200 Healthy Feasts by Jo McAuley

Having shifted from a high sugar and sedentary lifestyle to healthy eating and regular exercise 3 months ago I was beginning to need to move beyond steamed fish and vegetables, good as they are. This book has offered me inspiration and ways to use ingredients such as lentils, beans and quinoa that I was not so confident with, and in fact offers far more that 200 recipes as many of them have alternatives. I am gluten intolerant but most of these recipes are either naturally gluten free or very easy to adapt.

The book is split usefully into sections on Breakfast & Brunch, Starters & Light Bites, Soups & Stews, Fish & Seafood, Meat & Poultry, Vegetarian and And to Finish... It opens with a useful section on nutrition and the value of high fibre slow energy releasing foods, the importance of 'little and often' before the recipes each nicely illustrated with a full colour plate and well laid out ingredients list and recipe, with alternatives at the end. Usefully, for storecupboard ingredients that might be harder to get hold of, such as harissa and thai curry paste, McAuley gives the recipe for making them from scratch. However, most of the recipes are for four people, and I have a family of three with very different nutritional needs and dividing the ingredients by four is difficult in some cases.  Still, this is definately my favourite of the Hamlyn 200 recipe series so far.

The Intolerant Gourment by Pippa Kendrick

A beautiful cookbook that is as delicious to look at as to cook from. It's a proper foodie cookbook, helping the intolerant cook use and celebrate seasonal changes in ingredients. Kendrick splits her book into the four seasons with a fifth section for Breads and Baking. In her introduction Kendrick provides comprehensive coverage of the ingredients she uses in her receipes that offer alternatives to wheat, gluten and dairy and at the end gives stockists, although many of these once obscure ingredients are now readily available in supermarkets.

I cooked the Greek Salad sans Feta and Lebanese Chicken and adored both. Many of the receipes are naturally low in fat and high in ingredients that release their energy slowly and in a healthy way. This is one of those books I will return to time and time again, not only for the allergen free aspect, but also just to look at, the photography is enticing and the recipes well written and easy to follow.

Tintin: Herge and his Creation

A wonderful book, taking George Remi's creation Herge and the Tintin books in chronological order, showing how they reflected Herge's growing talent and critical contemporary events.

Willpower: Rediscovering our Greatest Strength by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney

There are thousands of books on self-help, but I am averse to the kind of unsubstantiated mantras about thinking yourself into success that so many of them espouse. Baumeister and Teirney's book is different, it is completely evidence based. It cites results that have confounded experimenters and forced them to rethink their current ways of thinking about willpower and self regulation, and so to find new clarity. It speaks about the genetic basis of willpower but also the ways in which we can help ourselves find the ability not to succumb to temptation, be it spending, overeating, or sloth.

The book begins with looking at the Victorian notion of willpower and self denial, and contrasting our current social mores and extremely temptation full modern world. It then moves through experimental evidence about to-do lists, how our willpower is sapped, and, most importantly, how we can conserve it, use it best and what power it has when we instil it in our children (and how to do that!)

Like all really good non-fiction texts, it slotted in with some of what I already understood about my own willpower and those around me, while challenging me, putting a mirror up to some uncomfortable truths and giving me ways to help myself. I have always been strongly self directed, content to be alone.  I am wilful to the point of stubbornness, and I do get up off my butt and get on with stuff, I'm currently doing at least half an hour of exercise 5 days a week to become stronger for walking in the Austrian Alps in the summer.  I work from home, I have a data set that I have to keep up to date with and commitments to my boss, but no externally set deadlines.  I regulate my own workflow, and do have a saying in my head if I don't want to do something: 'if it's worth doing it's worth doing well'.  It is better to get through a task and get it done than to fudge it or to rush through it, 'less haste more speed', I make mistakes if I rush and if I leave things undone I feel, in Baumister and Tierney's term, the monkey on my back.  The monkey is that hopping attention that I am so familiar with, that agitation when I'm trying to get lots done at once.  The mindfulness helps and this book helped me put the jigsaw together.  By making a list the monkey doesn't chatter so much, yesterday I calmly worked through all the stuff on my desk that was there to remind me to do stuff, and am so much calmer.  The book speaks of having a mind like a pool of water rather than the chattering monkey, so just as a pool reacts to a pebble falling in it so the mind can be, reacting completely in proportion to the disturbance then returning to calm.  Yesterday I exhausted my willpower working and when my daughter came home and was whiney about doing her homework my patience snapped and I got angry.  On reflection, it became clear what had gone wrong and that I need to do something, probably meditate, an hour before she comes home from school.  Mediation, or religion if you are so inclined, is important because it allows me to act in a situation rather than react, to see my emotions and feelings as a river that I am sitting on the bank of, to clearly see and understand the patterns of my anxieties and fears and let them pass, not fighting them, just letting them come and go.

59 Seconds: Think a Little Change a Lot by Robert Wiseman

Richard Wiseman is speaking to his friend Sophie, a 'bright, successful thirty-something' when she asks him what he thinks of the self-help industry. 10 minutes into his lecture about the scientific research into happiness Sophie stops Richard, points out she's a busy person, can he give her some genuine effective advice that could be implemented in under a minute. This book enlarges on that idea, a refreshing antidote to the avalanche of self-help literature that is at best misguided and at worst psychologically damaging. I really enjoyed it, finding out where I was going right, happy to be proved wrong and vindicated by many of my uneasy gut feelings that making life better for yourself surely could not be as easy as just visualising yourself thinner, richer, prettier etc etc.




Wiseman splits his book into 10 easy to read sections:

Happiness - the effectiveness (or otherwise) of postitive thinking, diarising, and gratitude

Persuasion - how to interact socially and successfully

Motivation - how to plan, overcome procrastination, and think yourself into motivation

Creativity - destroying the myth of brainstorming, the effects of modern art and green plants

Attraction - seduction, roller coaster rides and the art of dating successfully

Stress - punching it out doesn't work, pets, reducing resentment and blood pressure

Relationships - Velcro, photographs and vocalising

Decision making - two heads are not better than one, how to make effective no regrets decisions, how to harness your unconscious and how to tell if you are being lied to

Parenting - the Mozart myth, baby names, effective praise and marshmallows

Personality - graphology, fingers and thumbs, pets, bedtime and OCEAN / CANOEs

develop the gratidue attitude / place pic of baby in wallet (get back) / hang mirror in kitchen (weight loss) / buy pot plant for office (creativity) / touch people lightly on upper arm (dominance persuasion) / write about relat (appreciation) / deal with liars by using email / praise children's effort not ability / visualize doing not achieveing (plan) / consider your legacy (what will they say about you after death)