Tiny Pep Talks
Reading Paula Skaggs and Josh Linden’s humorous and often snarky Tiny Pep Talks: Bite-Size Encouragement for Life’s Annoying, Stressful, and Flat-Out Lousy Moments is much like an afternoon spent with your favorite vodka aunty who’s always had your best interest at heart. After a lighthearted introduction, their advice covers sticky situations that range from the utterly trivial to the somewhat deep. It starts out, for example, with “For When It’s Time to Get Off the Couch and Go to Bed.” Other offers of comfort include “For When Your Clothes Don’t Fit,” and, inevitably, “For When You Just Got Ghosted: A Spooky Tale.” There’s also advice for if you’ve been walking around with spinach between your teeth, when your battery’s down to 5% and when you can’t stand your friend’s significant other (Skaggs and Linden specify that this means a significant other who’s simply annoying, as opposed to one who’s abusive and dangerous. That’s for a “more serious book.”)
Even weighty stuff like grief is handled with a touch of sass. Grief, they write, “is like a toddler. At any given moment, it might be messy, it might kick and punch you in the gut, and it might refuse to go to bed when all you want is to go to sleep.” But as Scarlett O’Hara said, tomorrow is another day. You’ll be okay.
Good People
Gabriel Reilich and Lucia Knell’s lovely, open-hearted Good People comforts through example. It tells the stories of all kinds of ordinary folk who’ve gone through stuff and come out the other side, sometimes battered, like the narrator of “Invictus,” but unbowed.
In the very first story, we follow Amy B. as she happily moves from Washington, D.C., to attend law school in New York City, only to be poleaxed by a family tragedy. New Yorkers are notorious for ignoring people who break down and cry on subways or airport terminals, but in Amy’s case, someone notices and helps her. She never learned his name and doesn’t even know if she’d recognize him if she saw him again, but his brief presence permanently changed her life for the better. Good People is full of stories where an “angel” shows up at a moment of crisis. Wherever you land in this book, you’ll be comforted by the fact that despite the insanity of the times we live in, most people are indeed, good.
Life Audit
Ximena Vengoechea’s Life Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide to Discovering Your Goals and Building the Life You Want is one inspirational book where you’ll need to do some work. As the title says, it asks you to do an audit of your life, but the process is led by pages of delightful bar graphs, mind maps, drawings and Venn diagrams in cool pastel colors. In other words, it’s much more fun than an IRS audit of your taxes.
Auditing your life is a worthwhile pursuit when you don’t quite know what you want to do, or if you’re in a rut. Vengoechea breaks down the process into small but revealing steps. At the beginning you’re encouraged to write down every single one of your wishes, no matter how trivial, on 100 sticky notes in the space of an hour. Though labor-intensive, this helps you prioritize your wishes, identify your core values, use your time wisely and pick the people (five of them, the author suggests) who are eager to offer you support. Vengoechea also shows you how to avoid folks who would drag you down and shares motivational tricks, such as getting an ice cream cone or putting on a party dress after you’ve turned in your manuscript. Life Audit is a lovely book to keep on your bedside table.
Not Sure Who Needs to Hear This, But . . .
Though this book is over 200 pages long, you can easily read Willie Greene’s Not Sure Who Needs to Hear This, But . . . in a few hours. Indeed, its layout allows you to just jump in anywhere, for every page holds something pithy. Greene, the founder of WE THE URBAN, which launched as a Tumblr account that dispenses similar advice, divides his book into six chapters: Peace; Love; Learning, Unlearning, Relearning; Creativity; Well-being and Affirmations. The first few pages of each chapter posit the virtue, followed by sections, none more than a couple of paragraphs long, that tell you how to achieve it. After that comes pithy adages, often framed by colorful boxes that recall sticky notes. Included are: “Forgive yourself every night before going to sleep”; “Act. Even if fear is present” and “Delete the Ex-files.” (This one, I believe, means to move right along after you’ve been dumped or subjected to that even worse 21st-century atrocity of “ghosting.”) There are dozens of these little pep pills for the soul. Who needs to hear them? We do!
