The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin, HarperCollins, 2009 (original hardback publication date; now available in several other formats)
It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do a formal review (well, as formal as these things ever are) of The Happiness Project, since that book kicked off my whole “Intentional Living” thing. I give credit to the book in Intentional Happiness and also on the home page of this website, but here’s some further information. Gretchen Rubin certainly doesn’t need my help in selling any more books, as she’s sold about a gazillion already, and I would like for everyone reading this to buy a copy of my book first, but then after that you should buy a copy of her book if you’re one of the half dozen people who hasn’t already done so.
Why has this book (and her second one, Happier at Home, which is almost as good) been such a phenomenon? It’s because we live out her life with her. We go with her on her various outings around New York City, we stand with her as she bangs on the bathroom door while her daughter is having a tantrum, we overhear her bawling out her (very, very nice) husband over some trivial issue. Talk about transparency! A lot of research has gone into this book, true, but there are tons of other books out there on this topic. Often they seem pretty dry. But with this one we get to see the ideas put into practice (or not, as the case may be—she’s quite frank about her failures).
I’ve said that one of the reasons why I love this book so much is that Rubin reminds me so much of . . . myself. Hey, except for the facts that she graduated from Yale, and Yale Law School, and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Review, and clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, and has several other books to her credit besides the wildly successful happiness ones, well, we’re exactly alike. I hear my voice on her pages.
You can get a GR fix every day if you fall in love with this book, as you can also subscribe to her blog and get a daily happiness quotation by e-mail. My little treat most mornings is to click on the link in the e-mail to read that day’s blog entry. If it hasn’t been posted yet, I’m disappointed. I keep saying that I’m going to go back to the very beginning post way back in 2006, 3 years before the book was published, and read them all. Haven’t done that yet.