By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

With a new year comes fresh starts, setting goals, and resolutions. To make these happen we need tools – and what better tool than a good book! My book list below includes a new book about inspiration that lead to my choice of a “word of the year,” and includes books for using time wisely, achieving goals, building better habits, connecting with family, living more with less stuff, and living with more joy.

I’ll also be giving away one copy of the first book, Dare to Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration in Work and Life to one of my readers! To enter, subscribe to the Being in Community email newsletter and then comment below with your interest, and your New Year’s reading (current subscribers need only comment). Last day to enter is Friday, January 9^th at 11:59 pm EST, US addresses only please. All email subscribers also get access to my Annual Reflection and Planning printable, a tool many of my readers have found very useful. May you enjoy a joyful and fruitful 2020!

Resolve to stay inspired.

Dare to Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration in Work and Life by Allison Holzer, Sandra Spataro, and Jen Grace Baron

This is my New Year reading, and dare I say that I am already inspired? I pre-ordered this book as soon as I heard about it from my friend Allison Holzer, one of the authors, and I had already been following InspireCorps’ work since its inception. There is so much great material in this book, which explores the lesser researched field of inspiration, and offers ideas for how to engineer inspiration to better serve both work and life. “Simply put, when individuals feel inspired, they are more inclined to build stronger connections and community with others,’ write the authors. In addition to numerous examples of how different individuals spark and nurture inspiration, Holzer, Spataro and Baron share eighteen “engines of inspiration” with useful explanations for how to use the one or two that work best for each individual. I am enjoying this book so much and can’t wait to try some of the ideas to inspire my work this year! One of my readers can receive a copy of this book by subscribing to my email newsletter and commenting below. Purchase the Dare to Inspire on Indiebound here (affiliate link), Amazon here (affiliate link) and Audible here (affiliate link).

Resolve to use time wisely and well.

Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam

I’m a huge fan of Laura Vanderkam’s writing on productivity and time management. I’ve read all her books on the topic, and have reviewed and recommend two others on the blog as well: Juliet’s School of Possibilities (reviewed here, a great shorter book by her if you can’t commit to reading a longer one) and I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time (reviewed here). Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done is my favorite, because it drills down to the essence of why we think about using our time in the first place—not just to be more productive, but to use our time to live full and meaningful lives with our loved ones in the limited time we have. Based on a time perception and time diary study Vanderkam did of almost one hundred people who have families with children and who work full time, Vanderkam came up with “the secrets of people who have all the time in the world.” They are: 1-Tend your garden. 2-Make life memorable. 3-Don’t fill time. 4-Linger. 5-Invest in your happiness. 6- Let it go. And 7- People are a good use of time. You can read my full review of Off the Clock here. Purchase it on IndieBound here (affiliate link), Amazon here (affiliate link), and Audible here (affiliate link).

Resolve to achieve goals.

Your Best Year Ever: A Five-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals by Michael Hyatt.

I extensively reviewed this excellent book by leadership and productivity guru Michael Hyatt on this blog post and this one. Your Best Year Ever is a readable and useful book of steps for effectively achieving both personal and professional goals based on some of the latest research on human behavior and motivation. Three of my biggest takeaways was how regret can be a force for change, gratitude can contribute to goal achievement, and working on goals in community helps us to better achieve them. Purchase Your Best Year Ever on Indiebound here (affiliate link), Amazon here (affiliate link), and Audible here (affiliate link).

Resolve to build better habits.

Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin

There are countless books on building habits, but this one stands out. In Better than Before, Rubin does not take a “one size fits all” approach when it comes to building good habits (and breaking bad ones). She instead describes “Four Tendencies” that people fall under when it comes to keeping habits: obliger, questioner, rebel, and upholder. As a tendency, this means that no one is boxed into any one category, but a general trend towards a certain type of behavior. An “obliger” is someone who tends to follow through and fulfill tasks if there are others dependent on them. A ”questioner” questions everything until fully convinced before doing something or meeting an expectation. A “rebel” resists all rules, whether imposed internally or externally, and an “upholder” is able to meet both internal expectations and external ones. For people with each of these tendencies, Rubin offers suggestions for how they can harness those tendencies to best build up good habits. Read my full review of the book here. Purchase Better than Before on Indiebound here (affiliate link), on Amazon here (affiliate link), and on Audible here (affiliate link).

