Choosing Happier - despite your circumstances, history or genes


by Jem Friar (2017)

I have to say I am a complete sucker for books where the author has clearly spent his time selecting and collating a load of primary sources and packaging them all into a lovely, readable, presentable, entertaining product, rather than them bothering to come up with any devastatingly new ideas themselves and this is pretty much what happens here.  OK, you can argue for a degree of creativity on the part of the author in managing all this selecting, collating and packaging, so I won't feel too bad giving this lovely, readable, presentable, entertaining book a high rating.

Somehow also, I don't seem to be tiring of reading books about positive psychology.  This year alone, I seem to have read quite a few and whilst a lot of the information in "Choosing Happier" is familiar, there are other ideas I hadn't encountered before. 

All in all, from personal experience of a vast range of moods including a general sense of happiness and contentment, I would say that the suggestions in the book make very good sense. These micro habits and practices are often what happy people do.  Whether this will shift someone from an unhappy state to a happy one is another matter, but certainly worth a shot.

The only other quibble: there is a reasonable amount of selling of other merchandise that goes on in this book, but I can't hold even that against him, as there is also a lot of other stuff which he offers completely for free.  An author's gotta eat, after all.

Rating 8/10

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