223: Favourite Books, Documentaries, Podcasts and Music 2020

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 223 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at seven-health.com/223.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel, and today it is my annual roundup show where I talk about my favourite books and documentaries and podcasts and music from the last year, so from 2020. This is the sixth time of me doing this. If you want to see what I’ve consumed in previous years, I’ll link to all of those other shows in the show notes.

I’ll do the same for each of the categories for this year. So for the books, I’ll list all of the books that I read this year, and then obviously go through the ones that I go through today, and I’ll do the same for the documentaries and the podcasts, etc.

00:01:00

Favourite books of 2020

Let’s start with the books. This year I read 23 books in total. As always happens, I will discover some other book or multiple books that I forgot to add to the list, but at this time it’s 23 that I can remember. Three of them are fiction. I think last year I didn’t read any fiction, and I said that I wanted to start including some of that again back in my reading, so that happened on three occasions this time. I’m going to go through now six of the books. These are my six favourites for the year.

00:01:33

This Book Will Save Your Life

My first one is called This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes. This is fiction. The title is terrible in comparison to actually what the book is about. It’s about a father having a midlife crisis, and he’s trying to reconnect with his son and find out what makes him happy and living in LA. I really enjoyed it because it was such a page-turner, and it was a really easy read. Immediately sucked in from page 1. I think often with fiction, there is a point where you’ve got to persevere to start with to then really get into it, and with this there was none of that. The whole time, it was really engaging, and it was just a really easy read.

It had actually been sitting on my shelf for a number of years. I can’t remember where I bought it or when I bought it, but I had a decision this year to really scale back on buying books because I have so many books on my bookshelf that I haven’t read. At some point I was looking through and I picked this up, and it was really great. It was really, really enjoyable and I now want to go and check out more books by this author. So if you’re looking for some fiction that is very easy to read, then I would recommend this. It’s called This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes.

00:03:07

The Fifth Risk

The next book was The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis. I’m a big fan of Michael Lewis. I included one of his books last year on my list called The Undoing Project, which was about Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. He is also the writer who wrote Moneyball and he wrote The Big Short, both of which have been turned into films.

I actually read this at the very start of the year, the very start of 2020. I bought it in an airport on the way to Australia. What he talked about in that book has become very relevant now. It looked at the problems in government for two areas, and this is looking at the U.S. and the problems where institutions within government are gutted and that government becomes smaller and smaller, and things that people don’t really understand how important they are get cut.

He also talks about the importance of the transition period, going from one government to the next government. He talked a lot about how grateful Obama was to George W. Bush in that he got such a great transition. When Obama was elected and there’s this transition period of six weeks or two months, George W. Bush put everyone on it and gave him a really smooth transition into government.

Then when Obama was going out of government, he wanted to do the exact same thing. He wanted to give Trump a really smooth transition into the White House, and they set up these transition teams. On Day 1 they were expecting all of these people to turn up and no one turned up, and then weeks went by where no one was turning up. Then with a couple of days to go, one person would turn up for a meeting for three hours and then they would go, and that was kind of it. He talked about how devastating that can be in terms of starting the new cycle as a government. So it’s very interesting now to see how all of this is playing out with the Trump government at the moment.

I thought it was a really well-written book. It was pretty alarming in many ways. But Michael Lewis has a really great writing style. It’s very easy to read. It’s a pretty short book in the whole scheme of things, but it’s pretty accurate how much of what he was talking about is now coming to fruition. So that is The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis.

00:06:08

It Wasn’t Your Fault

The next book is called It Wasn’t Your Fault by Beverly Engel. This was actually recommended to me by a client of mine. As part of the work that we were doing together, she decided that she wanted to start working on the fact that she had been abused as a child. She started to work with a therapist, and they recommended a number of books, and this was one of the books that they recommended to her.

