Gretchen Rubin

3.5 stars

I love goals. I love making them and tracking them, and I love hearing others' goals and their progress on reaching them. So naturally, I enjoyed Gretchen's project. I appreciated that she included examples of her successes and failures. I liked that she incorporated statistics/studies into her book, but correlated them to her challenges, making them more memorable.

I have to admit, her "Secrets of Adulthood" and "Splendid Truths" were a bit much for me, and she kept repeating them over and over again... After she began including comments from her blog, I also started to tire of that - a few well-placed comments would have been fine, but sometimes she included so many that they went on for pages and simply felt like filler. The book could have easily been reduced by 50-100 pages.

There's nothing new or profound in this book (there usually isn't in this kind of writing) but it was still a fun read.… (mer)

This is not a book. This is a series of poor personal rants, or substandard blog posts at best.

The author is extremely lucky to have so many supportive people -judging by what she says in the book- in her life enabling her to publish such shallow, incoherent, and incomplete personal observations that can only apply to her own life, as if they were "revelations" that can be dropped on the masses to enlighten them!

The readers are not as lucky as the author though. How this book got any star ratings, in any factor or criteria a book can be rated in, higher than 2 stars is really beyond my comprehension.

I created a new shelf, "Won't continue reading", because of this book.… (mer)

I've read a bunch of books on habits, and I wasn't expecting to find anything new here. And indeed, there's nothing groundbreaking in this book. But the way Rubin explains how we create habits -- and more importantly, why some habits stick so easily while others don't -- really resonated with me. I appreciated her approach to categorizing different personality types and how she recognizes that what works for one person will not work for someone else. I think that's something many of these types of books tend to overlook, offering instead a prescriptive, "one size fits all" formula that leaves readers frustrated and wondering what's wrong with them.

Rubin allows us to take an individualized approach to habit setting. However, she does give her admittedly biased opinion on what habits are best to set (i.e. low carb eating) and how to go about it (i.e. abstaining). But even if you never intend to give up eating bread or never sipping from a glass of wine again, there's plenty here to appeal to anyone wanting to improve their day-to-day life.… (mer)