books on happiness
darhma
keen goal-orientated careerists making a fortune out of it. I go back
to reading books which take a slant on the subject. I used to read
Hesse a lot when young, and he is surprisingly good still. And Robert
Musil's masterwork, The Man Without Qualities, is passionate on it.
Much of the existential stuff of course deals in it, although both
Camus and Sartre now seem just a bit, well, quaint. I read a great book
called Silk by Alessandro Barico not long ago which dealt in finding
and then refusing happiness. And a new book out called Liontooth by
Sara Sharpe which is posits happiness as a garden in an almost medieval
way. Maybe I will come up with a top ten of literary texts on
happiness.
da5zeay
Hm, I wonder what I would like out of a book on happiness. the first
books that pop into m mind are "the alchemist", "the little prince",
"what should I do with my life", and a few blogs like "pause" and
"crossroad dispatches". None of these are directly ABOUT happiness, but
nevertheless are closely associated with it.
I could see something like a happiness installation in a large
warehouse, where you could sort of follow your senses to happiness, and
maybe gain insight that way. That's probably my diagnostic/analytical
side coming out, trying to think of a way to figure out what makes a
particular person happy, beyond the fundamentals that one might pull
out of generic texts. I'm assuming that everyone's happiness is fairly
unique.
Then I imagine some kind of system-building approach to help construct
cycles of energy-building positivity in one's life, to fully irrigate
our souls if that makes sense.
I guess this is something that life coaches do...I've never met one in
person.
Think_n_See
the subject on happiness.
I really really like story books. I second da5zeay's recs of "the
alchemist" and "the little prince."
Most of Norton Juster's books are superb. So are those by Bernard
Suits.
Haruki Murakami's books take a strange slant on happiness, so you may
like that.
I'm a bit fan of Jhumpa Lampiri in that sense as well. I feel that a
lot of her stories and books are about echos of happiness or echos of
wished-for and almost-achieved happiness (like we talked about here:
http://groups.google.com/group/happinessgroup/browse_frm/thread/7706a34b536f8de0/e3d04ee3b67d31bc?q=echo&rnum=2#e3d04ee3b67d31bc)
As for non-fiction, I recommend:
"The Happiness Hypothesis" by Haidt
"Stumbling on Happiness" by Gilbert
"Learned Optimism" by Seligman
"Paradox of Choice" by Schwartz
"Authentic Happiness" by Seligman
darhma, thank you for the tip on The Man Without Qualities; it sounds
pretty intriguing.
da5zeay, would you please post the link to the "pause" blog? I don't
know that blog.
BOOKS from above:
"The Happiness Hypothesis" by Haidt
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465028012/qid=1147211014/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2092689-2109423?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
"Stumbling on Happiness" by Gilbert
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400042666/qid=1147211150/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-2092689-2109423?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
"Learned Optimism" by Seligman
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671019112/qid=1147211257/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2092689-2109423?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
"The Paradox of Choice" by Schwartz
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060005696/qid=1147211282/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2092689-2109423?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
"Authentic Happiness" by Seligman
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743222989/qid=1147211313/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2092689-2109423?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
da5zeay
TnS: http://www.jorydesjardins.com/pause/ is the blog I was talking
about. It's not really a "happiness" blog, but the author talks about a
lot of things that I've also thought about.