Blogger Book Club

So, this is not the Blogger Book club that I tried to start. This is a really fun idea started by Sian! It's almost a book swap in a way. The plan was to send your favorite book to one person in the group. We keep rotating the books around and write a review of each one. Then, the book gets sent on and you get a new one in the mail! I'm so happy to have found this group of bloggers and I can't wait to get more books. I also can't wait to see what everyone thinks of my favorite! I had to pick my second favorite since I didn't want everyone to have to send around Harry Potter :)

Here's my thoughts:

This was a really great book. The premise is the author goes around to the happiest and unhappiest places in the world to find out what the secret to happiness is. My favorite chapters had to be the one where he went to Bhutan and the one where he went to Iceland. The author met a lot of people in his travels that were, what he called, "hedonic refugees". These were people that were born in one place (like America) but now live somewhere else. He said that a lot of them had moments where the traveled somewhere and felt like they belonged there. A feeling that they had been born in the wrong country. This really touched me because I felt the same thing when I went to Scotland. I studied abroad there and as soon as I stepped off the plane, I had this feeling that I was meant to be there. I've traveled a lot and never had that feeling anywhere else. There were a lot of funny parts mixed in with facts and the authors opinions of each place. The only thing I didn't like was the generalizations made about an entire people based on the meeting of a few or just his impressions of one city. Can you really know everything about India by just going to Bangalore? Can you know everything about America by living in Miami? I felt like some of the chapters would have been better if they were more fleshed out.

To summerize, this is a great book and I highly recommend reading it! Head over here to check out what she thought of my book (it was ok apparently) and see what everyone else thought of their books!