BOOK REVIEW: The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa

Title: The Yellow World
Author: Albert Espinosa
Pages:  224
Publisher: Penguin
Release Date: 1st November 2012
Tagline: 'Trust Your Dreams and They'll Come True'

***Thank you to Penguin and the Spinebreakers scheme for providing me with a copy of this for review!***


Summary
"Albert Espinosa never wanted to write a book about surviving cancer, so he didn’t. He wrote a book instead about the Yellow World. What is the yellow world? The yellow world is a world that’s within everyone’s reach, a world the colour of the sun. It is the name of a way of living, of seeing life, of nourishing yourself with the lessons that you learn from good moments as well as bad ones. It is the world that makes you happy, the world you like living in.The yellow world has no rules; it is made of discoveries.
In these 23 Discoveries Albert shows us how to connect daily reality with our most distant dreams. He tells us that ‘losses are positive’, ‘the word “pain” doesn’t exist’, and ‘what you hide the most reveals the most about you’."



 My Thoughts
I really had no idea what to expect with The Yellow World. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction (okay, make that hardly any non-fiction) but for some reason I was intrigued by the idea of The Yellow World, and something compelled me to give it a go. And I’m glad I did.

Within the first few pages of the book’s introduction, I knew that I was going to like it. There was something in the friendly, conversational tone of Espinosa that was inviting, and made the book light-hearted and easy to read. The discoveries followed in a list (being an engineer, Albert likes numbers, and therefore, in his own logic, also lists) with each discovery being given its own short chapter.

The 23 discoveries were very…interesting. Some of them seemed a little strange, for example Discovery 9 – ‘Put your lips together and blow’ – and Discovery 20 – ‘Do you want to share an REM with me? – and quite a lot of them made me think, ‘How could I possibly relate that to my own life?’ However, some of the discoveries seemed quite logical and useful, such as trying to cultivate the mentality that ‘the word “pain” doesn’t exist’, and the aim to ‘ask five good questions every day’.

I feel like The Yellow World is a timeless book; one of those that you will pick up time and time again at various stages in your life and be able to glean new and different things from each time. I may not be able to make sense of all of Albert Espinosa’s discoveries right now, but I’m sure as I revisit the book in the future, I will find more will have become relevant, and useful, to my life.

As for now, I have been inspired to train my brain to ‘start counting from six’, and I will be keeping a close lookout for any ‘yellows’ that cross my path!