my mind on books

At the bookstore today I browsed through The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner, a breezy, humorous sort of travelogue looking at the relationship between place and happiness. Weiner starts at the World Database of Happiness in the Netherlands, then visits Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova (an example of an unhappy place), Thailand, Great Britain, India and the US.

Reviews: here, here (for the Moldovan perspective), and here.

The Author’s website includes a slideshow on Bhutan.

San Francisco Chronicle article on “Cultivating happiness” (12/28/07) discusses this new book: The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky.

The article also mentions the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and the “Half Full” project on “The Science of Raising Happy Kids,” as well as the work of Carol Dweck, which was discussed here in an earlier blog post.

Though not considered “notable” by the New York Times, the following titles are my picks for the top mind books of 2007. I came up with seven, listed in roughly chronological order, so there is room for a few more nominations to make a Top Ten.

1. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (James H. Silberman Books)
(featured on the latest Brain Science Podcast)

2. I Am a Strange Loop

3. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

4. Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment

5. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

6. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

7. The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

Maybe not strictly a “mind” book but certainly another notable book of the year: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

12/16/07 – a belated addition: Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World

I’m a fan of both TED.com and LibraryThing. Now TEDBlog has just announced that the TED Book Club has been put into LibraryThing, so their picks are available for browsing here, 61 titles so far…

Also on TED, the latest talk posted is Buddhist monk and author Matthieu Ricard speaking about “Habits of happiness.”

books by Matthieu Ricard at Amazon

A lot of “must read” books have been appearing recently, but I don’t want to overlook this one:

The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (Bradford Books) by Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University.

MIT Press has Table of Contents + Introduction available online.

Flanagan has written on consciousness and participated in the Mind and Life Institute conferences with the Dalai Lama.

Google video from Mind & Reality Symposium