February 2023 Reading List

The third book in the Eternity Springs series by Emily March. I read book 1, Angel’s Rest in December 2022, and book 2, Hummingbird Lake in January 2023.

In Heartache Falls we delve into the life of Ali Timberlake as her children have all left home and how she is coping with such a big change especially with her husband Mac, a successful judge.

As the title suggests it really is a time of great struggle for Ali and how she has to rediscover what she really wants in life. And does that include her busy husband who doesn’t pay her the attention she needs?

A bit of a tough story to listen to but really shows that we are always trying to discover who we are and what we want to do at any age.

Narrated by Kathe Mazur, it runs for 9 hours and 10 minutes.

I borrowed this book from the library based on the use of “Sewing” in the title. I’m reading more books based on the world wars so I was looking forward to how these two topics would go together. But they never did.

When I was halfway through I was thinking, surely it’s going to mention sewing soon. And it does eventually. Once. Yep, only once. As a codeword for why people were meeting. It really was a misleading title and should be changed. Even the cover with the lady in red, is not how I imagined the main character – her clothing would not have been so expensive looking.

The story itself was interesting and something that was new to me. The Jews of Denmark were helped by their non-Jewish countrymen to escape to Sweden during World War Two. The risks people took were inspiring.

The first saw Jamie Kern Lima give a presentation on the Tony Robbins online seminar I watched in January this year. Her presentation was full of useful nuggets of information I hadn’t heard before. My favourite was:

Rejection is God’s Protection.

Jamie Kern Lima

So I wanted to learn more about her, and it’s all in her book Believe It.

Jamie built her cosmetics brand IT Cosmetics to deal with her skin condition rosacea, She did the hard yards appearing hundreds of times on infomercials where you had to reach high sales targets to be able to return next time.

Having a WHY kept her moving forward, even when it got tough, really tough. Being authentic built her brand. Chose brave over being liked. Which all led her to sell her company for a staggering amount.

It’s a great read for business owners or wannabe business owners.

Atomic Habits is everywhere. In bookstores. On all GoodReads pages. Amazon. Facebook groups. Everywhere. I finally succumbed.

We all have habits, both good and bad, and of course we want them all to be good habits. Clear covers both – how to get good habits and how to eliminate bad habits using his four step model – cue, craving, response, and reward.

He talks about the use of systems not goals.

Goals are for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.

James Clear

And having habits of any size as part of a system leads to remarkable results. Want a new habit of reading before bed? Make it small. Make it doable in 2 minutes. Read one page.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Not all of it was new information but it is presented in such an actionable way that we can all improve our lives following the methodology presented in this book.