Get Happy

The business of contentment.

- ANTHONY LANE

into the on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear's "Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones" and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you'll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins's "Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds," on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins's prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon's best-seller list is "Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier," by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio).

At this point, your conscience rebels. By buying a book on Amazon, you tell yourself, you will be directly funding a new angora lining for Jeff Bezos's monogrammed slippers in the master bedroom of his private yacht-not the main one but the backup vessel currently moored off Patmos. Quivering with righteousness, you close your laptop and stride to your nearest bookstore, only to bump into a dilemma: whereabouts in the store, exactly, can "Build the Life You Want" be found? It is not an easy volume to place.