If you’ve been following my blog, you may have discovered that I’m a bit book obsessed. I read many books and consider reading a massive part of my self-care routine. So I thought that I would spend one blog a month discussing books that I have read! For any of you book lovers out there, hopefully, you’ll find some neat suggestions!
Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman
I love Gaiman’s writing! He always pulls me into any world that he creates with his phenomenal storytelling! He’s one of the authors that I study as an inspiration for my own writing. I really enjoy reading short stories so Trigger Warning (a collection of short stories) was the perfect read for me. Lately, I’ve been reading many novels, and it can be nice to read these brief stories.
I nearly finished this book and so far I can just say that it is amazing! Of course, with any short story collection, you’ll most likely stumble upon stories you like and stories you don’t. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every story in this book, although there were some that astounded me more than others.
If you’ve never read Neil Gaiman before, his storytelling is often quite dark. It ranges from fantasy to urban fantasy, to something completely his own. Many of my favorite stories of his are the ones that take place in a world that’s just like ours, but just has a few surrealistic tweaks to it. Sometimes it’s magic, sometimes it’s monsters, sometimes it’s both. Either way, I highly recommend Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warning. For anyone who enjoys good storytelling, dark stories, and even some spooky stories, Trigger Warning may be the short story collection for you.
Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen M. McManus
I listened to the audiobook of Two Can Keep a Secret and finished it today. Sometimes, I wonder how I perceive books when I listen to the audiobook versus when I read them. I can’t help but feel like maybe I miss quite a few details by listening to the audiobook. However, maybe I pick up some things in audiobooks such as tone that I may not have picked up while reading. So I suppose there are benefits and pitfalls to this. What do you think?
Anyway, I’m still a little torn in how I feel about this book. It’s a young adult book and I’d categorize it as a mystery book. It follows two teenage twins as they’re thrown into the chaos of this small town and its dark history. The writing and storytelling were definitely good. The actual mystery part of the book, I really loved it.
I started putting a few pieces together myself maybe about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through the book. While I love guessing the final reveal and trying to fit the pieces together myself, I find that when I’m confident in the ending, I’m impatient to get to it. So it’s probably a good thing I listened to the audiobook because there’s a very good chance I might have skipped ahead unintentionally by reading the book.
Because it is a mystery, I really don’t want to give too much of the story away. So I’ll be keeping this review a little vague. While I definitely enjoyed the plot of the book as well as the relationships between the characters, I felt that the actual pacing of the book was a little off. Sometimes it seemed to drag by to me. One of the main characters continually comes up with theories regarding the mystery. By the end, I was exhausted reading about her theories.
However, while I’m not a huge fan of the execution, I do really appreciate the writing style and the plot that this author came up with. If you’re looking for a mystery youth adult novel, Two Can Keep a Secret may interest you.
When Panic Attacks by David D. Burns
The last book I’m reading is a nonfiction book. I’ve actually been working on this book for a very long time. Since I started my website, in fact! I had this idea that I would read these mental health books and share my reviews of them on my blog. This way people could read them and decide which books may be best for them.
However, I started with quite a hefty book. It’s bursting with information and is difficult for me to get through because I’m not really big on self-help books. I understand that self-help books have helped many people and that’s wonderful! However, I often find that many self-help books have a cookie-cutter method of getting over something or of overcoming an obstacle and I don’t really care for that approach. I believe that each person and each journey is different. While a self-help book may have tools that would be useful, it’s not always a guarantee to get to where the book claims you’ll go.
Back to When Panic Attacks, Dr. Burns gives so much information and so many great tools to implement into your own life that could greatly reduce anxiety. He really does offer these tools to help people help themselves. When it comes to mental health, we can often feel trapped in a cycle, not knowing how to get out without shelling a bunch of money to a therapist. The good news is, there are these self-help books that teach you techniques and reduce stress.
That being said, I do want to warn any readers that this author seems to be very anti-medicine for mental health. I question a lot of this information that he gives regarding medication. I’ve looked at the studies he refers to when discussing medicine and found that several studies are quite dated.
I take medicine when necessary for my mental health and I know that medicine has helped many people. If you choose to read this book and you are on medicine, I strongly recommend that you take what Dr. Burns says about medicine with a grain of salt.
He discusses how medicines aren’t truly effective because of the placebo effect. However, medicines have absolutely helped people. Many of us on mental health medications have tried different medicines with bad results before finding one that worked for us. I question his theory regarding the medicine mostly working on a placebo effect when so many people have tried different medicines until finding one that worked.
Regardless, I wanted to point this out because I’d hate for any reader to feel guilty or make a decision about their medicine based off of this book. So if you choose to read it, keep that in mind.
If you feel that your anxious thoughts are crippling you and you don’t have the finances to pay for a therapist, When Panic Attacks could be a good alternative. It does give you a lot of tools to combat anxious beliefs and thoughts.
So there you have it! Just a few books I’ve been reading! What have you been reading?