Can a single book be responsible for a book slump?
The Good Life is my argument for yes.
Over the years, I’ve found the way to keep reading is to make sure I have multiple different streams of books. My main streams are as follows:
The fiction book - Trashy, zero effort, likely just another space opera.
The easy non-fiction book. Probably written in the last 5 years, history about a person, company or phenomenon.
The hard book - something that takes a little thinking to read, usually due to abstract nature or language difficulties.
This year, with the goal to read 10 books in Chinese, category three is booked up. The Good Life is supposed to be a reasonable book to keep me reading when didn’t have the energy to read or listen in Chinese, and the Harvard Study is an immensely fascinating topic, but this book is bad.
It leans heavily into anecdotes from the study, only to combine such anecdotes with purple phrases about how we should live life (with forgiveness and cheerfulness). I can get behind the core message, but every chapter I just wanted to put the book down.
So 5 months have gone by, and I’ve made my way through 4 Chinese books and nothing in English non-fiction, the information river plugged up by this blockage. Finally I’ve decided to just put it down and rely on insights already gleaned from Triumphs of Experience.