written in a very specific, teacher-approved format. The topics were variable, all of them coming back to horror, and I know that I enjoyed the experience of reading it! But there was one main problem.

I don’t remember a single thing that I read.

This is not a reflection on the book, but how I’ve been during recovery. Because each of these essays was focused on only a couple ideas, my brain just wasn’t able to hold onto one when I started the next. It was a fascinating experience, and one that I will hopefully never experience again.

But I do know that I enjoyed what I read, which is something! And if you were thinking about checking it out, do it! And then tell me what I read.

Look. I know. But fiction is still very hard for me and these self help, how to organize your life books are significantly easier for me to get through. And I’m also very bad at sticking to my choices anyway, so I’m reading another one of them!

And this one isn’t too bad! Unlike a lot of the other books of this ouvre that I’ve read before, this book is mostly about outlining a structure over crafting very concrete rules about how to live your life and insisting that this way is the only way. And I like a book that is open to the idea that different specifics are going to work for different people.

At a high level, the book focuses on a very simple idea: Put effort into the things that matter the most to you, and figure out a way to make the rest as automated and lazy as possible. Some of it is letting go of what isn’t important, like not having your house set up in a way that looks like it belongs in a magazine. While her examples don’t match my own life, the ideas behind the rules that she’s created feel like they could be adapted to fit most people, which is more than I can say for some of the other books I’ve read in this genre.

Overall, I generally like it! While it might feel like a bit much if you’re currently overwhelmed and in need of something to get your life together right now, I think this book is a good guideline to help you refine a system into something that works better for you.

I have known a lot of people who swear by the Getting Things Done methodology. I have heard that there is even a course on how this works taught at my company! I work in tech, and the reason why so many people in this industry specifically have gravitated towards this method with such zealous dedication1 is a lot more clear after having read the book.

The method essentially requires that you gather all of your tasks in a single place and assess everything on your list with a flow chart. The first thing you wrote down is the first thing you do, then the next, then the next, without prioritization until it is all done. If it is a big task, it is a project that is broken into smaller tasks, and there’s an emphasis on figuring out what the next action is and just, well, getting things done.2

It’s a process that’s fairly standardized and explained with just enough vagueness that it could, in theory, be applied to anything. But also enough complication that I think it draws a certain type of person who is also very drawn to software development. And I think the fanbase of this methodology might be part of the reason I have a weird feeling about it.

I think it’s fine as a starting point, but it is a method that should be adapted and adjusted once you have the initial panic of needing some place to start settled. Getting all of your tasks in one place is a good thing, as is taking time to look them over and assess whether you have to do this now or if you can delegate or get rid of it all together. As a whole, it’s fine for if you have a fairly straightforward life, or if you don’t have a need to get into a flow or have interest-based attention, or even have a lot of interest in doing anything you’re working on. But life my life is a bit more complicated and nuanced, so I don’t think I’ll be taking this method on.

1. The number of times I have heard that the only reason the method doesn’t work is because you’re doing it wrong… [↩]
2. Also a bunch of stuff about keeping tasks to zones, which is one of those relics of the time when you didn’t have devices that allowed you to do things in different places. [↩]

For whatever reason, as my brain was recovering I had a much easier time with nonfiction, so back to the old standby that I already know I don’t like that much: self improvement books! This is entirely my own fault, but who knows, maybe this is one of the good ones?

Nope. I fully acknowledge that this book is definitely written for the exact opposite kind of person from me. I do not have trouble starting things and, though it might take a bit of time, I’m also pretty good at finishing them as well. This book is very much about getting people to start doing things and getting through the mental blocks that might be preventing them from doing so.

And no mention that I caught of rolodexes!

I did like a few elements of it. The idea of unscheduling was interesting and follows some things I find really useful, such as setting maximums on the amount of time you spend on work and scheduling in your breaks and things you do for fun. Having done something similar, I can confirm that it is definitely a thing that works pretty well.

Ultimately, though, not my thing. I do not have the issues outlined and found some of the pep talks to be a bit abrasive and not accounting for things outside of someone’s control that could be getting in the way. Overall, though, still a few interesting ideas. Check it out if you have trouble starting things!

I’ve been trying to read and be normal, but I read this while dealing with cognitive issues and after having failed to read a lot of other, more complex books. Like YA novels. But this was frames as a book about problem solving for adults framed around how children do problem solving, so I figured I could handle this one!

And I finished it.

The book really is just a walkthrough of problem solving techniques for business with pretty straightforward language and all of the examples are based around kids problems. It’s kind of amazing realizing how difficult some of these techniques are for people in business that I’ve worked with to grasp. Things like “Just ask your audience” and “Test a couple options” are amazingly foreign to a lot of the people I’ve worked with.

It was exactly at the level that I could handle and it does provide a lot of great insight into how to do some preliminary research to uncover the reasons for a problem before jumping into finding and working out a solution. Just because you think you know does not mean you do, and it’s nice a pretty quick, easy read.

If you’re having trouble with finding a solution to a problem you’ve been having for a while, or just want to do a book club book with some people at work who think they know exactly what is wrong and what will fix it, this might be a good one to pick up.