POTPOURRI

Colour

30 Days of Creativity: Draw, Color, and Discover Your Creative Self by Johanna Basford

One of the most popular creators of adult colouring books, Johanna Basford has been behind some of the best-selling volumes in the genre. In 30 Days of Creativity, the artist hopes to inspire her fans to do some drawing of their own.

The book aims to encourage creativity by offering prompts and ideas to finish the drawings the artist has started. You are told to add patterns to incomplete images and shapes, from finishing a mandala to making designs in teacups, vases, hearts, kites, and lanterns. There are, of course, also several patterns – often floral, because this is Johanna Basford – for you to colour, plus a handful of quotes for some more inspiration.

The book’s title and conceit, however, feel a tad misleading. This isn’t so much a journal with prompts for creative exercises, as you might be led to think by its name; it’s more a workbook that encourages you to draw and be artistic. Had the point really been “creativity”, then the idea could have been executed better. (Also, you’d need to be either very gifted or have a lot of free time on your hands to be able to finish this in 30 days.) If you didn’t enjoy the pages in her previous volumes that required you to draw though, then this book might not be for you, but you can always flip through it before you make the purchase.

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Littler Books

www.littlerbooks.com

Littler Books is a neat little website that offers summaries of non-fiction books. You can browse through a growing library of summaries that put together the salient points of well-known books. Just click on the title of your choice to see a list of the main ideas that are explored in the tome.

From Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics and many other works in between, you can find a lot of popular content summarised here.

The ideas detailed for each title are presented in a way that makes sense if you haven’t read the book, but the summaries are perhaps even more effective if you’ve previously read the volume and are looking for a quick refresher.

Everything is displayed through a simple interface with no distractions, and there is a lot to absorb here if you enjoy non-fiction and want to soak in some interesting ideas from works by some of the world’s most well-known thinkers.