It doesn't matter that she's the eldest daughter of a lord and the niece of a viscount, and is expected to marry well. It doesn't matter that no woman can be a physician, let alone a surgeon. Hazel has her heart set on becoming a surgeon. Part romance, part gory historical curiosity and part pulsating page-turner, Schwartz's novel is thrumming with life, even as it looks compassionately at what is dead and dying. In Anatomy, Dana Schwartz ( Choose Your Own Disaster The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon) pulls back the curtain on the thrilling and fascinating world of 19th-century surgeons and the bodies they dissect, as seen through the eyes of 17-year-old Hazel Sinnett in 1817 Edinburgh, Scotland. That was indeed a moment of profound happiness with no anxiety attached, and definitely improved my short-term well-being. On the other hand, it was through newish media I learned, in December 2020, that Bailey had become the unlikely winner of the British TV competition Strictly Come Dancing. ![]() In his chapter on reading, Bailey observes: "There are many scholarly articles which list the benefits of reading, ranging from having a greater vocabulary to being more thoughtful towards others, or even broadening your outlook on life generally." Which leads me to Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to Happiness (Quercus, $28.99). Any happiness came from encountering great reads. If they also sparked anxiety, they meant to. The last six books I read were Louise Erdrich's The Sentence (Harper, $28.99) Damon Galgut's The Promise (Europa Editions, $25) Sandrine Colette's The Forests (Europa Editions, $18) Amanda Lohrey's The Labyrinth Joy Williams's Harrow (Knopf, $26) and Muriel Barbery's A Single Rose (Europa Editions, $22), all of which, I believe, were good for my long-term well-being. ![]() I thought about Manny when I recently encountered a new study from the University of Oxford, University of Vienna and Nesta that noted it is "often assumed that engaging with traditional types of media improves well-being, while using newer types of media, such as social media, worsens well-being." The paper contends that "changes in the types of media people consumed and the amount of time people spent engaging with traditional media were not associated with substantial changes in anxiety or happiness levels." In the hospital, his doctor breaks the news that " somehow you assimilated it into your system overnight." Things get more complicated when he accidentally swallows the book. The situation leaves the frazzled patron, Manny (Bill Bailey), only marginally better off for having acquired a copy. In the first episode of the classic British comedy series Black Books, a man rushes into the bookshop and desperately asks Bernard Black for The Little Book of Calm.
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