Yesterday I plowed through Neil Strauss’ “The Style Diaries,” one half of the “Rules of the Game” set from the author of the book that pushed the current pick-up artist culture into the mainstream, “The Game.”

The Style Diaries are a collection of eleven essays, all but two of which were written during the period in which Strauss was learning the tricks of the trade that he later recorded in The Game. Unlike The Game, however, Strauss says The Style Diaries are “less about getting the girl and more about the nature of desire itself.”

And they’re great.

I think that it’s easy to forget that Strauss has real chops as a legitimate writer in the cloud of chatter and controversy that surrounded The Game. The experiences he details in The Style Diaries are touching, squirmingly honest, and fully, murkily human. I think it’s easy to forget that the goal of self-betterment, even in the pursuit of love and sex, does not necessarily portend skeeviness. (Although it often does! I’m just saying: absolutes are always useless most of the time.)

Of course, The Style Diaries are only half of the tiny, pocket-sized package, and while great, probably not worth $25 for an hour’s worth of reading. The other half is the embarrassingly named “Stylelife Challenge,” a set of exercises designed to be done over the course of 30 days, sequentially, with the goal of landing a date before the month is over. I think it’s a great format for a self-help book and one that I had considered trying before when I was toying with the idea of doing some sort of Dethroner-brand Get Your Shit Together guide, albeit with much more convoluted sealed envelopes scheme.

I haven’t yet cracked open The Stylelife Challenges partially because I plan on writing about each day and putting it up here. (There’s a forum that Strauss’ company runs, but it’s all too monolithically branded for me. [He says on his heavily-branded website.]) But before I tuck into it, I was wondering if any of you guys would be willing to go through it at the same time so we can compare experiences, either virtually if you’re not in New York, or in meatspace if you are.

You can buy it through Amazon (as I did) by clicking the links above and I’ll get a cut, but making money isn’t my real hope here. It’s just that I have been reading and consuming and applying a lot of self-help type of stuff lately, and while I feel like it’s generally been a positive thing, I’m sort of sick of not having anyone to talk to about it.

I’ll probably start the workbook Monday.

Previously: Interview: Neil Strauss on Why “Pick-Up” is a Horrible Word [Dethroner]