Borrowed it three times. Bought it in the end.

Right, the full saga, because a friend asked how long I'd been trying to read this and the answer is genuinely embarrassing.

Joined the queue in January at position 122. One hundred and twenty-two! For a book that every single person I know already owns a copy of and keeps offering to lend me, which I will not do, because then I have to give it back to a person instead of to a computer.

Four months later it lands. Fourteen days. Fourteen days sounds like plenty until you remember that you have a job, and that two other holds came in during the same week, because that is always how it works. You wait four months for absolutely nothing and then three books arrive on a Tuesday and every one of them has a countdown on it.

Got to about 60%. Then it went. Three in the morning, no warning, and the worst part is that the app keeps your place except it keeps a place, some place, roughly near where you were, and I lost a whole chapter to that. Rejoined at 47.

Second borrow I did as audio instead, which was a mistake for this kind of book. He reads it himself and he's fine, very calm, very level, but I had it at 1.4x while cleaning the bathroom and I promise you nothing about a system for building habits goes into your head while you are scrubbing a bath. I renewed once. No one else was waiting by then, which after a queue of 122 felt like a personal insult.

In the end I bought it. Charity shop, two pounds fifty, and it took me nine days.

The actual book: the small stuff works. Habit stacking works, I do it now with vitamins and the kettle. The two-minute rule works, or at least it worked long enough to get me flossing, which is more than my dentist has managed in a decade of asking. The identity chapter I liked more than I expected, and I've quoted the line about becoming the type of person who does the thing to at least four people, one of whom told me she'd read the book already, which is fair.

What doesn't work is the length. It's the same five case studies coming back around with different hats on, and by the last section I was reading paragraphs and taking in absolutely nothing. I skipped the whole final part and I don't think I missed a single idea that wasn't already in the first hundred pages.

Seven. It would have been an eight if I'd got it in one go instead of over five months in three formats, and honestly some of that is on me for not just buying it in February like a normal person.

The paper copy is on the shelf with the charity shop receipt still in it at page 180. I'm not going back for the last section. I know what it says.