First, We Make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson is a book that was written by a health blogger who surfs, eats healthy and abstains from sugar like it was Sarah-Wilson-Repellent(tm). Basically the opposite of me, a sugar-filled-but-still-always-out-of-energy-to-do-anything teenager who blurs the lines between human and a lumpy sack of mandarins. So when I say that this book, which is found in the Health & Fitness section of Dymocks (the horror), is one of my favourite books period, then it’s worth at least a little bit of your time. First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, or as I like to call it: F,WMtBB (rolls off the tongue quite nicely) is a story about Sarah Wilson and her anxiety and its many forms, such as OCD, depression and the general feeling of AAAAAAAAAAAAA. And not only is it a biography about a failing mind in a successful person, but it is also a self-help book, which I find not only great for helping anyone struggling with an anxiety disorder, but also for helping some people into becoming that successful pretentious vegan health blogger of your dreams. But the main selling point for this book, F,WMtBB, is that it doesn’t tell you that anxiety is like the mental disorder version of stepping into a 10 cm muddy puddle with your favourite socks on and NO SHOES, but it is more like the mental disorder version of a bad mark. Sure, you can loathe and roll in the pain of failure, or you could acknowledge that you got a bad mark, and even embrace that feeling of defeat to find out how to do better. This book encourages people to embrace their anxiety and use it to their advantage. Don’t cope with anxiety, live better with anxiety. To quote an ancient Chinese proverb: “Before you conquer the beast, you make the beast beautiful.” And this book is certainly not a beast (unless you don’t like reading, or you can’t read a book with more than a hundred pages), but it certainly is beautiful. Sure, it’s a weird, chaotic, sugarless, pretentious, healthy and anxiety-ridden form of beautiful, but beautiful nonetheless. And thus First, We Make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson gets 4 and a half out of 5 pretentious vegan health blogger points.