No Nonsense Spirituality by Brittney L. Hartley
I read No Nonsense Spirituality for a real life book club. I hated it. It was awful and earned my first very rare one star rating of the year. A quick rundown of some of the things I loathed about this book in no particular order:
- The writing is extremely poor. Really, it just wasn’t pleasant to read or even very coherent.
- There are several typos. My favorite typo, though, was where she wrote oxycontin instead of oxytocin: “When we connect with characters in a story, our brains release oxycontin, which is associated with empathy and relationship building.”
- The book was so incredibly rambly and repetitive. So much was stream of consciousness talking in circles. There were also random topic changes without warning, often going back to what was being said before the topic change and also without warning.
- It’s so boring. So incredibly boring. I never DNF books and if it wasn’t for being a book club book I absolutely would’ve DNF’d this one. It was just that bad.
- It could’ve been so much shorter. Basically, find spirituality wherever you want and in everything you can. The end. Sorry I spoiled it for you.
- For someone who repeatedly says she is an atheist the author talks about finding God, even if it’s not religion God, a whole lot which I just found very strange.
- I couldn’t figure out if the intended audience is exmormons or general non-religious people seeking spirituality. The Mormon issues she brings up are very specific and I get that even though she says she’s “studied” pretty much everything it’s really Mormonism she’s truly familiar with. There were a couple attacks on the Mormon church and, really, attack away. I get it. It’s just that they were very much out of place and nonsensical in context making me think she’s either not as deconstructed as she claims or she’s actually writing just for exmormons.
- The author is on the young side, especially for presenting herself as an expert in finding non-religious spirituality, but thinks she is incredibly wise and has all the answers. I do wonder if as she gets older if she’ll come to be embarrassed by what she wrote in this book.
- The author thinks a whole lot of herself and comes across as arrogant and condescending.
- She got a few things absolutely wrong which makes her thinking she’s so incredibly smart rather amusing. For example, she tells the (false, but often repeated) story that the Lord changed Saul’s name to Paul on the road to Damascus. The problem is that’s not supported by the New Testament story Paul told of what happened. As was the case with many people at the time, he had two names. Saul was his Hebrew name. Paul was his Roman name. He always had both names. He just began using the Latinized version when he started mostly preaching in the Roman world.
- It really feels like the author left a high demand religion but couldn’t quite get comfortable and so went down an adjacent but also high demand path.
- As Meredith Brooks once sang, “Pop psychology words don’t mean anything, When you throw them around to be cool.” That’s pretty much how I feel about this book (actually, go listen to Cosmic Woo Woo in its entirety and you’ll get more out of it about how to live your life than you will from this book).
- I’m truly not sure what the goal of the book is. It’s very random like she threw together stuff she’s said on TikTok (apparently she’s a popular exmo TikToker… I’ve never run into her videos though so I can’t be sure whether what I’m thinking here is true or not). As a self-help book, or a book intended to help people find spirituality without religion, it’s a failure. But I think that was her goal. Maybe.
- The book is full of very black and white thinking. Repeatedly she indicates either you find spirituality (which you can find in everything) or you want to die (she really likes the term nihilism). Again this feels like a not fully deconstructed exmormon talking.
- It was almost like she was trying to create a whole new religion (or maybe fill in what she lost when she left her very high demand religion) out of spirituality. I have a friend who left Mormonism years ago and dove into stuff like the author describes and ended up just as deep in a high demand something. She has cautioned others to not do that because it’s just as unhealthy. My friend would probably have been much better at writing this book than the author to be honest.
- So much of what she said is just incredibly obvious. If she didn’t already know this stuff and do this stuff before “studying,” well, I feel sorry for her.
- By the end my brain was screaming “Oh my gosh shut up already!” She clearly could not figure out how to end the book. She kept talking in circles seemingly forever until she finally, mercifully, quit writing.
Needless to say I don’t even sorta recommend this book at all. Just skip it. After all, I’ve already spoiled what its trying to say thereby saving you the almost ten hours of life that I’ll never get back because I read the whole thing.
1 (out of 5) Stars
Books Read in 2024: 31
Pages Read in 2024: 11,492
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