Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Martin Seligman

Originally published 20 years ago, an indispensable tool for learning the cognitive skills that decades of research have shown to be essential to well-being — an unlearning those that hold us back from authentic happiness.

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking

Oliver Burkeman

Forget positive thinking, pessimism might be the key to happiness… sort of.

Read on at the link.

The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to their Younger Selves

Sarah Moon

63 celebrated queer authors – including David Levithan, Amy Bloom, Brian Selznick, Gregory Maguire, and Lucy Thurber – offer honest, heartening, profoundly moving personal missives to their younger selves.

The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

Originally published in 1993, this gem explores what’s arguably the most important dimension of what it means to be human — our inherent imperfection — and the many ways in which we violate it daily, delivering a constellation of wisdom and practical insight on how to live in a way that enables, rather than disempowers, our humanity.

Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired

Till Roenneberg

“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.)

But science indicates otherwise.

German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg debunks the social stigma around late risers and shows the biological roots of “night owls” and “early birds.”

O taste and see: New poems

Denise Levertov

“Two girls discover the secret of life on a sudden line of poetry.”

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Charles Duhigg

New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg proposes that the root of adhering to our highest ideals — exercising regularly, becoming more productive, sleeping better, reading more, cultivating the discipline necessary for building successful ventures — is in understanding the science and psychology of how habits work.

Schopenhauer’s Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas

Deborah Luepnitz

What the porcupine dilemma made famous by German philosopher Schopenhauer can teach us about intimacy and happiness.

American Letters: 1927-1947

Jackson Pollock

“The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life.”

From a beautiful letter to 16-year-old Jackson Pollock by his dad, found in this magnificent volume.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Vintage International)

Alain De Botton

“A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses it to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery. And the dominant form of snobbery that exists today is job snobbery — you encounter it within minutes at a party when you get asked that famous, iconic question of the 21st century: ‘What do you do?’ The opposite of a snob is your mother.”

Philosopher Alain de Botton on false standards and how to reclaim the metrics of success.

You Are Not So Smart

David McRamney

An illuminating and just the right magnitude of uncomfortable almanac of some of the most prevalent and enduring lies we tell ourselves.

7 Must-Read Books on the Art & Science of Happiness

Annie Dillard on winter, memes, and living with wonder

Annie Dillard

“I’m getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it it cheerfully cruel. I never cease to marvel at the newspapers. In my life I’ve seen one million pictures of a duck that has adopted a kitten, or a cat that has adopted a duckling, or a sow and a puppy, a mare and a muskrat. And for the one millionth time I’m fascinated. I wish I lived near them, in Corpus Christi or Damariscotta; I wish I had the wonderful pair before me, mooning about the yard. It’s all beginning to smack of home. The winter pictures that come in over the wire from every spot on the continent are getting to be as familiar as my own hearth. I wait for the annual aerial photograph of an enterprising fellow who has stamped in the snow a giant valentine for his girl. Here’s the annual chickadee-trying-to-drink-from-a-frozen-birdbath picture, captioned, ‘Sorry, Wait Till Spring,’ and the shot of an utterly bundled child crying piteously on a sled at the top of a snowy hill, labeled, ‘Needs a Push.’ How can an old world be so innocent?”

7 Essential Books on Optimism

“Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”