(subtitle: Snowy Days, Bakery Air, Finding Money in Your Pocket, and Other Simple, Brilliant Things)
Stumbled into this book via the blogosphere. Neil Pasricha is the author of 1000awesomethings.com, and I will let you explore over there for his reasons/motivation for writing the book.
What I love about it (besides the title) is not even within the book's pages; it's the very idea of a book of awesome ... the inspiration to create your own, to form a giant, personal list of "Best Stuffs Ever." It takes the concept of a Gratitude Journal and turns it on its ear just a bit; these are things you might feel silly thanking God for in your evening prayers ("Thank you God, that I got the cereal-to-milk ratio just right this morning" (pg 20) or "Praise the Lord for bubble wrap" (29) or "that I got the Nintendo to work by smacking it" (42)).
Don't get me wrong: some of the observations contained are just plain BRILLIANT: "The sound of scissors cutting construction paper," and the writing hilarious: "The smell of crayons: Crack open a fresh box and get ready for a neuron-splattering head rush. AWESOME!"
It's just when you sit The Book Of Awesome down (hopefully taking a few days to read, rather than trying to ingest it all in one sitting), you start to see things differently (and really, isn't that one of the AWESOME things about books??): you start to see episodes in your life as entries in your own mental (or if you're a nerd, like me, physical) Book of Awesome. The night after reading a few pages, witnessing my husband get out clothes for the following morning, I added this:
Going for the superfluous bum-bump drawer close, even when you were just facing it with both hands outstretched. AWESOME!
Reminds me of a book a friend in HS loved called "10,000 things to be happy about" -- apparently that one has been updated and now is 14,000 things to be happy about.
ReplyDeleteI think I read that as well... sounds very familiar. I think with that, though, you end up with this "I should be happy because of all these things" type feeling. This is fun in its randomness ... observations of life. Same premise, tho. :)
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