WSBG reviews Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

This is a good book for a book group to read because it provides so much fodder for discussion.

It’s about how what we think makes us happy really doesn’t. Mostly because humans are not very good at imagining the future when we rely on our own imaginations to do so. (Because we base our imagined future too much on what we feel in the present.)

We are, however, amazingly good at rationalizing, which means we can pretty much decide to be happy pretty much whenever we want to if only we understand ourselves better.

We also have an uncanny ability to remember dramatic events and generalize them so we believe them to be typical. (That’s why we are convinced we always pick the slowest moving line at the checkout stand.)

There are so many interesting things in this book, including some that are really useful, like helping you understand why you don’t order what you really want when you are dining with others and why we can’t think of the name of one song while another is playing.

We generally enjoyed reading the book, although we had a couple of quibbles. We got a little annoyed with the author’s unrelenting attempts at humor (what Darcy so accurately labeled his “preciousness”). And we think he made a mistake by asserting that humans are the only species that predict the future.

In that case, Reba wants to know why chimpanzees store up rocks to throw at humans?

When will humans learn? Every time they claim that some behavior (e.g., tool making, language) is unique to their species, somebody discovers an exception.

So I think I’ve finally got it:  Humans are the only species constantly searching for a unique trait that distinguishes them from all other species.

WSBG reviews Gob’s Grief by Chris Adrian

So as I sat down to write the World’s Smallest Book Group’s most recent read, I suddenly realized I didn’t review last month’s book.  

And I had a damn good reason. I have no idea what to say about it. Except that it was the weirdest, most bizarre, truly outlandish book I think we ever read.

The book was Gob’s Grief by Chris Adrian. It begins with an 11-year-old boy (Tomo) leaving home to join the Union Army as a bugler during the Civil War. And was killed in the first battle he encountered. Shot right through the eye.  When the twin brother (Gob) who backed out of the army-joining thing at the last minute hears of his brother’s death, he is overcome with grief and sets out on a mission to bring the civil war dead back to life.

Along the way we meet up with Walt Whitman (yes, that Walt Whitman) in an army hospital in Washington D.C. where he takes a rather ummmmm, shall we say, obsessive interest in a wounded young man. We also encounter women from the suffrage movement (including Tomo and Gob’s mother Victoria Woodhull) and get into abortion, time travel, time machine construction, Abe Lincoln, photography, medicine, free love, communism, and many other topics I can’t remember any longer.

And in the end, it turns out that it was actually….  oh, sorry, almost spoiled it.

If you like reading really bizarre books that refer to everything but in the end might mean nothing, this just might be the book for you.

The World’s Smallest Book Group is not among its fans. The book jacket blurbs were quite enthusiastic, though sometimes from rather obscure sources. We did agree with this one from The Economist however: “Remarkable…utterly different. A work unlike any that has come before it.”