In writing this brief review, I decided to leave out the diacritics on the author’s name because I can’t even guess his last name. Sure, his first name is Cường, but his last name could be Lư or Lữ. I couldn’t find any reference to his name. That said, let’s get to the book.

Cuong Lu who was a longtime student of Thích Nhật Hạnh is picking up where his teacher left off. He writes about Buddhist psychology with concise prose and clarity. Happiness Is Overrated is insightful and practical. What strikes me the most is how happiness and suffering are close to each other. The book itself is super short. It can be read in one sitting. If I have to choose one chapter from the book, it has to be chapter 5, which titled “True Wealth.” I am just going to quote the entire chapter here so I can refer back to later on. Cuong Lu:

We all want to be happy. We think happiness is the answer to every kind of suffering. Just be happy in the here and now, and everything will be fine. I wish life were that simple. But it isn’t. Your happiness, for example, can be the suffering of someone else. We need to see ourselves in others, too. If we don’t care about the suffering of others, that is not true happiness.

When we only think about ourselves, there are many things we can do to make ourselves happy. When we think about others, there are many things we can do to help them be happy. Sometimes, though, we need to choose. We only have one treat, and we have to choose. We can choose to eat it, or we can choose to give it to someone else. Sometimes we want to have it for ourselves, and yet we give. We’re not 100 percent happy, but at a deeper level you can’t overestimate the joy of giving and helping. Facing these choices is part of the journey to discovering the meaning of your life.

You are more than you think. Others are also you. When you respect others, you’re respecting yourself. When you love others, you are loving yourself. When you help others, you are helping yourself. But when you’re happy and others are suffering, your happiness is incomplete. When you’re rich and others are poor, something is wrong. We need to share. And we need to share our happiness with those who are suffering. Only by sharing can we be truly happy. Only by sharing can we be truly wealthy. There’s no way to be rich in spirit without giving and sharing.

The more you give, the richer you become. Sharing is an art. If you’re rich and don’t know how to share, you are still a poor person. If you are happy and don’t know how to make others happy, you are suffering. Taking care of yourself is not enough. You need to learn to take care of others. Happiness is not only in the here and now. Future generations are in us. We need to work for the happiness of future generations; then we’ll be happy.

In the Lotus Sutra, there is a story of two friends who met each other after many years apart. One had become rich, the other poor. After a dinner with a lot of alcohol, the poor friend fell soundly asleep, and the wealthy friend, before leaving, sewed a diamond inside the lining of his friend’s jacket. Many years later when they met again, the poor friend was still poor. He never realized that he had a gem inside his jacket.

This is not a story about wealth. The gem is a metaphor for your true self. You have a diamond in you. You don’t have to search for it; it’s already yours. Happiness and suffering are both yours, as is the wisdom of knowing how precious life is. With this wisdom, we know how to love one another and protect life.

Clark’s writing is concise and he keeps each chapter to several pages. Nevertheless, I could not finish the book. Maybe I am not the right audience for this type of book. He has good information on public writing. I am not a public writer. I am just a blogger.

This novel took me three weeks to finish. I was lost in two-third of the book. I couldn’t tell when the story took place in the past or the present and in reality or in a dream. The last 100 pages started to make some sense, but I was still uncleared. Although the storyline is blurry to me, Ms. Trần’s use of diacritical marks for Vietnamese was clear for me. I liked her food writing. The steamed duck with gingered fish sauce made my mouth watery. Mad props for including web design as part of the story.

Năm trước tôi định đọc quyển Truyện ngắn Lê Hà Ngân nhưng ngưng khi thấy sách quá nhiều lỗi. Không phải trong chính tả mà trong cách gõ chữ Việt. Chẳng hạn như chữ ơ thiếu dấu móc hoặc hai chữ gắn liền nhau. Giờ đọc lại thì thấy cách viết văn của Lê Hà Ngân hay. Những câu chuyện về tình cảm và xã hội ấn tượng. Trong “Một khoảng trời mây trắng”, tác giả đưa vào hai câu châm ngôn mà tôi chưa từng nghe qua: “Ừ lành thì làm gáo, vỡ thì làm muôi nhé!” và “Sông còn dò được khúc nông sâu mà lòng người không ai dò hết được”.

I enjoy Jones’s personal poems. I appreciate his openness on racism and same-sex experiences, but I find the connection with him on the grief for his mother. Reading “Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude” and “The Dead Dozens” makes me miss my mother so bad. I loved this collection.

Reporter James R. Hagerty has written more than 800 obituaries for the Wall Street Journal; therefore, he knows what it takes to write a life story. No one is better at telling your story than yourself and you can start writing right away. On this blog, I have a goodbye category, in which I write brief tributes to the people I had known. I also have a personal category, in which I write about my life. This blog is my obituary as well.

I read Timothy Goodman’s corny-ass love in Paris in one sitting. He’s right. The love is corny as fuck, but his prose saved the story. His writing is concise and lyrical. The art part is hard to read though. I skipped that.

Simone Stolzoff’s The Good Enough Job comes at the critical moment of my own career evaluation. I fell into the conventional wisdom of following my passion. I believed that if I worked hard at what I loved to do, I would become successful. I spent over 20 years of my career from a web designer fresh out of college to work my way up to become a design director. Now I am on the brink of losing everything. A director title doesn’t mean anything. I have come to accept that money, power, and privilege overrules passion. I am in the process of separating my identity from my job and my self-worth from my output. Fortunately, I am not alone and Stolzoff has the proof through his interviews with people who have burned out, become disillusioned, and find meaningless in what they do. It is an essential book for anyone who wants to reclaim their life from work.

Reading Hua Hsu’s memoir gives me nostalgia. Hsu is 45, my age; therefore, we listened to the same hip-hop songs from the early 90s. We were raised by Asian-immigrant parents. We had similar experiences growing up. Hsu had Ken and I had Đức.

When I first met Đức in high school, he embarrassed me. His jokes, his accents, and his hustlings somewhat irritated me. He bought stolen TI calculators from the Black kids for $10 or $20 a pop and resold it for $50. He sold me one for $30 so I was part of the problem. He was known for copying pre-calculus homeworks from our Vietnamese group. I often wondered how he would survive college if we were around to let him copy our homeworks. I would never find out.

Despite all of his flaws, Đức was a charming guy. Outside of the school, he was street smart. Our friendship grew. I welcomed him into our crew, which included my two Vietnamese friends I had known since middle school. To keep the story short, Đức drowned in a boating accident. He, his girlfriend, and I were in the same canoe. I can’t remember if there was a fourth person on it. The canoe flipped over when we stood up and clowning around. I was not a good swimmer; therefore, I grabbed a hold of the canoe. With the help of other friends from another canoe, we flipped the canoe over. His girlfriend and I got back on, but Đức was nowhere to be found. We thought he was pulling a prank at first. Two, three, four, five minutes later, we started to worry.

Like Hsu, I felt guilty about Đức’s death. It was also the first loss of someone so close to me. The incident haunted me many years later. Ken, Hsu’s friend, was tortured and brutally murdered. It is such a heartbreaking story.

Hsu won a Pulitzer Prize for this memoir. It’s a concise, heartfelt, page-turning read.

Airey’s Identity Designed delves into 16 different brands. My personal favorites are Ad Age and Rooster Beers. The book featured both texts and illustrations. The format is repetitive. The body text is set in Alegreya. The size is a bit too big; therefore, it doesn’t look as solid as it should. The text size should be a bit smaller. Avenir Next for big text is just fantastic.