Dawn's Reading Blog

I liked The Happiness Makeover: How to Teach Yourself to Be Happy and Enjoy Every Day so much that I bought a copy for my boyfriend. You could call it Buddhism-lite. Without mentioning Buddhism except in passing, it communicates many of the fundamental tenets that can lead to a more peaceful, contented life. The chapters are very short, perfect for reading at bedtime or a quick pick-me-up on a bad day. The writing style is informal and friendly. This one’s a keeper.

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think takes a psychological study approach to the subject of overeating, explaining the ways in which our minds trick us about how much we eat. The book was interesting when it stuck to the study results but got too close to being yet-another-diet-book at other times.

The main thrust of the book was that we can eat 200 calories more or less in a day without even noticing. If we eat 200 calories more every day, we gain weight; less and we lose weight. So if you can “mindlessly” be on the lesser side, you can (slowly) lose weight pain free.

The one thing the author didn’t address is that our caloric needs decrease as we get older, especially for sedentary people. So what is 200 calories less this year becomes the right amount next year and 200 calories too many the year after that. The truth is that we have to keep our eye on the scale and keep adjusting our strategies as bodies change.

That said, some of his strategies are effective ones. For instance, eating more slowly and off smaller plates; standing farther away from the buffet; not keeping food in sight. One “mindless” strategy I’ve employed is to eliminate foods that are ubiquitous but that I don’t really care that much about. For me, that’s french fries, potato chips, and soda. Not that those things aren’t good or that I don’t ever, ever eat them, but I don’t tend to crave them or miss them. By switching from a Quarter Pounder meal with fries and a soda to a Quarter Pounder with a side salad and water, I consume about half the calories and enjoy my meal no less.

For me, it’s all about finding a physical activity you enjoy and doing it regularly. Not only do I burn calories and up my metabolism, but I have extra reason to care how much I weigh. When I weigh more, my sports performance suffers and I get a quick, brutal reminder that overeating leads to underperforming. For people who really can’t bear exercise, this book provides some researched ideas into ways to keep their calorie intake as low as it needs to be.

I enjoy books about crazy people (perhaps because I am one) but I have a hard time buying into multiple personality disorder. Katherine, It’s Time: The Incredible Journey into the World of a Multiple Personality was an entertaining read but it didn’t really sell me. I just can’t believe it’s possible to have a job, a husband, kids and have blank spells in your life long enough for another person to live their life. “Liz married so-and-so” or “Penny had a job at such-and-such a place.” The coordination must have been intense. Especially considering they didn’t even speak to each other. I mean, most of us have enough trouble finding time to pick up the dry cleaning without having to wait our turn to inhabit the body. Can you imagine trying to remember where you parked?

Stumbling on Happiness had a lot of really excellent information in it. It’s not a how-to guide for happiness, so don’t buy it expecting that. What it is is an examination of the ways in which we try, and fail, to predict what will make us happy and the reasons why we’re so bad at predicting what will make us happy. In some ways it reminded me of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of my favorite books, which makes the point that we can’t possibly ever make a good decision because we don’t know what the results will be. And that even though we look back on past decisions as a guide, that’s no use because a) we only know how the path we chose went. We don’t know if the other path would have been better or worse. And b) every situation is unique anyway. That’s what the “unbearable lightness of being” is – that we can’t stand the fact that all the pondering we do is pointless. That we could just “be” and do as well as we do with all that thinking.

Anyway, Stumbling on Happiness is sort of saying the same thing but with clinical research and examples. It was an interesting read, if not perhaps practically useful. My only objection to the book was that the tone was so cutesy and light-hearted that it got a little cloying. The author is obviously trying to make clinical material fun and accessible but he goes farther than he needs to. The material speaks for itself.

The Power of Mindful Learning is a weaker-sister sequel to Mindfulness, which was fantastic. This was a watered down re-hash. The new information was much less well researched, proven, or presented than what was in the original, making it more speculative than useful.

Mindfulness is another Blink. Learning how our brains really work, the ways in which we delude ourselves, and how that can be put to use is fascinating to me. Mindfulness is well-written and interesting, citing numerous studies and expanding on their findings. I’ll definitely have to try some of her other books.

Bleh. Don’t waste your money. All that you’ll learn from Telling Lies about how to tell when someone is lying is that it can’t be done. Oh, you’ll also learn why it can’t be done. In excruciating oft-repeated detail. There are like three studies backing up the hundreds of pages of supposition. If you want to know everything non-useful about lying that you already know (but haven’t bothered to write a 400 page book about) then this is the book for you.

It’s more like a dictionary than a manual. Ekman assigns a name to every kind of way you can tell every type of lie and every way you might feel about lying and/or being lied to. So this book could be a useful set of terminology for someone who actually had something to say about lying but reading it is about as interesting as you’d expect reading a dictionary to be.

The most idiotic thing about this thoroughly useless book is the way he uses examples from fiction. What could a fictional situation possibly prove to us about knowing who’s lying or how they feel about it in real life? I don’t know if Ekman knows this, but you can make fictional characters do anything. You can make them give away their lies and you can make them not get caught in the face of obvious evidence. What happened between two characters in a John Irving novel is simply irrelevant to any scientific exploration of why people lie and how to know if they’re doing it.

It’s possible that a strong editor could make a good 3,000 word article out of this book.

Blink is the best, most thought-provocative book I’ve read in a long time. What it contributes to our understanding of prejudice should be mandatory reading for everyone and the rest of it was interesting too. Every chapter had me fascinated. The only knock on the book is that it doesn’t really manage to draw the different pieces together into any kind of cohesive framework. Probably it’s not possible. We can’t live without our snap judgements, and we may be able to improve our snap judgement making ability, but snap judgements have their downside too. That would be the summary – not so interesting, I know. But the detail was riveting.

I’ll be recommending this to everyone I know. I wish I’d read it as part of a reading group so I had someone to talk to about it. Every page could start a conversation.