[.ca] Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (ISBN 0226768546)

Anything but boring:
This book is anything but boring; it's one of the most fascinating I've read in a long time. Spacks examines the idea of boredom, its genesis and implications, and forces readers to acknowledge that it is a culturally constructed concept, not a naturally occurring one. She historicises the word and the assumptions about the world that it reflects. The fact that most of us can't conceive of the world or our response to it without this category of experience only reinforces her point of how much it has become naturalised. But it reinforces a deadening passivity in our experience of life. The statement "I'm bored!" says much more about the person who is bored than it says about the ostensible cause of the boredom. Read Spacks and learn to pay active attention again.

A book that exemplifies its topic:
Sounds exciting, but actually, well, boring, mostly because the author fails to distinguish between two very different claims: first, that boredom, the state of mind, didn't exist until recently, and second, that it wasn't talked about much until recently. The first claim would be exciting and bizarre, but the argument at most supports the second.