📚 Happiness

What makes a life feel good, asked as a real question — the findings on money, work, relationship and habit, tested against the self-help shelf.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject happiness in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Das Kapital	Karl Marx	1867	189
	The game of life and how to play it	Florence Scovel Shinn	1925	97
	The art of happiness	His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso the XIV Dalai Lama	1998	31
	Flow	Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi	1990	25
	Life's Little Instruction Book	H. Jackson Brown, Jr.	1991	24
	Think Like a Monk	Jay Shetty	2020	24
	Feeling Good	David D. Burns	1980	22
	The Secret	Rhonda Byrne	2000	21
	The conquest of happiness	Bertrand Russell	1930	18
	The antidote	Oliver Burkeman	2012	18
	Who Will Cry When You Die?	Robin S. Sharma	1999	17
	嫌われる勇気	Ichirō Kishimi	2013	17
	Four Thousand Weeks	Oliver Burkeman	2021	15
	Ikigai	Héctor García	2016	13
	The Happiness Hypothesis	Jonathan Haidt	2005	12
	Stumbling on happiness	Daniel T. Gilbert	2006	12
	The secret of happiness	Billy Graham	1955	11
	The Courage to Be Happy	Ichirō Kishimi	2019	11
	Girl, Stop Apologizing	Rachel Hollis	2019	11
	Five Minutes to Happiness	Maxwell Maltz	1962	10
	You Can Be Happy No Matter What	Richard Carlson	1992	10
	Emotional alchemy	Tara Bennett-Goleman	2001	10
	Happier	Tal Ben-Shahar	2007	9
	The Comfort Book	Matt Haig	2021	9
	No More Mr. Nice Guy	Robert A. Glover	2001	8
	The Art of Living	His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso the XIV Dalai Lama	2001	8
	The Happiness Project	Gretchen Rubin	2010	8
	The happiness advantage	Shawn Achor	2010	8
	The things you can see only when you slow down	Haemin Sunim	2017	8
	What I believe	Bertrand Russell	1925	7

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 06 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.