I read self-help books occasionally. I think there’s good advice to be gained—I have learned things—but they are so very different from the other types of books I read that I find it hard to do enough of a mental re-set. A lot of self-help books are set up for people who don’t want to read them, which is alienating for me, who is always looking forward to reading everything. These books have their sections working independently assuming a reader might not read them in order, or not read all of them at all, so there’s no accumulative knowledge and things are repeated over and over. Sort of like textbooks, but like textbooks for a class that doesn’t exist—no one HAS to read them. So it is assumed that the reader is skimming for one or two particular pieces of knowledge, and those are repeated too. There’s a lot of filler. The reading level is low. There’s an attempt to make all the examples generic, in case, not being able to see ourselves mirrored exactly we flee. I find many self-help books an exhausting exercise in being talked down to. But, I guess, it works for many people, probably the people who are taking what they need and ignoring the rest—I read every page of every book with scrupulous attention whether I care or not, including the copyright page, so it is probably my own fault I am mad sometimes.

I am mad at Your Second Life Begins When You Realize You Only Have One by Raphaelle Giordano. This is a self-help book disguised as a novel for no known reason. In it, an incorrigible idiot named Camille is driving in the woods when her car breaks down in the dark and rain. She has to go to a big strange house and beg for assistance, and if you were imagining this is where Dr. Frank N. Furter appears to teach Camille how to have a sexual awakening like Janet in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, you aren’t the only one. Disappointingly, it’s not Frank but Claude, a “routine-ologist” (I know!) who, seeing Camille’s despair, offers to teach her to snap out her malaise by shaking up her routine…but I did picture Claude as Tim Curry in bondage gear for the rest of the book. This only made it slightly less irritating.

I thought writing this book as a novel was extremely dumb and annoying but this book has sold THREE MILLION COPIES so what do I know. So this review does not tell you as much about the book as about me—I am not in the zeitgeist and I am impatient, and I like complexity. Camille is written to be I guess what someone thinks your standard “overwhelmed mom” in the 21st century is, I guess hoping to both particularize the advice but also make it a generic enough example that readers can easily imagine themselves into the story. Instead, it is tedious to read about a woman with no characteristics. She in a job in “sales” that she does not enjoy, a marriage she is doesn’t like with a child she loves but doesn’t play with because she imagines herself too old for games?? (I’m not a parent, but are there really people who have children on purpose hoping to never play with them?)

The odd thing is, most of Giodrano/Claude’s advice is decent: Throw away everything in your life, literally and figuratively, that doesn’t serve you. Keep a diary of your accomplishments and read it when you are feeling low. Make time for sillyness. Do box breathing. Create SMART goals. Of course, neither Giordano nor Claude invented most of these ideas—most of the best stuff in the book is borrowed. You could just read the two page appendix at the end that lists all the actual advice, get a bunch of good suggestions and skip the story about Camille getting in a grade 9-style years-long name-calling battle with a colleague and then solving it all with one kind word! Or deciding to lose 10 pounds and then after she has done so realizing that weight doesn’t matter (there’s a weird irrelevant streak of body-shaming throughout this pseudo-novel). When she finally launches a haute-couture line by buying cheap cotton separates on the internet and customizing them (I don’t think that’s what haute couture is???) and then becomes very successful, and we learn that Claude is actually not a routine-ologist (Camille is SHOCKED by this, because Camille has the IQ of a banana). I wondered if the whole book would wind up being a dream but anyway, I hated this very much and if I ever meet those three million people, I guess it is going to be awkward.

But my faith in self-help remains. I went right ahead and read another book in the genre, such is the roulette of library holds. And Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman was great, inspiring and interesting and well-written. The subtitle is “Time Management for Mortals” and it is, unsurprisingly, about how the human conundrum of trying to get more done than we can get done, and being endlessly distracted and overwhelmed, is brought on and exacerbated by a constant low-grade thrum of the fear of death. Instead of concocting fictional examples of people who sound like nobody or like lunatics, Burkeman uses real examples of writers like Schopenhaur and Kafka working through the challenge of how time works, and how we can work within it, or with it, or through it. Burkeman also uses examples from his own life, and the wider world.

This is a smart book and gently funny, and while it gives some good advice a lot of it is on the metaphysical level—I didn’t walk away with lessons like to buy a little address book and put happy memories and successes in alphabetical order in there so I can always look them up and feel better about my life, the way Giordano (er, Claude) advises. There’s more about how to feel about my place in the universe, how to separate the wheat from the chafe in terms of what I’m trying to do in a day, and also what is ethical to prioritize. It is, honestly, not as fun to write about Burkeman’s book as Giordano’s even though it is much much better to read Burkeman’s. Do I enjoy writing snarky reviews? Who am I??

A lot of self-help is very, well, self-absorbed. We do need books that allow us to work productively on the self—I do appreciate books like that when they aren’t dumb, I swear—but it would be nice if we could do that in the context of who we are in the wider world. Camille doesn’t so much as buy a birthday card or send a checkin text to a pal in her whole dumb book, so obsessed is she with making herself happy. Burkeman’s book focusses at least occasionally on the finite confines of not only mortal lives but the breathing earth around us, and how we might spend our time so that we are somewhat in harmony or even in support of the wider world.

Basically, Giordano’s book struck me as unpleasant and facile but did contain some useful tools, and Burkeman’s book was a great read and thought-provoking but I don’t know if I exactly walked away with any concrete steps to take. Self-help is whatever you want for your actual self, I suppose is my advice.

PS—I got the idea to read 4000 Weeks from the Instagram account The Cat’s Bookshelf, which is a great account to follow if you, like me, have so many books to read at home that you are secretly hoping to be sent to jail sometime soon for some uninterrupted reading time, and yet you also love to be distracted by new excellent things to read. Plus there’s sometimes photos of a cat.