Readings of 2014, February Edition, Part 1

Well, February was quite the doozy for me in terms of number of books read. My grand total for the month was 7, which brought me up to 8 for the year(just managed to get through Walden in January).

To be fair, some of those reads were a little on the fluffy side, but I viewed my first 2 books as palette cleansers of sorts, analogous to the pickled ginger you eat in between different sushi rolls.

Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson:

If you're looking for an incredibly easy read, that still has a bit of substance to it, I would look no further than this book. It is far from mind-blowing, but the ideas are presented in an easy to grasp way.

If you don't feel the need to but the book, you're in luck, because my cliff notes version will be rather sufficient. 2 mice and 2 little people(people who are the size of mice) live in a maze and need to eat cheese to survive. They don't know how the cheese gets to the various cheese stations, but it just does. The story starts off with the 2 mice and 2 little people having found a vast amount of cheese at a cheese station, so the 2 little people decide to hang up their running shoes and move their homes closer to the cheese; while the mice always keep their shoes around their neck and commute back to their original home. The mice and the little people are enjoying the comforts of the cheese for a long time, until one day the cheese runs out. The mice then move on to look for cheese, while the little people stick around angry that the cheese is gone and hoping that it comes back. This persists almost until the point of starvation, when one of the little people decides to go venture out in the maze in search of cheese while the other stays back. Eventually, he finds the mice at a cheese station and has his fill, while the fate of the other little person is left a mystery.

Moral of the story: Don't get too comfortable in your current situation and embrace change, otherwise you may starve to death.

F*ck! I'm in My Twenties by Emma Koenig:

This is another easy read... not sure if I can even call it that though, seeing as it is just a compilation of various sketches that depict the struggles of post-college twenty-somethings. However, seeing as I am also a post-college twenty-something, I was able very easily able to relate.

Where as "Who Moved My Cheese" had some substance to it, this book is thoroughly devoid of substance, it is simply a series of (pretty funny)rants.

I wouldn't recommend buying it, but what I would recommend is going to your nearest bookstore with a coffee shop, grabbing it from the shelf and reading it while waiting for your coffee, because that is precisely the time it will take to finish.