Book review

Proper time management is a common and important problem for freshmen, and it is also for me. Maybe it is the reason why the book How To Live On Twenty-Four Hours A Day written by Bennett.A. become one of the recommended books for us.This book is short but concise with twelve chapters that averagely within one thousand words. At the beginning, the author points out the fairness of time and the contradiction between people’s laziness and their endless eager. Then a series of suggestions about the adjustment of mood and attitude are offered in a logical order. At last, he emphasizes it again that the change to live a new live must be slow and solid. Even though it is concerned to the philosophy of time management, I didn’t feel that there is anything unnatural or hard to understand when I was reading the whole book. I think that the plenty use of British humorous jokes and the form of dialogue play a significant role, which can make readers feel at ease and acquire knowledge more easily.When it comes to the content, what impress me most is author’s description about “time dilemma”. People always hold an opinion that the more time given, the more task they can finish. But the truth is that no matter how much time left, most people tend to put off their task until the deadline. This description was put forward about 100 years ago, but it is still quite accurate to this day. The most common example is our homework. In the last few days of summer holiday, students can finish their two-month homework miraculously, like an eternally energetic machine. That is to say that there must be some spare time in everyone’s daily life. The true murderer of time is our laziness.After analyzing people’s attitude toward time, author begins to provide some advice, one of which I value most is “if a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely?” So, the best way to cure laziness is to separate work and free time. (don’t live in the shadow of your tiring job)In order to do so, firstly you must have your mind entirely controlled so that your attention can be focused on something mentally helpful. I can read from the book that author think highly of the function of literature especially poetry and prose. I understand why the importance of poetry and prose, but I can’t agree with his opinion that novels do not belong to serious reading. An excellent novel has a clear context which the author think is not helpful to deep thinking. However, under the clear context there is always a hidden line, some metaphor, Insinuation and so on. In my opinion, novels can also be one of the best choices during your free time.It is not enough to make fully use of free time. You should have a strong passion for your job at the same time. Yet this is much easier to said than done. According to a investigation, there is only less than 20% people that truly love their jobs. This can explain why people today are not happy.All in all, this old book indeed inspire me to try manage my time but some suggestions are out of date or unrealistic so that I can’t get the meaning of them. By the way, one word of this book’s Chinese name 悠然 is really confusing because the author emphasize it for many time that to manage time is not easy and should be train for many years!