Dear Hannah: A Geek’s Life in Self-Improvement

App developer Dhingra is fluent in the language of self-help texts, as his epistolary memoir of self-improvement shows. At 14, he received a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People from a classmate, and used it to improve how he socialized and negotiated early professional experiences. He concluded that if one book could do that, more would be even better. The next 15 years were devoted to a repetitive and somewhat self-destructive process: discovering a new self-improvement technique, relaying it to his friend Hannah with enthusiasm, and then feeling his interest wane and his frustration with his work and love life redouble. After taking up meditation and sticking with it for multiple years, however, he decided to write a book collecting his letters to Hannah, in hopes of helping other self-help devotees. Reading about Dhingra’s past self-improvement efforts can be difficult, since his obsession with self-analysis borders, as even he admits, on the obsessive-compulsive—he has an apparent need to put every aspect of his life in a spreadsheet. While Dhingra presents some useful ideas about meditation and mindfulness, the book’s tone comes off as at once relentlessly self-analytical and un-self-aware, making it unlikely to appeal to readers seeking their own path to self-improvement. (BookLife)