The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life - Brad Stulberg, Steve Magness

A decent book about channeling passion and energy in a positive direction. I appreciated the author's discussion about how passion, when focused on outcomes or external factors, can corrupt someone's motivation and lead to burn out, or more seriously, cheating and destruction of someone's character.

Passion Paradox discusses both sides of pursuing your passion and gives concrete tips on how to maybe not let it overtake and ruin you. And it does away with the notion that Passion leaves room for balance. It may actually do away with the notion of balance at all which was actually quite refreshing in a COVID environment when it seems everything needs to be done RIGHT NOW and I'm personally pulled in five different directions at any given moment.

Each chapter contains summary boxes with the most salient points and the distillation of all the words is helpful in trying to formulate a plan or an understanding for a path forward. The book is ultimately accessible without a lot of jargon and some real life examples of people who got it right, or got it wrong. 

3/5 Stars.  

Your Best Stride: How to Optimize Your Natural Running Form to Run Easier, Farther, and Faster--With Fewer Injuries - Jonathan Beverly

I loved the practical approach to improving form in this fast and informative book. Jonathan Beverly lays out the main areas of form weakness and gives concrete exercises and routines to improve those areas.

I've been a sometimes runner since I joined the cross country team my senior year of high school in order to try to stay in shape. It's been a thing I do for myself and it gives me joy, but almost two years ago I developed a case of plantar fasciitis that I could not beat. It kept my running sidelined for 18 months and after PT, massage therapy, dry needling and everything in between, I'm finally back to running. As I try to recondition myself, it's really important to me that I don't get injured again.

But I also appreciate that the book doesn't proclaim one exact right way to do anything. Everything is based on general principles of strength and flexibility which aid in running form. But every body is unique and so too is the stride generated from that body.

I've been putting some of the techniques into practice over the last week and I'm hopeful I'll run injury free into the future.

4/5 Stars. 

Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life - Henry Cloud and John Townsend

I struggle with boundaries. There I said it. I'm not sure why except to say that I don't like rocking the boat, and therefore not maintaining boundaries seems like the better option. As I've gotten older I have realized this is not the case. And now that I have kids of my own, the consequences of not setting boundaries is a constant and very annoying reminder.

In Boundaries, Cloud and Townsend, reiterate the importance of boundaries and the far reaching effects of not setting them. While I wholeheartedly agree, I found the book repetitive in parts and long on rhetoric but short on practical application, which is what I was really after in the first place. I didn't need to be sold on the benefits, I needed strategies to implement.

I did really appreciate a couple of beneficial nuggets, including not making my children responsible for my emotional reactions and that we are not meant to overcome problems by our will alone, that's why we have Christ. But I also noted that the biblical references seemed to be shoe-horned in without much thought to nuance and context.

So I had a bit of mixed reaction to reading the book, but overall I thought I benefited from reading it.

3/5 Stars. 

Washington Black - Esi Edugyan

I'm just going to say it now. This is the best book I will read in 2019. The moment I woke up after reading all night, I sent a note to my mom and sister - "Just finished this last night. It's exquisite."

Exquisite. I'm not sure I can think of a better word than that to describe Esi Edugyan's Washington Black. First, the writing is exquisite. This is about as tight as a novel can be written but still say so much. Words aren't wasted. Ordinary words line up in a sentence and become transformative. Here's some examples:

"You were children," his father said. "You knew nothing of beauty."
"Children know everything about beauty," Titch countered softly. "It is adults who have forgotten."

"In any case, it was then I recognized that my own values - the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman - they are not the only, nor the best, values in existence. I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something." 

Goff gave a flustered grunt, shoving some boiled potatoes into his mouth, but I could see he was interested. "Such a thing is not possible." 
I peered quietly at him. "Nothing is possible, sir, until it is made so."

Point number two: The nuance is exquisite. These characters, they're complex without being unnecessarily so. There are strong positions on slavery and race, but it's not surface stuff. There is so much nuance - so much examination of the subtle violence of slavery and racism that accompany the obvious violence. 

Point number three: The timelessness of the story is exquisite. Yes, clearly this novel is set in the 1830s. It boldly displays that at the start of each section. And yet. And yet. I would sometimes completely forget that this was happening in a setting close on 200 years ago. All of a sudden a carriage would make its way through a city and I would be shocked to remember that this was all happening a long time ago. This shouldn't be possible when one of the characters is a former slave, and slavery is still a very much real part of the plot, but it just somehow was. George Washington Black, "Wash", was timeless in his character. Somehow. And that is just a very real mark of the artistry put in by Edugyan. 

