What I'm Reading This Week -- April 11, 2010 - Happiness
Quote de jour
"Happiness is good book."
~LMW
My Sunday "Room With A View" photo series resumes with the first look of spring from my bathroom (or throne).
Happiness is the flavor of the month, at least as a book subject. At the top of the heap is the hugely popular The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. She spend a year trying different ways to be happy and blogging about it. Her website and blog are worth checking out for tons of free resources. I'm not so happy about her begging readers to go out and buy her book this week so she can stay another week on the NY Times bestseller list. Be happy with what you have Gretchen. http://gretchenrubin.com
A book with a more sanguine look at happiness is Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreic
Becoming happier means making changes but making changes is harder than expected. Hello graveyard of new year's resolutions.
Switch by Chip and Dan Heath shed light on how we can change. These brothers rock. http://heathbrothers.com
Hey kids, see what I see? It's all about primary colors: red blue and yellow. Coincidence? I don't think so...
Happiness for me today is reading under this tree in my garden.
"Happiness is good book."
~LMW
My Sunday "Room With A View" photo series resumes with the first look of spring from my bathroom (or throne).
Happiness is the flavor of the month, at least as a book subject. At the top of the heap is the hugely popular The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. She spend a year trying different ways to be happy and blogging about it. Her website and blog are worth checking out for tons of free resources. I'm not so happy about her begging readers to go out and buy her book this week so she can stay another week on the NY Times bestseller list. Be happy with what you have Gretchen. http://gretchenrubin.com
A book with a more sanguine look at happiness is Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreic
Becoming happier means making changes but making changes is harder than expected. Hello graveyard of new year's resolutions.
Switch by Chip and Dan Heath shed light on how we can change. These brothers rock. http://heathbrothers.com
Hey kids, see what I see? It's all about primary colors: red blue and yellow. Coincidence? I don't think so...
Happiness for me today is reading under this tree in my garden.
Posted by Layla Morgan Wilde at 4/11/2010 12:37 PM 
Categories: A Room With A View, What I'm Reading This Week
Tags: Gretchen Rubin Chip and Dan Heath Barbara Ehrenreich the happiness project
Categories: A Room With A View, What I'm Reading This Week
Tags: Gretchen Rubin Chip and Dan Heath Barbara Ehrenreich the happiness project
That's weird about all the primary colors but maybe it's because primary colors are cheerful, childlike and make us happy?
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That's a really good point.
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Yes, the quest for happiness and happyness...we forget that grief, depression, sadness, fatigue, boredom, anger, self loathing are all part of human existence. And the medicalizations of normal emotions has made it worse.
Did you know the DSM V will become an international book? Already China and Europe are adopting some of our more cockamaymied ideas about mental health.
The DSM is the book that psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers use to diagnose our ....well, they call it mental and emotiaonal disorders...I call it our humanness which refuses to fit into society's expectations for us and society calls us aberrant.
Boo ha.
Anywho, lovely photos. Off for a run, then to Starbucks with a printout.
Once the grief over my father's death resolved itself and once I got over my parent's mistreatments of me, my original happy disposition returned, with no thanks to the medical industry, who are still puzzzling over it and scratching their bald pates and consuming great quantities of big pharma.
Next time I go through a major grief period, and that is likely to come with a major death, I will take big pharma, but not until then.
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I did know. I recently read an interesting book about the Americanization of mental health called Crazy Like Us. Scary.
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Yes, very scary. the author made very good points. He was interviewed on...Colbert, maybe. A few weeks ago.
Now going for my run. Was at Staples forever.
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I saw the eye-opening interview with Ethan Watters on Jon Stewart.
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Ah, happiness! "People do everything to make themselves happy, except let themselves be happy." (An old aphorism of mine.)
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I like this. It would have made a good quote de jour!
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Maybe you'll find another occasion for it. It's one of my favorites.
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If you don't mind I'll park it for future reference.
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