How to books: How to Think by Rick Norwood and How to Be Bored by Eva Hoffman
How to Think
I started reading this book many times, but despite it being a tiny little volume I couldn’t get into it. I wanted to read it in little chunks to properly apply what the author had to offer, but I could never return to it.
Now that I am Bullet Journalling (or attempting to), perhaps I could use some of the exercises or write them down somewhere for future use. I actually have time to promote thinking now! And some down time for my brain to want to feel like thinking about things other than science.
How to be Bored
The author of The Secret has written this tiny little novel for ‘The School of Life’. I’m sorry, but thinking about The Secret made me not want to even approach this book. I’m all about positive thinking, but without making the appropriate concrete steps towards you goals, you can’t just expect them to fall in your lap. For example, if you envisage yourself getting a pay rise, but don’t actually ask for it at your annual review, it’s highly unlikely you are going to get one! Or hoping to win the lottery when you didn’t buy a ticket.
I think I also struggled with these books because I’d like to think that I can think and that I know how to be bored. I’d like to spend more time away from my phone and laptop, and I think that’s possible now that I don’t have to be writing all the time! After I finish catching up on the 13 or so reviews that need to be written, maybe I’ll be able to go back to guilt-free reading.
Maybe I will give these as Christmas presents this year and hope that someone else likes them! Or maybe they too will pass them on. These would make good Kris Kringle gifts, rather than the all too common candles/hand cream/useless gadget that are usually on offer. Non-fiction reading doesn’t force me to give stars to things, so I’m just not going to try.
Ugh, I spent this novel reading it in a sort of daze of disbelief. To start with, I didn’t really connect with the main character, and the style of writing just didn’t take me into the novel. And then, funnily enough, the protagonist talks about reading a book with no discernable plot-line. This one was just the same!
Isn’t it a bit see-through that the main character falls for a guy totally outside the range of ‘norm’? For some reason, the ‘bad guys’ and the ‘wild guys’ always attract women. The heart wants what it can’t have? Anyway, it was totally predictable for who Paige would end up with, which made it a little more boring.
This novel was satisfyingly sneaky. The reader just keeps waiting for the penny to drop – and it never does! There’s hints of things that are awry, but I found myself always expecting one of the five suspects to make a mistake. It’s told from their point of views, but many other novels can successfully hide secrets from the reader by suppressing the thoughts of the character (such as in 
The novel opens with a boy picking berries to sell. l made an instant connection with him – that I gradually lost as the novel progressed. The other protagonist, the drone pilot, I absolutely understood, but again, I didn’t care about him either. This novel overall felt flat to me, just like the 2D characters.
This novel was engaging, powerful and awesome! I’m not sure that it was quite on the same level as 
I loved this novel so much. I loved 
At the age of 12, Helena meets the outside world for the first time but finds herself in a place that seems to have aged over 50 years over night. She doesn’t know what to do with any of the rules, and struggles to fit into anything, not helped by her grandparents spending all the money left over from her ‘telling her story’ to magazines. When she finds a man who appreciates her, she is too afraid to tell her past.
I wanted to love this novel. I was super excited about it from the moment that Ford Street emailed me to ask my opinion on which of three potential cover images would be the best. Turns out, the one I liked the most was also the one eventually chosen. I just found that this novel added very little to the host of teenage fiction around ‘fat girls’ and so forth. There’s several others that I have read, of which I just can’t remember the name of at the moment, and those would take my fancy first.
This is Conway’s greatest literary achievement so far. This novel made me keep reading it, and the range of characters was diverse. I have to say that I didn’t see most of the novel coming! Ah, twisty good bits. It’s amazing what secrets people can keep – and how awesome it is to set up a clue-finding trail. I only wish he had been there to see it!