So I could say many things about the plot. How 11 year old Wash is selected by Christopher Wilde to become his assistant while he toils around his brother's plantation. How Christopher, "Titch", is repulsed but also complacent in his brother's mistreatment of slaves on the land. How the brutality of slavery seeps into every page of the first part of the novel and beyond. How Wash has an opportunity to escape that life without truly understanding what this meant to be forever one part out and one part in. How a daring escape led to a discovery of what it fully means to be your own person. 

But this is really not a novel that can be described but has to be experienced. Because my heart still feels full of it and that's a rare gift.

5/5 Stars. 

Love Warrior - Glennon Doyle

Once upon a 2012, I had a baby and was overjoyed and terrified and tired and emotional and in the midst of a fog of sleep deprivation stumbled across Momastery, a blog started by Glennon Doyle Melton where everyone was encouraged to tell the truth. Life was hard. Being a new mom was hard. And on Momastery, it was okay to say all these things.

After 12 weeks of maternity leave I headed back to work as a lawyer and my Momastery friends were there when I checked back in from time to time. In 2014, we became thick as thieves again as I endured and cherished and outlasted and relished another 12 week maternity leave. But then I went back to work, and we moved and I stopped checking in with my friends. 

Last year though, when I broke off my toxic relationship with Facebook (it was bad for me honey) I was happy to find Glennon there on Instagram being Glennon. And her kind words, her fierce determination, her all encompassing love was a reminder of those spaces on Momastery where I'd once found refuge in my post-partum malaise.

Well you know what? That beautiful human, Glennon Doyle wrote a big book about herself and her messy past and her constant work and love and Love Warrior was everything I'd always hoped I could wrap up into a beautiful gift of Glennon. So it was a lovely book to read, full of those things that I really enjoyed from Matthew Kelly's Perfectly Yourself (you can read that review here). I'm wondering now, did Glennon inspire MK to write "Do the next right thing" or "You can never get enough of what you don't need"? Was I listening to G all along?

Yes it's a memoir about Glennon's life but Glennon doesn't ever just tell you about her life, she tells you the lessons she's learned, and if you're lucky enough, you can learn those lessons too, without all the pain. 

So rather than detailing Glennon's story (she really tells it the best), I'll leave you with some of my favorite Glennon nuggets from the book. 

Grief is nothing but a painful waiting, a horrible patience. Grief cannot be torn down or scaled or overcome or outsmarted. It can only be outlasted.

We need a church that will teach us about loving ourselves without shame, loving others without agenda, and loving God without fear.

Faith is not a club to belong to but a current to surrender to.

Happy reading Warriors!

5/5 Stars. 

Perfectly Yourself - Matthew Kelly

I saw author Matthew Kelly speak at our church earlier this year as part of Dynamic Catholic's Living Your Life With Passion and Purpose series. I came away from that event feeling re-energized about my relationship with God and the things I could do with the limited talents and time I have here on Earth. 

Perfectly Yourself was this year's Best Lent Ever book and I didn't read it at the time so I thought I'd pick it up now and use it as a boost of adrenaline to get me back in that space I was in following the February program. On the whole, this book was not as dynamic and energizing and Matthew Kelly's live presentation. I did take away some very good nuggets of trying to attain a more perfect version of myself, but overall I found the book repetitious to the point of tedium in some places which made it a much slower read than its 210 pages would suggest. 

I'm really glad I read the book because I believe some of the things I picked up are going to be life-long lessons - or at least life long language that I apply to lessons. For example:

When work is approached in the right way and with the right frame of mind, it helps us to become more perfectly ourselves. Who you are is infinitely more important that what you do or what you have.

Um yes, possessions mean nothing, work titles can mean nothing if WHO you are is not a person worth knowing, or not being value added. 

I also liked this nugget from St. Augustine:

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you. 

It's not enough to pray. You have to put in the work. I think this message is lost a lot today, about putting in the work in order to see results. People want the easy fix, the magic pill. There is no magic pill. Results in any arena require work. 

And lastly, Kelly makes a distinction early in the book which I have thought a lot about over the last month - the difference between happiness and pleasure. Pleasure is the feeling you get from a good piece of cake, or a entertaining movie, a moving song. But it's not happiness. Happiness is not a thing that can be sought an attained. Happiness is a by-product of living your life in a way as to try to be perfectly yourself. Happiness is sustaining and life changing and deep. Pleasure is momentary and shallow. So now when I find myself doing something or saying yes to something, I want to make sure that I know whether my motivation is for pleasure, which is perfectly fine, so long as I'm not looking for it to fulfill my need for happiness.

3/5 Stars.