("Stumbling on Happiness" + "Sex as a Second Language")

[fiefoe]

Daniel Gilbert is a lively writer.

In the foreword, he makes an excellent observation that our future selves are ingrates. The claim that our imagination gets into the way of our experiencing happiness takes longer (i.e. the rest of the book) to explain.

His advice comes at the very end: trust other people's current experience.
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I ended up reading Alisa Kwitney's latest not for the romantic elements.

• Like Sophia Loren, Lia had gradually exchanged the sultry beauty of her youth for a solid, affluent handsomeness.
• Lia had explained that he'd had a startlingly sharp, muscular, wholly unsentimental intelligence, completely at odds with his mild looks. "I was taken by the fact that he was so brilliant and unsparing," Lia had told her. "I felt like his choosing me was a validation of my own intelligence."
• Nowadays the only sin people worried about was looking old.
  
• "Especially the saga of Gunnlaugur the Worm Tongue."
  
• She had the uncompromising air of a person who'd been living alone for some time.