It’s about compassion and self-compassion, but with the focus being for those who have suffered childhood abuse of some kind, whether that be physical or mental or sexual. It’s looking at why someone who has had that experience or experiences in childhood can have such a difficult time with compassion and self-compassion. Beverly Engel is a therapist and someone who suffered many of these abuses herself growing up, so a lot of this has come from her own healing, but also working as a counsellor or therapist for many decades. This is something she’s done in private practice as well.

For me, I’ve found that it’s been a really great book for bridging the gap because I am such a big proponent of self-compassion and think it is really integral to so much of the work that I do. If you listen to the podcast I did with Josie Geller, we actually talk a lot about this and how if self-compassion is not there, that can be a roadblock to healing from eating disorders. And it’s not just eating disorders that it can be a roadblock for; it can be for many different reasons.

So this book was great in talking about why self-compassion is important – which I already knew, but in terms of why it can then be so difficult and why someone who has had such a traumatic start to life can struggle with putting that into practice. I really, really enjoyed it – ‘enjoyed’ is probably the wrong word because it is quite a tough book and there’s definitely some upsetting parts, but it is very practical. It is very helpful. I have recommended it to a number of clients this year, and I’ve actually reached out to Beverly, and she’s going to be on the podcast in the early part of 2021. That is called It Wasn’t Your Fault by Beverly Engel.

00:08:54

More Than a Body

The next book is More Than a Body by Lindsay and Lexie Kite. This is probably one that’s more familiar if you’re a regular listener. I just released a podcast with Lindsay talking all about this book. It’s looking at body image and body image resilience and how you can learn to see your body as an instrument for living and helping you navigate in this world and getting enjoyment and happiness and all of those things instead of it just being an ornament for objectification and self-objectification.

There’s a lot that we dig into as part of the recent podcast. We talk about self-objectification. We talk about health and fitness and the problems that are caused because of the mainstream media and the way that it’s looked at. We look at the belief that people will be happier when they’re thinner and how misguided this can be and the process by which you can change this. There’s a lot in that podcast, and it will give you a good taste for the book.

This is something that I’m definitely going to be recommending a lot with clients. It’s only just been released – I think it was released on Christmas day or the day after, so now that it’s out, I will be recommending it to clients and getting them to use it regularly. So that is the book called More Than a Body by Lindsay and Lexie Kite.

00:10:32

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes

The next book is called Little Girls in Pretty Boxes by Joan Ryan. This is another book that I’d had sitting on my shelf for a very long time. Again, I’m not sure when I bought this, but it had sat on my bookshelf for a while and I pulled it out this year. It’s actually a pretty old book; it was released in ’95. I was reading it, and early on in the book, she makes reference to the fact that Boris Becker recently won some tennis tournament. I was like, hang on a second, Boris Becker has not been playing tennis for a very long time. So I checked the front of the book and I was like, okay, this was released in 1995.

The book focuses on gymnastics and on figure skating and the pressure that is put on these very young girls who participate in these sports, and the injuries and the eating disorders and the abuse that has gone on. With each of these, it goes through different participants and talks about their stories. Despite being written 25 years ago, in some ways, or in many ways, very little has changed.

This year I watched the documentary on Netflix called Cheer, which is all about cheerleading and a particular school that has been winning all of these cheerleading competitions, but it was pretty difficult to watch because you’re seeing these young kids with broken bodies and training with injuries and trying to weigh less. You just see really how disposable these kids are in terms of wanting to win some tournament and being pushed beyond what should be happening for a healthy body.

Whereas with other sports, in terms of basketball or NFL, there could be someone who pushes themselves because they’re likely to have a career in this, so there is something that could be potentially riding on it in terms of them making a large income and that then being their life, with this, after they finish college there is no more of the kind of cheerleading they’re doing. So this is something they’re doing at a very young age that is probably going to have an impact on them for the rest of their life in a pretty negative way, or likely in a negative way. It seemed to match up very much with what was talked about in the book.

I also listened to a podcast called Believe, which was all about Larry Nassar, the U.S. gymnastics team national doctor who is now in jail for abusing girls over a period of decades. This is also talked about as part of the book. So despite the book being quite an old book, it’s rather sad to see that nothing has changed.

