Nonfiction Book Reviews

I picked up The Only 127 Things You Need: A Guide to Life’s Essentials by Donna Wilkinson because the title caught my eye.  The only 127 things in the whole world that you need?  Why 127?  Why not 128 or 152 or 101?  I started reading it over lunch at the park, and was surprised by the format.  I was expecting a list of 127 things - not an essay style of writing.  That’s not necessarily good or bad - it just wasn’t what I was expecting.

It was fairly interesting reading - it basically touches on every part of your life: Nutrition, sleeping, clothing, shelter, love, and spiritual stuff like doing good unto others, serving others, meditation, etc.

There were a couple of things that bothered me; one of the biggest being that the author repeated the information quite often.  And she wasn’t just repeating the same concepts, but was repeating the same sentences, word for word.  That was a bit disconcerting.  I think she was trying to state the idea in the chapter, then sum it up at the end of the chapter, but to me, it just came across as her trying to pad her word count.  If I had been her editor, I would have been slashing quite a bit of it out.

I did think that the idea was an interesting one, and to an extent, it worked: To give a guide to the basics of how to live your life.  When we were born, we didn’t pop out complete with an instruction manual.  This book tries to fill that gap.  But if you’ve read many womens’ magazines or watched much daytime TV like Oprah, you’ll know most all of this stuff already.  It was kinda fun to have it all in one place though.

Overall, I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.  There simply weren’t enough new or exciting concepts to warrant anything higher.

Hava

PS For those who are interested, no, there never is a reason given that there are only 127 items, and not another random number. Just in case you were curious…