Decent Obsessions: Why it's okay to sweat the small stuff

by Bernard Salt

What is the etiquette of greeting an opposite-sex colleague in a social situation? Should you shake hands or air-kiss?


Are you surrounded by people who continually complain about being broke but manage to pop over to Bali for a holiday?


Do you like saying the names of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Aung San Suu Kyi just because they sound good?


Do you secretly envy surgeons because they get to scrub right up to their forearms, or feel uncomfortable unless the television volume is set to an even number?


Have you ever left a social function thinking, 'Am I the only normal person in the world?'


If any of this resonated with you, then Bernard Salt is your fellow traveller. Decent Obsessions is a rollicking - some might say slightly obsessive - journey through the manners, the mores and the minutiae of modern life.

218 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2013

Reviews

[Booksy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a compilation of The Australian columns written by Bernard Salt on topics of demographics, sociographics, social etiquette and personal opinions on various aspects of life, such as ageing, kids, modern family, obsession with list writing (I can very much relate to this one!) etc.
The author describes a number of human conditions as OCD (such as, for instance, strong predisposition to list-writing) if he doesn’t suffer from them, and yet some conditions are perfectly normal in his opinion (such as, obsession about leaving the TV volume on an even number rather than on an odd one) if he is the one afflicted by them.
Other than that, I found this book a real delight of popular study of human nature, psychology of men and women, people of different generations, “how much brain space is devoted to being agitated by the behaviours of others…”
Some observations sounds LOL funny and yet some sounded to be border lining on “grumpy old men” grumblings.
I really connected with chapters on linguistic observations: the author’s love for all words foreign, the interest in etymology, his stance (that I respect a lot, and trying to lift my own punctuation act as much as I can) on the necessity of using correct punctuation. Those were the chapters written for me, at least I felt this way.
And I would have loved to join the Society for Normal People (SNP) set up by Bernard Salt that apparently has 4,000 followers, only I don’t share this contemporary obsession with Facebook in general, and, especially, with setting up Facebook pages on various topics ranging from global warming to really really small stuff.

[SHR · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Geoff Cumberbeach · Rating 2 out of 5]

This material is possibly OK in a newspaper column as a filler, but it left me very disappointed from a thinker and social commentator like Bernard Salt. You can save a lot of time by just reading the introduction and the summary.

[Guy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Bernard's columns. But a book of columns was too rich a diet to sit down and read. (I'm not one for nibbling at a book.) BTW, these a Bernard's general (Saturday) columns, not his (Thursday) demographic ones.

[Lisa Liebelt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great fun with plenty of ah ha moments. But maybe this is a reflection of my age. I recommend this one for anyone that is feeling disenfranchised with the world, you are not alone.

[Rachael]

I found most of his observations to be amusing. I think if he ever gets past his casual sexism & his 'poor me' victim mentality, his pieces