I’ve done podcasts also on RED-S (relative energy deficiency in sport) and how that affects all of the different systems within the body. This book, again, when talking to all of the different interviewees, really highlights all of the different aspects of RED-S. Definitely not an uplifting book by any means, but gave a pretty eye-opening state of affairs for both of these sports in terms of figure skating and gymnastics, and I would imagine that it’s much broader than that.

00:14:00

Shadow Daughter

The next book is Shadow Daughter. This is by Harriet Brown. This is a book that is all about family estrangement. Family relationships can often be fraught with difficulties, and for many people it reaches the point that it’s better for them to not have that person or persons in their life. This is definitely not an easy decision, and there’s a lot of taboo around this as a topic.

This book is a memoir, or part memoir, by Harriet Brown. She talks about the troubled relationship that she had with her mother, and she also looks at the research around estrangement and conducted many interviews as part of writing this book.

I actually had Harriet on the podcast and we talked about this. It was Episode 203. We talk about the fact that estrangement can happen on a continuum depending on how much contact or non-contact you have. We talk about attachment and conditional versus unconditional parenting and early childhood experiences and how these can have an impact on sense of self and self-esteem for the rest of someone’s life. We talked about forgiveness and what this actually means. Harriet had done a lot of exploration in this area, so we go through that.

Estrangement is a topic that has come up a lot more in my practice this year, so that was part of the reason why I read the book and part of the reason why I wanted to have Harriet on the podcast. I do see that it does happen a lot for clients that have eating disorders; there has been or is still a figure in their life – it can be a parent or a relative – that is having a detrimental effect. They do really struggle with the decision of how to navigate that relationship.

It’s, again, not an easy book to read because it is quite saddening in parts, but if that is something that you’re dealing with, I would highly recommend checking it out. It’s called Shadow Daughter by Harriet Brown.

00:16:45

Sudoku

So those are the books that I wanted to recommend, the six. The other thing I wanted to mention that I do a lot of the evenings is I will play Sudoku. I’ve got a Sudoku book. That’s often something I’ll do in bed. If I’m not reading in bed, I will do that. I find that for me, it’s a great way for my mind to settle, especially if I’ve been working late. If I’ve finished up with a client call pretty late and I’m finishing that and just getting straight into bed, I find that I need something to help me wind down for the day. Sometimes playing some Sudoku as opposed to just reading something can be helpful for that. So that’s something that I do.

00:17:33

Favourite documentaries of 2020

The next section is documentaries. I watched 26 documentaries in total this year, and again, these will all be in the show notes. I’ve started to include documentary series in this list. I hadn’t done that in previous years, but I did this year just because they’re coming up a lot more. They’re much more common, especially on Netflix, that there’ll be a documentary series, and they were a large chunk of what I watched this year. So I wanted to include them as well because they can be incredible, and I didn’t want to skip over them.

I’m going to talk about six documentaries. For a couple of these, I’ve talked about them previously. At the end of episodes I make some recommendations of things that I’ve watched or consumed and want to pass on, so some of these I have mentioned before. But I’m going to cover them again because I know that not everyone listens to every single episode.

00:18:42

The Last Dance

The best documentary, or my favourite documentary for this year, was The Last Dance. This is a 10-part documentary series on Netflix all about the Chicago Bulls. It was from the late ’80s through to most of the ’90s, so looking at when they won six NBA titles. A large focus of this was on Michael Jordan, who was the centrepiece and the superstar of that team.

This was an incredibly well put together documentary. There’s so much great archive footage that they were able to use, going back to when all these stars were in college. There’s incredible interviews. They actually did interviews with each of them a number of times, and for subsequent interviews they would often show them a clip of what someone else said to get their reaction. It just goes into so much detail.

