Review: Hello, Habits: A Minimalist's Guide to a Better Life

Hello, Habits: A Minimalist's Guide to a Better Life by Fumio Sasaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read quite a few books on habits over the past few years. It seems this is a cottage industry for non-fiction writers that want to write more. This was another. In total, it seemed much like the others that I’ve read. There are many personal stories from the writer and there are some suggestions as to how to build or break habits. This had a different, more personal voice than I’ve seen in other books though. It seems the author kept a diary and used this book as a way to reflect on his life and the habits that have impacted him. He even shares his bad habit of drinking too much and his efforts to successfully eliminate this habit. He also talks about food and exercise, especially running, quite a bit – no surprise. But he also talks at the end of the book about habits of kindness, which was a nice way to end his musings. You get a lot of the personal in the beginning and the ending, which I found the most interesting parts of the book. The bulk of the book is going through a couple of long lists relating to making habits and the values of habits. Here he mixed personal observations with research and quotes. I was surprised that many of the quotes were from William James, famed psychology writer before Freud, and Haruki Murakami, famous writer. The James quotes implied to me that Sasaki started his research on the topic with the basics, and maybe focused on them for the scientific aspects of his book. Or maybe James quotes come up often when Googling habits… The Murakami quotes and mentions show the personal research the author is relating, as Murakami is also a runner who book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” is in a similar vein.

Overall, nothing really mind-bending, but it is a mostly comfortable read. I listened to the audio version of this book, which was slowly read, with long breaks between thoughts that worked well for allowing something to sink in, even at 2x speed. I am rarely happy with long lists in an audiobook, and this one has two long lists. They were too long to really keep track of, but in this case the items, 50 in the longest list, were more like short chapters where the topics merged into other chapters. The organization wasn’t something that you needed to rely on to understand the point of the book. So that worked OK here, which was good because the points all ran together when listening.

I forgot to carp on this in the first version of the review:
I should also mention a pet peeve that occurred with this audiobook. I greatly enjoy when the places I live in or grew up in show up in books. I'm from a small town and live in a small suburb. I think this background makes me more interested in familiar locations showing up in books. It helps me feel a comradery with the author. So this book mentions the neighboring suburb, Naperville, as a place where some research took place. Naperville is pronounced with a long a, but the narrator pronounced it with a short a, like taking a nap. I've made this point before, but I know producing an audiobook is an expensive proposition for a publisher, and there often aren't more than a handful of proper names in a non-fiction book (that goes for this one). Why can't they get the pronunciations correct? This was the second audiobook in a row that mentioned one of my cities, and flubbed the name.

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