Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Stumbling on Happiness is by far the best book I've ever read on psychology. It's entertaining, easy to read and at times outright hilarious. Gilbert is a great writer, with a gift for a turn of phrase and a knack for coming up with amusing ways to describe the various foibles of our brains.

In fact, Gilbert writes this book a little bit too well. Unlike Malcolm Gladwell, who is such a talented writer that he makes books about nothing sound absolutely fascinating, Gilbert's book is crammed with all sorts of incredible insights that I found myself almost glossing over because of his entertaining writing style.

Which is a pity, because this book taught me more about my brain--how it misperceives, misremembers, misprojects and mismeasures nearly everything around it--than anything I've ever read. But I had to read it a second time (and take notes, even) to get the most out of it. Seriously, how often do you read a book that makes you want to not only re-read it, but take notes while you're re-reading it? Yep, it was that good.

I had a family member tell me when she was about half-way through the book, "when is it going to get to the part about being happy?" The thing is, this book isn't about happiness. It's about how our brains trick and mislead us, which is an insight that's actually far more important than teaching us how to be happy.

This book, along with Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, revolutionized how I think. I can't say that about many books. Highly, highly recommended.

The Prophet of Edan by Philip Chase [The Edan Trilogy #2]

We all have our part to play and our duty to perform. This is a beautiful novel about performing your duty with honor, even in the face of almost certain failure. Author Philip Chase has an unusual gift for telling a compelling story, and The Prophet of Edan works on two levels: on the individual level, with characters we care about and root for, and on the grand, civilizational level, where entire nations hurl themselves at each other in a desperate war of survival. And the geopolitical dramas in Philip's world of Eormenlond are downright Kissingerian --with betrayal, realpolitik and honor, all in equal measure. Now, any story with a large cast and a lot of moving parts presents the author with a structural challenge: how do you help the reader keep everybody and everything straight, but yet do it in a way that's organic to the story? After all, this is the second part of a trilogy, and a lot happened in Book I . So I'll share an example here of what this author does,...

H.R. by Edwin Lefevre

I wouldn't recommend this odd book for its story. But H.R. is interesting for its social and psychological commentary on early 20th century New York society, as the Gilded Age gave way to the so-called Progressive Era. Edwin Lefevre is the author of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator , the famous (at least among investors) pseudobiography of Jesse Livermore. This book, in stark contrast, is a forgotten and comparatively forgettable work. But not totally forgettable. The reader watches the life arc of a young man who catapults himself across several caste barriers, starting as a frustrated New York City bank clerk who quits and, implausibly, starts a union of sandwich-board advertisers. He then uses this sandwich board advertising platform (you could think of it as an early 1900s "new media" platform) to gain influence throughout the city, ultimately parlaying his way into joining New York's social and economic elite. At its heart, this book is about power and influ...

The Art of War in the Middle Ages by Charles Oman

A wonderful, information-dense book surveying the evolution of warfare across the Middle Ages, and a glorious starting point for readers to contextualize an enormous amount of European history. There's a great deal of historical knowledge here that author Charles Oman assumes in his readers. And so the very act of reading this book (and looking up the author's near-constant historical references) equates to a semester or two--at least--of upper-level undergrad European history. Read this book and spend some time looking things up. Then read several more books like this [1]. Pretty soon, enough osmosis happens such that the various battles and historical figures this author mentions casually will be things you start mentioning casually: Cannae, Adrianople, Brunanburh, Hastings, Robert Guiscard, Durazzo, Tours, Crecy, Agincourt, Arnold von Winkelried, Albrecht von Wallenstein, and so on. (This will be an inner monologue of course, because we all know how much every...

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