How about Stumbling on Happiness?

There are different ways to find good books. I normally scan the best-seller lists in the internet and the front-alleys of the major book stores - Landmark, Odyssey, Crossword etc - to find the latest hot ones in the market.

The other sources include blogs, newspapers etc, but the risk with most of these is you'd end up getting familiar with lot of 'popular' books as opposed to good ones that suit your taste. For example, Hindu tells me that the self-help (Shiv Khera and likes) and motivational (Paulo Coelho etc) books sell the most (they, apparently, are timeless; and sales volume is about 25% of total) - and keep the cash registers ringing. Nothing wrong with that per-se, but that is stuff I do not like. And again, fiction always sells like hot cakes, but that is something I'm trying hard to refrain from, because, Fiction has started to sound a little pointless, and I want to make sure I read good books in the limit time I have.

All said, the most credible source of good-books information come from friends, colleagues and other avid book readers you know, particularly ones with similar taste.

For picking up Science related books, I generally go by the Aventis Science Prize winners list. This list is considered the Booker prize for Science books. And my personal experience reading these books ("Short History of Nearly Everything", and "Guns, Germs and Steel" that I'm currently immersed with, to quote two of them) have been awesome. Looking at that list, and coming to the point, has anyone read "Stumbling on Happiness", that has been listed as the winner in 2007? I remember seeing the book in New York Times Bestseller list too, and reviews say the book is off-beat, but just want to hear from people who've read it...