This was a really big part of my childhood, or covered a big period of my childhood, so it brought up a lot of memories for me. I’m not sure how I remember a lot of this because I didn’t actually watch much basketball when I was growing up. I was into it, but I don’t know how much of the NBA was being broadcast in Australia. So I don’t know how I remember so much of this, but I do.

It was great to get to see Michael Jordan interviewed for such a long time because he is such an interesting person. Very supremely talented in what he did and what he was able to achieve, but you also get the sense that he’s not the most likeable or agreeable person. Great for winning championships, but outside of that, I don’t know how much time I would want to spend around him.

I would say that like all good documentaries, if you’re not into the topic at hand, you’ll still find it interesting. And this is definitely the case. Even if you have absolutely no interest in basketball, this is still fascinating to watch. I would say those who are triggered by exercise and exercise leading to comparison, this is probably one to avoid because it’s a lot of people playing a lot of basketball and training a lot, but otherwise it is really fascinating.

00:21:20

My Octopus Teacher

The next documentary that I really enjoyed this year was called My Octopus Teacher. I mentioned this I think probably a couple months ago on the podcast.

I’d first heard about this through David Farrier, who is a New Zealand journalist and a documentarian. He created Tickled, which is one of my favourite documentaries of all time. If you’ve never seen Tickled, I would highly, highly, highly recommend watching it because it is just bizarre and has many twists and turns and is not what you’re expecting. But yeah, I heard David Farrier interviewed and talking about how much he enjoyed this, so I took note. Then a client also made a recommendation of it, and that jogged my memory, so I checked it out.

It’s the story of a South African guy who is also a documentary filmmaker who’s having a midlife crisis, and he’s feeling burnt out. He goes back to his home in South Africa and starts swimming in the sea and finds that this assists with his mental health. At some point while swimming in this new area, he discovers this octopus. Then he goes back the next day to see it again, and he then decides to take his camera and starts going back every day. This becomes the documentary about him developing this relationship with an octopus – which sounds strange when I say it out loud, and it is strange in parts. I was chatting with a friend about it recently who saw it, and he said it felt in moments like it was a spoof, like it was something from Saturday Night Live, because of how passionately he talks about the octopus.

But it really is a beautiful story. It’s shot magnificently well and it is stunning in that way. It’s narrated well and edited well. It feels like one part David Attenborough style documentary, where you are learning about the wonders of the octopus lifecycle that I never knew about, and the wonders of the sea, and definitely getting things on film that have never been caught on film before. And then it’s one part relationship story and about the guy’s relationship with the octopus and about the relationship he has with his son and his own life.

I just found that this was a really sweet story and rather feel-good, which definitely contrasts to a lot of the darker stuff that I listen to and watch. It’s called My Octopus Teacher and it’s on Netflix.

00:24:12

Hail Satan

The next documentary is called Hail Satan. This was one that, again, I think I’ve mentioned before on the podcast, way back in maybe the March or April or May time. I hadn’t heard of it before, but I was scrolling on Netflix and it came across the screen. I had heard a lot about the moral panic around Satanism in the ’80s and early ’90s, and that was kind of what I assumed this was going to be about. But it turned out to be completely different.

It follows the rise and influence of the Satanic Temple in the U.S. and how they’re using the laws around religious freedom to push for the separation of church and state. They’re doing this by basically saying, “If you’re going to put up a statue of the Ten Commandments on a government building, we want you to put up a statue from our religion, so a statue of Baphomet, because it needs to be equal. If you’re going to have one religion up, we’re going to have another.”

While the name “the Satanic Temple” probably carries lots of negative connotations, they have seven tenets which, for someone like myself, are hard to disagree with.

Tenet (1): One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason. (2) The struggle for justice is a necessary and ongoing pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions. (3) One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone. (4) The freedom of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend; to wilfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own. (5) Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world; one should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs. (6) People are fallible; if one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused. (7) Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought; the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

You might not have guessed that the Satanic Temple would have them as their tenets, but that is the tenets of that religion. I found this a really interesting documentary and worth a watch. It’s called Hail Satan.