How to be happier:

1. Don’t let feelings of time poverty or lack of confidence stand in your way. Spend the time to perform acts of kindness, to exercise and you will realize just how much you can accomplish with the time you have.
2. Spend wisely, not wasting hours in front of a screen and instead investing them in the people and experience that bring you joy and in what will help you achieve your purpose.
3. Strategically remove distractions and focus on the here and now.
4. To make your chores more enjoyable, bundle these activities you have to do with other activities you want to do.
5. Taking time for vacation increases happiness, along with creativity and performances at work.
6. We are prone to letting our days get mindlessly filled with activities that are unfulfilling. One reason is that we too frequently say yes to incoming requests, because we incorrectly believe we will have more spare time in the future. Identify, commit to, and prioritize space in your finite time jar for the activities that bring you joy.
7. Say thank you to the people who make your life good, and count the remaining times you have with them so that you make your shared times even better.
8. It’s never too late to live the life you aspire to be remembered for – a life without regret.

Feeling happy is a worthy endeavor – benefiting you at work, in your relationships, and in your health, as well as making you more resilient, creative, and kind.

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Five stars – I just did not expect to fall in love with this community. If we’re being honest, I was afraid of growing old and becoming boring, feeble, and forgotten. On the contrary, the characters in this book are wonderful, heroic and flawed, sneaky, and uproariously funny. Old people in particular are often overlooked and underestimated; it’s delightful to see these character use that to their advantage. To lay it out, they have a number of advantages: 1) because they have lived so long, they know many people and have a much wider network of folks to solicit information from and call in favors. 2) They drift under the radar. 3) They have interesting backstories and a lot of free time. These are sources of ingenuity.

As far as the actual mystery, the plot was complicated as there were more than twenty characters to follow and at the end it was hard to keep track of the death count. The narrative contributed to the confusion. It was like talking to an old person, a ton of tangents, unfocused rants, and an occasional clue which typically ends up being a red herring. Needless to say, I forgave the chaotic nature because I figure it was intentional and because the tender moments were so much more brilliant. Unlike most murder mysteries, the author sees the world as fairly benign and full of adventure. Moving into a retirement community is similar to a first year at college, where friends are always around and you join a bunch of extra-circulars. This is an unexpectedly uplifting book and I can’t say enough good things about it.

NYPD detective Barry Sutton is investigating a devastating disorder known as False Memory Syndrome – a mysterious affliction that drives victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. As he searches for the truth, a mysterious benefactor grants him an opportunity to save his daughter who was fatally killed in an automobile accident a decade earlier. He re-experiences the alternate reality, learns of the technology that has unmade the world, and meets its creator, neuroscientist Helena Smith. In this sci-fi thriller, Barry and Helena race against time, memory, and destiny to restore the original timeline.

Memory is reality. It is our memory that underwrites our identities and connects us to others. While time travel is fairly popular in pop culture, this may be the first time memory advances beyond the metaphysical argument and becomes the vehicle with which characters can change the past. The idea of time travel grants us an opportunity to fantasize about undoing debilitating regrets or gaming life to obtain the elusive. However, unintended consequences and an inherent distrust of humanity’s ability to govern technology are major themes. Completely engrossing and full of suspense, I could not put the book down. The book is a meditation on pain, suffering, memory, and meaning: “Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

Jesus’ Son is a collection of short stories of lost souls shunned by society. The main character is a young drifter who spends all his time getting high and hanging out with strange characters. He staggers from habit to addiction – passively participating along the way in abortions and car crashes, drug deals, robberies, and murder. These stories are short and detached from the past.
• car crashed hitchhiker
• an attempt to ditch a mute sociopath
• heroin addict stealing welfare checks of dead people
• consuming too much weed to save a friend from an accidental gunshot wound
• aiding a friend who breaks into his old home to steal copper wire
• an emergency room orderly pulled a knife out of a patient’s head. afterwards he get on the road and runs over a pregnant rabbit, then tries to warm the fetal rabbits but crushes them under his weight
• gunshot suicide after finding his wife overdosed on pills depressed after aborting their child
• man with a bullet hole in his face at a detox center
• loveless promiscuity

The narrator’s inability to construct a “well-made” story, or even to keep the facts of his life straight, expressively parallels the rest of his dysfunctional behavior. He continually fails to execute his restated plans. He tends to feel profoundly ambivalent about the women in his life. He focuses on his physical maladies and dependence on heroin and illegal sources of income. His universe is governed by addiction, malevolence, faith, and uncertainty. It is a place where attempts at salvation remain radically provisional, he has condemned Jesus’ son to only 11 Stations of the Cross.

