2015 Blogger Book Club – January
My blogger buddy and fellow Fitfluential Ambassador, Sarah Ohm from SarahOhm.com gathered together a group of us for the 2015 Blogger Book Club. Sarah is hosting a virtual monthly book club. Each month we will have a theme. We will each read a book of our own choosing, according to the month’s theme, and then share our reviews on our blogs on the last day of each month.
Welcome to the first edition of the 2015 Blogger Book Club.
For January, we are all reviewing a motivational or self help book.
I’ll have to admit, I’m not the biggest fan of self-help books. I’ve read a bunch, loved a few, hated a lot more. My favorites have been relationship books. “Men are from mars…” and “5 Love Languages” are the two that I always go back to as I don’t think anything else really compares. I read tons of parenting books when my kids were little and typically found little new information in most of them. Really, there’s usually one helpful takeaway in 150 pages and that’s it.
So, I started searching for a book… and searching, and searching. I was doing all this searching on my Kindle, reading reviews on Good Reads and anywhere else I could find them.
I came across one title that made me laugh out loud and actually resonated with me. But, I kept looking – mostly because the title didn’t really fit well with the things I blog about. I kept looking, and looking. And then I just went back to that first book. Here’s the book (yes I did a little screen shot editing, I’m pretty sure you can all figure out the title – this is a PG rated blog):
I hope you all agree that this is pretty much the greatest book title ever.
What I did not take the time to do was read the details of the book – I read the summary and some reviews and went ahead and downloaded it and got to reading.
After about 10 minutes, I looked down at my progress on the book and it said that I was 80% finished. Huh?
So, I went and checked – it’s a 13 page book! 13 Pages!!!! Oops – does that even count as a book? Isn’t that like a pamphlet?
By this point, I was a little annoyed about starting the process over and I decided that I really did like the message of the book, so I was going to stick with it. Since I really do think there’s one good takeaway in most self-help books, maybe I’ll just be able to get to it sooner with this book, I thought.
I’ll try to make my book review a little in line with the length of the book itself
The book is written by Johnny Truant who is a blogger and podcaster and part of the team that makes up Sterling & Stone. The book starts out with some good science about the origins of the universe. Actually, some really good science. Puts it all in perspective of how large the universe is and how small each of us is as an individual.
It goes on (in a short number of pages) to basically shout in the reader’s face that we are all small little tiny pegs in an incomprehensibly large universe. And that “if your life is to mean something, it’s up to YOU.”
The author reminds us all that our lives are short, the universe is going to exist after we are gone and it’s up to us to make the moments that we are here better. We can choose to help other people in their lives, we can choose to ease someone else’s suffering, we can choose to do something great with our moments. But, it’s up to us.
We might fail – but that’s okay. You won’t know unless you try. And if you try and succeed, then what is the problem?
The author leaves the readers with some monumental advice…
“Be Awesome. Do epic s$%&.”
I do like the message of the book – it’s up to us to be awesome, no one is going to hand it to you. So, let’s do that. Go do epic s$#&.
But first, check out all the book reviews that are linked up below:
