Book of the Day Roundup: November 24-28, 2025
Happy Habits
A Happier, Healthier Life One Minute at a Time
Tal Ben-Shahar
Alcove Press
Hardcover $24.99 (160pp)
979-889242358-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Tal Ben-Shahar’s encouraging self-help book is about why people’s efforts to change so often fail. It suggests strategies for turning failure and frustration into success, well-being, and fulfillment.
Asserting that failures to make lasting change are the result of either having set goals that are too ambitious or using ineffective methods, the book draws upon positive psychology, the science of habit formation, studies in brain neuroplasticity, and personal experiences to argue that small, consistent actions lead to meaningful, lasting change. In a conversational tone, it investigates the spiritual, intellectual, relational, physical, and emotional facets of happiness and reveals the power of Minimum Viable Interventions (MVIs) to effect positive change.
Clear, step-by-step instructions for performing the suggested actions and exercises appear. The book demonstrates, for example, how small acts of kindness increase happiness for both the giver and the receiver. It also asserts that three-minute meditations can improve focus and reduce anxiety, while writing down five things to be grateful for can improve one’s mood, sleep, and health. Other tips include seeking short daily bursts of high-intensity exercise, like stair-climbing, to improve one’s fitness and better one’s mood. Even the simple act of hugging is recommended to release oxytocin, elevating one’s mood and reducing one’s stress levels.
Adaptable to individual schedules and needs, the book encourages resolving one’s most pressing issues first. After celebrating such achievements, it says, people can draw on their resultant confidence boosts to address next challenges. As such, its program is incremental, building successes upon successes in an ever-ascending spiral up.
Happy Habits is an optimistic self-help guide to making small, accessible changes that lead to big, lasting results.
KRISTINE MORRIS (October 17, 2025)
Lisa’s Journey
Effie Lada
Clavis
Hardcover $21.95 (40pp)
979-889063213-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In the big city where Lisa lives, all she hears is silence, and all she sees are people on their phones. Wanting to help people see beauty again, she sets off through the countryside, through a forest, through a labyrinth, to the sea, across snowy hills, and, finally, to the fantasy factory at the edge of the world, where she sparks the fires of imagination once more. Gorgeous watercolor illustrations follow her quest to resuscitate magic in this dreamlike tale.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 17, 2025)
Lambs in Winter
Sketches of a Vermont Life Through Seasons of Change
Alexis Lathem
Bright Leaf
Softcover $24.95 (208pp)
978-1-62534-901-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Alexis Lathem’s enchanting essay collection Lambs in Winter celebrates simplified living on the small farm where Lathem raises sheep and cultivates vegetables with her husband. Their rural three acres in Vermont structure their lives, enabling them to foster a relationship with wild creatures and perceive what it “means to live as a human being inside a greater community of life.”
Thoughtful personal reflections on Lathem’s complicated childhood in Brooklyn and the challenges of bottle-feeding lambs during New England cold fronts populate the book, which also acknowledges urgent global issues like the mistreatment of migrant workers and the “climate chaos” that becomes inevitable as countries, including Mexico, lose their farms to drought. But as populations increase and climates become less hospitable, Lathem asserts, subsistence farming could be a source of flexibility and resilience. Humans, she reminds her audience, were “part-time farmers” for thousands of years, prior to modern industrial farming.
This nuanced text resists romanticizing pastoral life. It notes, for instance, that bottle-fed lambs often grow up to be aggressive and is forthright about the sadness of a favorite ewe’s death. While Lathem favors vegetarianism, she notes that plowing land and clearing trees for agriculture is another kind of violence to the earth. She also observes that healthy, biodiverse grasslands, while more resilient than industrial agricultural monocultures, may be “overrated” as a climate solution.
The prose is lovely and compelling, as with the description of a new trail in the woods as beautiful “in the way a poem is especially beautiful on a first reading.” Elsewhere, it suggests that recognizing that all animals have mysterious inner lives is akin to admitting “wonder into our daily lives…alive with consciousness and empathy, language and music.”
Lambs in Winter is a luminous essay collection about rural life and honoring the natural world.
KRISTEN RABE (October 17, 2025)
Story Work
Field Notes on Self-Discovery and Reclaiming Your Narrative
GG Renee Hill
Broadleaf Books
Softcover $19.99 (224pp)
979-888983265-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
GG Renee Hill’s Story Work is about breaking the chains of limiting beliefs by creatively reframing one’s internalized personal stories.
Conversational, thoughtful, and encouraging, this book explores how one’s identity, beliefs, and concepts of “good” and “bad” are formed and shaped by stories rooted in cultural, family, and religious histories, serving as templates for human behavior. Housed in the unconscious, these socially sanctioned narratives become stories that can stifle personal authenticity and autonomy. The text argues that inner exploration, overcoming the fear of vulnerability, using creativity as a tool for healing, and reframing limiting internalized stories are the keys to wholeness and authenticity.
Supporting its arguments with research in fields as diverse as neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality, the book also includes personal anecdotes of struggle and triumph. It illuminates the complex and long-lasting issues that arise from dysfunctional early family life and includes insights into cultural expectations specific to Black women. Its practical and accessible suggestions for self-care include thought labeling and taking an unflinching look at one’s personal values. Prompts for reflection are included at the end of each chapter.
Satisfying and hopeful, the book asserts that vulnerability is not a weakness to be feared, but a strength that can help forge connections with others. Rather than being “selfish,” it claims, self-care is essential for well-being. Most of all, it emphasizes that the internalized stories that lead to limiting beliefs and negative self-image are not written in stone; they can be rewritten and revised at any time to reflect one’s personal truths.
Story Work is an empowering self-help guide about using creativity as a tool for healing, authenticity, and wholeness.
KRISTINE MORRIS (October 17, 2025)
School Yearbook
The Untold Story of a Cringey Tradition and Its Digital Afterlife
Kate Eichhorn
University of Chicago Press
Hardcover $25.00 (232pp)
978-0-226-80951-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Kate Eichhorn’s School Yearbook is an illuminating study of the meanings and uses of yearbooks—“semipublic documents” with surprising cultural and political value.
The Yale Banner, circa 1841, is widely considered the first yearbook. By the early 1900s, yearbooks had developed a standard structure, including graduating seniors’ photographs and quotes, “most likely to” lists, and faculty and campus groups.
Yearbooks are “backward-looking in their nostalgia,” the book argues, their conventional format perpetuating biases: they have condoned blackface and KKK links, while the drape for girls’ portraits and tuxedo for boys’ reinforces a gender binary. And the issue of censorship appears in microcosm: Women’s and gay liberation movements seem invisible in the yearbooks of the 1970s to 1980s. Today, teenage pregnancies and mentions of murders by police tend to be expunged. Historical airbrushing extended to yearbooks produced in distressing situations, such as Native American residential schools and Japanese internment camps.
Alongside abundant black-and-white reproductions, the text explores the role yearbooks play in “reputation management”: they appear with regularity as evidence in trials and investigations, as with Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearing and after the mass shooting at Columbine High School. They also represent a vast online data source. Indeed, digitized archives contain hundreds of thousands of yearbooks, both a boon and a concern: it eased Eichhorn’s research process during COVID-19; despite lawsuits, Ancestry.com continues to make free use of yearbook images in their advertising.
In energetic style, School Yearbook traces the checkered history of these “memory albums” that attract myriad connotations and agendas.
REBECCA FOSTER (October 17, 2025)
Kathy Young
