Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I draw the comparison to the above two books because it's a similar approach: you make a kind of dictionary of interesting stuff, or through a lens that makes the stuff interesting. In the case of this book, it's about "obscure sorrows", but -- as the foreword notes -- it's not actually about sad things.

Rather it is about naming those moments in life where the absurdity of common moments hits you, and opens you up, if just for a moment, to the melancholy of contemplating the point of it all. It can be joyful, it can be sad, but it's definitely an experience.

I find it's perfect for the bathroom shelf (all book lovers have a bathroom shelf, right?). You can read a page, consider a word or five, how it applies to your life. And then the moment passes.

I can't claim to have read the thing in its entirety. But what it makes it a five start recommendation to me is that, so far, I haven't found a single word here yet that I could not relate to.

In addition to that, these words are rarely just neologisms. Rather, they're well researched neologisms, drawing from older roots of words, or from words common in widely disparate fields that unexpectedly collide here. For anyone like myself who enjoys tidbits of etymology, there's the additional joy of discovering how each word is constructed.

Totally worth buying and keeping. Not a light read, though.