Being Happy
Smile!
Previously, I talked about reading Stumbling on Happiness and now that I've finally finished it, I should say some stuff about it.
It was an amazing book, packed with loads of Dan's humour, occasional sarcasm about a myriad of stuff and little anecdotes about his research and different psychology experiments that kept me entertained and intrigued. Even Desmond was positively attracted by Dan's style of writing and the way he plays with your mind while giving you loads of information directly or indirectly about ourselves (yourselves), the way we (you) think and believe and thus behave. Despite a disproportionally large amount of text devoted to repeating the same points about human behaviors and examples given, Dan has planned his book very well, organizing it such that he would always go back to his point after leading readers wildly astray.
I went on reading and reading the book although the week was busy and I was very often distracted by loads of work (mostly involving me going away from the book and that explains why Desmond was reading it too). I didn't mind that I was giggling to myself at Dan's jokes at my workplace and attracting weird stares while only Desmond knew clearly why I was behaving so strangely because on the occasions when he takes over the book, he too gets the same sort of treatment.
If you've watch his presentations on TED.com, you'll realized that he knows his book so well that he uses the same wordings or phrasing to describe the same experiments, scenarios and even jokes for his presentation. And I exclaimed that he's a great speaker, which shows how speech-like his style of writing is. As I went through the words, predicting what is the next word that is going to turn up in the next sentence as described by him, I could even imagine his voice saying those stuff.