Jane Brocket, The Gentle Art of Domesticity. I’ve enjoyed reading Brocket’s blog Yarnstorm, so I decided to buy her book sight unseen.
It’s an enjoyable read and suitable for quick moments of browsing; it reads very much like a collection of extended blog posts — short essays that tie in thematically but can be read independently. (Indeed, some of the essays I recognized from the blog, though others were new to me.) The photos don’t seem quite as striking as those on her blog, but they’re still visually interesting.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge. A really interesting book advocating what they call “libertarian paternalism”. Brief summary of their argument: How you present choices to people affects what choices they make. So if you present the choice in such a way to make it more likely that they’ll choose what you’d prefer they choose (the paternalism side), but still make it easy for them to select another option if they want (the libertarian side), you tend to get the results you want while still preserving people’s freedom of choice.
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness. Why we don’t always judge correctly what’ll make us happy, from a psychology & brain wiring perspective. Interesting, and very entertainingly written. I quibble a bit with the author’s conclusion that the best way to figure out whether something will make you happy is to look at whether it makes other people happy — learning a Bulgarian dance makes me pretty darn happy, but most people find that pretty tedious — but the basic concept makes sense.