2024 Book Reviews

Book 1

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

Time Elapsed: 9 days to read

Rating: 9/10

This book was the perfect read to kick off 2024 with a bang. It had been on my reading list for quite some time, and I received it as a Christmas gift from my sister. It is Alderton’s memoir but does not read like other memoirs I have read in the past. In fact, it almost reads like fiction if not for the complete soul bearing and gut-wrenching honesty and growth. Alderton had such an interesting life in her 20s, nothing like I have experienced, which is why it read like fiction to me at times. But the deeper you get into the book, it becomes less like fiction and starts to relate to everyone, at least that is how I found it.

            Books rarely make me cry, but this one was a rollercoaster of emotions that I found myself able to relate to by the end. With Florence’s cancer diagnosis and with chapters ‘thirty’ and ‘enough’ about finally choosing yourself after a long and tedious road. It was when she repeated “I am enough” that I realized, although we all have vastly different life experiences, we can all struggle through the same feelings of emptiness or inadequacy.

            This book was a rollercoaster of good times and hard times, but I found myself learning along with Dolly about the highs and lows and in-betweens of life and I enjoyed the book immensely. When asked why I liked the book so much at first, I responded ‘because it is nothing like my life’. It is a completely different life than the one I have led with an even more compelling way of looking at the same problems, which is sometimes exactly what you need to help yourself out of what you’re in. Shift your paradigm and it can show you exactly what you have been missing. One of my other favorite writers, Pierce Brown, said recently something along the lines of, “Those who never read their enemies works are destined to be ignorant.” Now while Alderton is nowhere close to an enemy, she still has completely different viewpoints than myself, and it is increasingly important to see new viewpoints so as to learn and grown and not be stagnant water in a canal in summer, because all that does is breed mosquitos.

Book 2: The world is on fire but we’re still buying shoes by Alec Leach

Time Elapsed: 4 days

Rating: 8/10

This book is a great start for people just starting to dip their toes in the water of sustainability. It is short and concise without being overwhelming or too heady. It is a quick read with great graphics and explications. The author, Alec Leach, talks about the main ways that fashion draws us in and why we think we can’t live without it. At the end also offers solutions and small steps to take to just do a little bit for the planet. He states multiple times that “we don’t need everyone to be perfect. We just need most people to do better” which is applicable to many parts of life, not just sustainability.

One of my favorite parts that Leach talks about is to view buying clothes as taking on another relationship. We have a relationship with each piece of clothing in our closets and some spark joy and some spark feelings of regret or failure. He says to view shopping as creating new relationships, so that this can help us see how important each piece in our closet is to us or how detrimental it could be to our lives. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in sustainability or any area of the fashion industry.