In How to Be Less Useful: The Joy of Inefficiency, author Priyanka Mattoo questions why our lives as, say, office workers, parents, consumers, exercisers, and healthy eaters, have become entirely about efficiency and optimization. What about pleasure? With self-deprecating humor and laugh-out-loud life lessons, she looks at where pleasure begins, what it serves, and how we repress it – and shows us a way back. Will and Attention: A Memoir recounts how Meghan O’Gieblyn secretly began attending Catholic mass and meeting with a priest after leaving evangelical Christianity, kicking addiction, and building her life as a writer. After 11 years of sobriety, she began drinking again, struggling with feelings of regression and defeat. Will and Attention captures this perplexing time and her pursuit of a spirituality that could meet her longings. 

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