The novel is a multi-generational family saga set between the 1940s to the 1990s and centers on identical twin sisters Desiree and Estelle “Stella” Vignes and their daughters Jude and Kennedy. Desiree and Stella are light-skinned black sisters who were raised in the fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana. They witnessed the lynching of their father in the 1940s. At the age of 16, the twins run away to New Orleans. However, Stella disappears shortly thereafter only to be living her life in secret as a white woman.

Jude grows older and moves to Los Angeles through a track scholarship at UCLA. She falls in love with Reese while in college and eventually gets a job to help him save for surgery. While working part time as a caterer in Beverly Hills, Jude sees a woman who appears to be her mother’s doppelgänger. Jude meets Stella’s daughter Kennedy at a local theater and tells her the secret of her mother’s identity.

There is no plot twist in this book. It’s a straight-forward juxtaposition from the perspective of two women and their daughters of what it means to be black in America. The individuals confronting structural racism in the economy, education, and home. Through race we are ascribed kinship, pain, and pride. Typically when a character elects orphanhood, it is a matter of amputation or character suicide. But in this story, it is Desiree that has found herself in a narrow precise role of abandoned sister, loyal partner, and flighty daughter. And it is Stella who is afforded all forms of escape, mystery, and contradiction.

Edwin is eighteen years old when his parents exile him to Canada. It is 1912 when he reaches Caiette, a fictional place on Vancouver Island. He enters the forest and experiences a mysterious darkness and a cacophony of sounds. He meets a stranger named Roberts who claims to be a clergyman. Edwin is unconvinced.

A hundred years later, Mirella attends a film festival. Paul shows a video filmed by his sister Vincent that mirrors Edwin’s strange encounter – violin music, a train station, and a whooshing noise. After the performance Mirella is approached by Roberts. She seems to recognize him from her childhood as a person involved in a shooting under an overpass.

In the year 2203, Olive is on a book tour traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony. Within the text of her bestselling pandemic novel is a strange passage of a man playing violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

A century after Olive, Roberts lives in moon Colony 2 and was named after a minor character in Olive’s novel. He takes a job as a detective to investigate an incident that could be “file corruption: when moments from different centuries are bleeding into one another.” This could be evidence for the simulation hypothesis, that everyone is at all times living in a simulation.

This is Mandel’s sixth novel and continues her work of speculative fiction. Written during the COVID-19 pandemic, the novel covers themes of reality, time, and memory by exploring the multiverse and time travel. That feeling of something lovely glimpsed and lost is everywhere in these pages. Exiles, grieving friends, lonely authors, and lonelier time travelers are trying to catch hold of what keeps eluding them. And whether that’s something they’ve had and lost, or something they want but can’t quite name, all feel adrift on the boundless seas of longing.

First performed in 1895, this comedic play mocks the superficiality of Victorian society. Wilde writes a satire of mistaken identities and secret engagements, of two women Cecily and Gwendolen who are both in love with a mythical suitor named Earnest. Jack lives in the country with his ward Cecily. He invents a brother named Earnest and uses him as an excuse to travel to London periodically. Jack is in love with Gwendolen, the cousin of his friend Algernon. Gwendolen thinks Jack’s name is Ernest and wants to marry him but her mother objects because he is an orphan. Jack discovers that Algernon has been visiting the countryside and impersonating Earnest in order to woo Cecily. Subtitled “A Trivial Play for Serious People”, this play pokes fun at the institutions like marriage, social customs, and the pursuit of love.

The standing joke throughout is that the main characters never reveal their true feelings, always maintaining a witty persona so as to escape their social obligations. “Earnestness” was highly regarded as a worthwhile character trait in Victorian society. It had originated in religious attempts to reform the lower classes, but quickly spread as a desirable attribute to the upper ones. So the very title, The Importance of Being Earnest mocks the triviality of societal norms and values.

