Why did you read this book? This was Book #3 in my resolution to read 24 books related to personal growth in 2014. I chose this after reading The Happiness Project, as I thought something about the downside of pursuing happiness might be a useful juxtaposition.

Has Beckie read it? No.

42 word review: Basic premise: focusing on happiness and positive thinking often makes people angsty and miserable in short-run, or bad decisions that provoke extra hardship in long-run. Yay, melancholia! All the good ideas toward the front; last half either filler or redundant.

Useful quotes:

• The worst thing about any event, Ellis liked to say, ‘is usually your exaggerated belief in its horror’.
• Taking a non-attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, starts from a different question: Who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like’ doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn’t that you don’t feel motivated; it’s that you imagine you need to feel motivated.
• ‘The truth that many people never understand’, he wrote , ‘is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.’

Overall rating: 3 out of 5 imps of the perverse.