The Book of Human Emotions

By Tiffany Watt Smith,

Book cover of The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust

Book description

Is your heart fluttering in anticipation? Is your stomach tight with nerves? Are you falling in love? Feeling a bit miffed? Are you curious (perhaps about this book)? Do you have the heebie-jeebies? Are you antsy with iktsuarpok? Or giddy with depaysement?

The Book of Human Emotions is a gleeful,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Book of Human Emotions as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I wrote my own book inspired by this charming little encyclopedia of emotions.

Smith has collected 156 emotion words in English and other languages, along with delightful discussions of them. Stuff like David Foster Wallace’s ambiguphobia: “feeling uncomfortable about leaving things open to interpretation,” and l’appel du vide, French for “the call of the void,” that unnerving impulse to leap when perched on a high steep cliff. I love the Inuit word, iktsuarpok: the fidgety and restless feeling we get right before guests arrive.

Smith thinks that instead of trying to come up with a reductive list of…

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