Resolve to build stronger connections with family

The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids by Sarah Mackenzie

I knew all about the benefits of reading picture books aloud to young children. But The Read-Aloud Family took it to an entirely new level – that the benefits of reading together continue even after children have learned to read on their own. I became a zealot for reading aloud together with my kids as soon as I had finished this book – for all the benefits of reading aloud, the biggest and most important benefit to me, which Mackenzie goes into great detail in The Read-Aloud Family, is the way reading together builds lasting connections. As a family we have built stronger connections by reading aloud and listening to books together. A long drive on our way to Montreal and back is marked by all of us listening to Jennifer Neilson’s middle grade novel, A Night Divided. We’ve made memories reading the Little House series together and visiting Almanzo Wilder’s farm in upstate New York. Several books have sparked wonderful conversations with my children. It’s become a fun game trying to find books that we can call enjoy. We have recently discovered The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency book series on audio, and it is great fun. I highly recommend this book, as well as The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in an Age of Distraction by Meghan Cox Gurdon, which I reviewed extensively here. Purchase The Read-Aloud Family from Indiebound here (affiliate link), Amazon here (affiliate link), and Audible here (affiliate link).

Resolve to live more with less stuff.

The Grace of Enough: Pursing Less and Living More in a Throwaway Culture by Haley Stewart

Almost everyone wants to declutter these days, and the books and television series abound in different books about how to empty our lives with all the stuff weighing us down. Most of these books and articles fail to address the root cause of all the stuff we keep accumulating. Haley Stewart’s book, The Grace of Enough, goes to the root cause. This is not a book about how to organize your closet or fold your clothing in a certain way. Rather, the Grace of Enough is a book for everyone who wants to live more with less that is not just about minimalism and frugality, but about embracing the abundance God has for us when we resist the allure of a throwaway culture. In the book, Stewart describes how she and her husband sold their house in Florida and moved to a sustainable farm in Texas to do a one year internship. Paring down their lives to the bare essentials so they could fit everything into a small flat with one bathroom that had a compost toilet, they spent one year enjoying life in a different way than what seemed normal and expected, and Stewart describes some of the lessons she learned and how they still implement them in their return to suburban life with a radically different perspective. You can read my extensive review of this book here. Purchase The Grace of Enough from Indiebound here (affiliate link), Amazon here (affiliate link), and Audible here (affiliate link).

Resolve to live with more joy.

Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church by Phoebe Farag Mikhail

Is your word of the year JOY? My own book, Putting Joy into Practice, is the book for you. In it I describe seven practices that help us reorient ourselves to live lives of joy – even in the midst of struggles. Each practice includes stories from church history and contemporary times to connect the concept to living examples, and is followed by specific ways we can integrate it into our lives. So many people who have read the book already have found it helpful. You can learn more about it, watch me speak about it, or listen to audio interviews and podcasts about it here.

“Joy, like love, is not a lonely experience. Joy is something experienced in communion and community with God and with others—our families, friends, neighbors … even, inexplicably, our enemies. Joy can’t be sought after the way pleasures can be. Rather, joy is a gift given from a Giver who desires to give, not just occasionally, but continually—and eternally.”

Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church.

Purchase Putting Joy into Practice on Paraclete Press here, IndieBound here (affiliate link), Kindle ebook here (affiliate link), and Amazon here (hard copy).

What are you reading to kick off the new year? Comment below and subscribe to the Being in Community email newsletter to be entered to win a copy of Dare to Inspire!

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