Hello,

In honor of Halloween coming up next week, here are some of my favorite creepy novels:

• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith—an excellent novel (and an excellent movie) about an impostor.
• The Likeness by Tana French—the story of someone who has a double…and what exactly has that double been doing?
• The Passage by Justin Cronin—vampires on a rampage.
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens—we don’t often think of A Christmas Carol as a ghost story, but that’s really what it is. If you haven’t read the story yourself, you’ll find it’s more comical than you might expect, and it’s also more frightening than you might expect.
• The Sundial by Shirley Jackson—how had I missed this excellent Jackson novel until last month? No surprise, it’s unsettling and uncanny.
• Jane-Emily by Patricia Clapp—I love children’s literature, and I love this 1969 novel—but be warned, if you’re considering it for an actual child, the novel features a vengeful child ghost and is truly scary.

Onward,

5 Things Making Me Happy

I’ve been meaning to attend the immersive theatrical experience Sleep No More for years, and it was the first ticket I bought when I was planning “30 Days of Culture.” I loved the show, and want to go again. It’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced before, and now that I understand better what to expect, I’ll be able to pay attention in a different way. All audience members wore these masks during the performance, which turned us into silent, watchful ghosts. Eerie.

I was very interested to read “The scientific reason why you can’t stop going to Disneyland,” about the many strategies used by Disneyland to engage with park goers through the senses. The smells! The sights! The nostalgia! I feel this way about Worlds of Fun, the Kansas City amusement park that has played such a big part in my life.

I love spotting my “Four Tendencies” personality framework out in the world, and I was very pleased to see a Four-Tendencies discussion pop up in Slate’s popular “Dear Prudence” advice column. The reader’s dilemma: “Help! I’ve somehow been roped into learning how to drive a school bus.” She adds, “I am able to do everything asked for me by everyone else but I can’t do the same thing for myself.” When I read that, I thought, “Obliger! This person is absolutely an Obliger!” It turns out that “Prudie” reached the same conclusion, and gave a very accurate analysis of the Four Tendencies framework—much appreciated.

I loved seeing this short video: “In New York, this conductor thought nobody knew it was his birthday. He was wrong.” It was fun to watch the video that captured conductor David Robertson’s surprise, and also fun to read the comments—some musicians who had played that day weighed in.

I really enjoy the podcast Hard Fork, and I was particularly interested in their recent discussion with the founder of Osmo AI, a company which is using artificial intelligence to catalog the world of scents, or, as they say, “giving computers a sense of smell.”

Updates

• In case you missed the live event on LinkedIn earlier this month, you can watch the recording of my conversation with Kim Scott on mastering work relationships.
  
  
• Recently, I chatted with illustrator Wendy MacNaughton for her “Grown Ups Table” newsletter about creativity. So much fun! Read our full conversation here and join our Instagram Live on October 30th at 5pm PT / 8pm ET, as we explore how art and creativity makes us happier.

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