Better Reading BE: Feeling Good in February

Every month we do a Facebook LIVE that focusses on titles we feel inspire, educate, empower and nurture readers. We’re looking for special books: books written by experts in their field, books that celebrate women, and books that educate. Subjects that are covered include mindfulness and meditation, healing and health, powerful memoirs, and self-development. Click here to watch our February BE Live event.

BE Book of the Month

When We Become Strangers by Maggie Hamilton

Why we love it: We’re more connected, yet lonelier than ever… here Maggie Hamilton provides practical ways to combat the alarming rise of loneliness and solutions to combat social isolation in our families and communities.

What it’s about: After decades of affluence, we’re busier than ever, but leaving the house less and less. While we renovate our homes and bodies, and binge on Netflix, Uber Eats, and online shopping, depression and anxiety is soaring. Is it possible that our society’s constant need for connectivity is messing with our brains, and alienating us from what’s really important? Is this why we’re losing our ability to engage meaningfully with our communities, or stay in touch with the natural world? Maggie Hamilton, author of What Men Don’t Talk About, What’s Happening to Our Boys? and What’s Happening to Our Girls? explores our growing loneliness with care and rigour, and proposes practical solutions and an uplifting vision to combat the increasing social isolation in our families and communities.

I’m So Effing Tired by Amy Shah

Why we love it: Easy to understand language about and a proven plan to beat burnout, boost your energy and reclaim your life. In just two weeks, you’ll feel your energy surge. In three months, you’ll feel like a whole new person. It’s time to regain the energy you’ve lost, so you can get back to the life you want to live.

What it’s about: Are you feeling overwhelmed, overstressed, and overtired? If so, you’re not alone – and you don’t have to settle for feeling this way. Inspired by her personal wellness journey, Dr. Amy Shah has created this program so that you can regain your energy and reclaim your life. The key is tapping into the powerful energy trifecta: the complex, interconnected relationship between your gut, your immune system, and your hormones. Drawing on the latest science and her work helping thousands of clients, Dr. Shah explains how to transform your life by changing: What you eat, when you eat and why you’re stressed.

Raising Girls Who Like Themselves by Kasey Edwards and Dr Christopher Scanlon

Why we love it: This explores why seven specific qualities are important, what you can do to instil them within your daughter, and the obstacles that you may need to tackle. Filled with chapter recaps, personal anecdotes, and quizzes, this book is designed to help you process, learn and incorporate these techniques in the way you parent.

What it’s about: Free of parental guilt and grounded in research, this book is imbued with the warmth and wit of a mum and dad who are in the same parenting trenches as you. Packed with practical, evidence-based advice, it is an indispensable guide to raising a girl who is happy and confident in herself.

Special mentions…

Soul of a Woman by Isabel Allende

The wise, warm, defiant new book from literary legend Isabel Allende – a meditation on power, feminism and what it means to be a woman. As a child, Isabel Allende watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the first wave of feminism. She has seen what has been accomplished by the movement in the course of her lifetime. With this book, Allende hopes to ‘light the torch of our daughters and granddaughters with mine. They will have to live for us, as we lived for our mothers, and carry on with the work still left to be finished.’ We’ll be discussing this book more next month as well.