I haven't done a Sunday sampling in a long time but, this weekend, I really wanted to sit down and do just that. I ended up reading three very different samples: Wintering by Katherine May, New Happy by Stephanie Harrison and Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived. Three books, three different decisions/outcomes for their futures in my personal library.
Wintering is beautifully written. The language is lovely and the concept of times in our lives when what we need most is relaxation and recharging was definitely interesting. Unfortunately, it left me feeling a little like I was reading Sylvia Plath. Maybe I’ve been teaching positive psychology for too long, but it was too sad for me. I found myself skimming over the parts about her depression and reading more about strategies. Again, maybe this is a personal or psychology bias – probably it is. But I like to read in order to either learn or escape and this book felt too heavy for me. I want to reiterate that it’s beautifully written and I'm certain that there's an audience that would appreciate it tremendously. I just didn’t think I had the constitution to read the entire book so I deleted the sample.
Speaking of positive psychology, I had downloaded Flourishing when I was prepping for my positive psych class few semesters back. It’s more than 20 years old, so, despite its excellent format of chapters by various positive psychology researchers, I don’t feel comfortable assigning it as a textbook because some of it feels out of date. Still, there were some very interesting concepts in the sample like Seligman’s three pillars of positive psychology and a chapter on resilience that I will likely use with my classes. It helps a lot that they’re part of the sample – the chapters, that is – I can simply ask my students to go on Amazon and do their assignment by reading "Look inside this book” or by downloading the sample of the e-book to our course platform. I kept this sample because I’d highlighted various concepts that I wanted to bring out when I teach positive psychology again. The concepts themselves are somewhat timeless, and so the copyright date mattered less. So far, the sample is sufficient.
Finally, and also speaking of positive psychology, I had already read the sample of New Happy and, while I hadn’t found a lot of new-to-me information in it, at least as far as the sample goes, I’d enjoyed it. Her premise is well-articulated in the description above the title: "Getting happiness right in a world that’s got it wrong." I had found the sample interesting enough that I wanted to read more but, given that it felt familiar in its concepts, I wanted to find my cheapest option. I started with the library, which didn’t have it. That search made me aware that there’s an audiobook, so I checked out the price of that, and weighed it against whether I wanted to listen to the book or have a physical copy in my hand. Listening would be interesting, but I haven’t ruled it out as a possible read for one of my classes so an actual copy that I could highlight seemed like a better idea. The cheapest copy I found on eBay was in good condition, but that made me wonder how much highlighting was already in the book. In the end, I ended up with a Kindle copy. If I decide, I want to use it with my students, I will end up looking for a physical copy, but, for now, at $4.99, the price point was right. When I hadn't gotten back to the book a few days later, I bought the audiobook (so much for the cheapest option), which I am enjoying tremendously. I especially like her simple idea of new happy: "Happiness comes from discovering who you are and sharing yourself in ways that help other people."
Although I love the convenience of reading e-books, I’m still very much a hard copy girl. My husband reads exclusively on his iPad and so does my dad. My daughter, like me, has a mix of hard copies, audiobooks, and e-books. I still prefer to have a novel in my hand rather than on a device or a screen, but my non-fiction is pretty much mixed across all three formats.
How about you? Are you an e-book reader? A hard copy person? How about audiobooks? How do you decide?
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