What you should read next – January 2020

I stopped reading a book a day toward the end of the year because I had the cold from hell and a lot of family stuff going on. I would rather play Code Names (a board game) with all my cousins than read a book in the corner all day.

First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety

by Sarah Wilson

This is a beautiful memoir about anxiety. Personally, I have more depression than anxiety, but it’s six of one and half dozen of the other in terms of suckiness.

we are not our anxiety or depression. No, we are the sky, and anxiety and depression are but clouds that pass through us.

Of course she recommends meditation. Of course. It’s a little suspect if you don’t mention meditation in your self help book.

You can be crap at meditation and it still works. The mere intention to sit with yourself is an act of self-care as far as our brains are concerned, which, voila, triggers the comfort system.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

This book gives a brief history of humankind. It’s gives fascinating perspective. Evolution hasn’t caught up with technology.

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

Society only works because we buy the premise. Back in our hunter-gatherers day, we had simple lives of leisure.

I highlighted so many passages, but I won’t bore you with all of them. Go read it yourself.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

We stop feeling grateful for things so easily.

Perhaps people in modern affluent societies suffer greatly from alienation and meaninglessness despite their prosperity.

People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of.

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

by Florence Williams

The smells, the vastness of nature, and the subsequent feeling of awe makes us humans feel better, apparently. This was a slog to read, but I do agree with the premise. Nature makes us more us.

Sisters

by Raina Telgemeier

Adorable graphic novel about the author and her sister and their fights. It was a really fun, fast read.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

While reading this book, I kept thinking about one of my law school professors who taught us about various heuristics like anchoring. At the end of the book, the author mentions my law school professor – Cass Sunstein — by name!

This is a fascinating book on how two people with a background in psychology changed the way we think about various things. We get a deep dive into their lives and some of their biggest hits.

What might have been is an essential component of misery. There is an asymmetry here, because considerations of how much worse things could have been is not a salient factor in human joy and happiness.

That’s so true! So true.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

It was just a coincidence that I read this book after The Undoing Project. The author is one of the people from the last book who changed the way we look at things and I see a lot of the same examples.

I highly recommend this book. It’s a long, dense read, but really interesting. At least, the parts I understood were interesting. He talks about how investment advisers are just throwing darts. He says it more eloquently, of course, explaining that it’s reversion to the mean after a good year or bad year.

Oh, he talks about Professor Sunstein quite a bit too. Some of this material does sound familiar from my Elements of the Law class.

I highlighted a lot of passages that spoke to me.

we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

I think about this constantly. What am I blind to?

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with “mere statistics.”

The voice inside your head always wants to tell you a story. Sometimes there is no story. Actually, there’s never a story. It’s just running commentary.

He has some more insights into finance that I like.

utilities were attached to changes of wealth rather than to states of wealth.

Context and where you start matters in terms of happiness toward your finances.

Brain recordings also indicate that buying at especially low prices is a pleasurable event

This confirmation with brain recordings thrills me.

And he’s got some good life advice.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

I’m going to start chanting that last one to myself regularly.

A Secret History of Witches: A novel

by Louisa Morgan

I loved this novel. It’s a story of five generations of daughters who are witches. Some are likable. Some are not. I didn’t want this book to end.