It is argued that the play’s themes of duplicity and ambivalence are inextricably bound up with Wilde’s homosexuality, and that the dialogue exhibits a teasing homosexual urge. Following the play’s debut, Wilde feud with English poet Lord Alfred Douglas came to a head when Wilde sued for libel. The court proceedings provided enough evidence for Wilde’s arrest, trial and conviction on charges of gross indecency. Wilde’s homosexuality was revealed to the Victorian public and he was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour. In light of the historical events, I idolize the author and this play for its multiple layers of meaning and understanding. After his release from prison, he published the play from exile in Paris, but he wrote no more comic or dramatic works. By many accounts, this play is Wilde’s greatest dramatic achievement.

In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions. He sets out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists: that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. His work has reshaped social psychology, cognitive science, the study of reason and of happiness, and behavioral economics.

Human irrationality is Kahneman’s great theme, and he breaks it down in three phases. The first phase covers “cognitive biases”, fallacies, heuristics, or, the unconscious errors of reasoning that distort our judgment of the world. Typical of these is the “anchoring effect”: our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers that we happen to be exposed to. In the second phase, he shows that people making decisions under uncertain conditions do not behave in the way that economic models have traditionally assumed; they do not “maximize utility.” He proposes an alternative account of decision making, one more faithful to human psychology, called “prospect theory.” In the third phase, Kahneman has delved into “hedonic psychology”: the science of happiness, its nature and its causes.

In short, this book largely claims we are prone to jump to conclusions based on rule-of-thumb shortcuts to actual reasoning, and in reliance on bad evidence, even though we have the capacity to think our way to better conclusions. Life not only is uncertain, we cannot understand it systemically, and luck has just as much to do with what happens to us, maybe even more than we care to admit. These conclusions are often based in circuitous anecdotes and ramblings. To prove “hedonic psychology”, he designs a disturbing colonoscopy experiment. While I admire his contributions, this book was tedious and unsettling.

This is the autobiography of Simu Liu, the actor who played the Marvel superhero Shang-Chi. Born in Harbin China, Simu’s parents left him in the care of his grandparents to build a future for their family in Canada. At the age of four, his parents brought him to Canada where he became an academic prodigy full of promise. He follows the path laid out by his parents, but after a year out of college he becomes unemployed, ashamed, and directionless. Unhappy, Simu abandons his “secure” path to success. Against his parent’s wishes, he decides to pursue his dreams of making it to the big screen and play the role of a superhero.

An immigrant story is one full of sacrifice, failure, and heartache but through hope and dedication the story ends in triumph over impossible odds. What Simu highlights in this book is the emotionally distant relationship with his parents, strained and separated by language, culture, and values. This book is a call to breaking unhealthy parenting cycles and learning how to be loved and be enough. While the story may point to an affliction prevalent in Asian-American and Asian-Canadian culture, [IMO] Simu plays up the victim card to increase the drama in a fairly undramatic life. He comes off as self-serving. His story had the potential to be transcendent but he never ventures to bring others along the journey to transform anyone other than himself. Perhaps, it’s a guy thing to see yourself as the protagonist.

This book is an anthology of women who embody courage and resilience. More than one hundred women are featured in this collection, selected from more than two hundred essays the pair wrote. The subjects range from 16th-century astronomer Caroline Herschel to contemporary teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, and include athletes, healers, storytellers, scientists, inventors, political leaders, activists, environmentalists, and groundbreakers. Many of the early essays cover renowned women, and if you’re familiar with them I suggest you skip the first block of stories and go straight to the biographies of the lesser known ladies.

With so many stories, you can’t help but admire the avalanche of celebration. Women have painted, written, created, discovered, invented, and led for just as long as men. It’s simply that their work is more likely to go unrecognized—sometimes for centuries. And the reason it’s important to publish it is that it is hard to be what you can’t see, but that didn’t stop these women. They had no route to follow, no guarantee they’d ever reach their destination—whether that destination was freedom, the right to vote, the chance to be a doctor, or the opportunity to compete in sports or in anything else. The whole book feels like a restrained statement of rebellion. What’s more, a deep sense of female camaraderie permeates the book. It’s a girls club of defiant women who don’t like being told what they can and can’t do.

One of my favorite quotes was by Gloria Steinem, who was asked repeatedly when she planned to “pass the torch.” Her answer summed it up perfectly: “I’m not giving up my torch. I’m using it to light others. That’s the only way there can be enough light.”