The Happiness Project by Gretchen RubinHarperCollins, 2009

As I said in this post, happiness is the life goal that makes the most sense to me, more than success, more than achievement, more than, well, just about anything else. But how do you go about being happy? Some people would say your happiness is determined by external factors, and others would say it’s determined by genetics or personality, both of which are probably true. But there’s also the idea that, though the general circumstances of your life (health or lack of, money or lack of, etc.) certainly influence your happiness, so can your thoughts and actions, all the little daily choices you make. This makes a lot of sense to me, and it seems that striving for happiness within the framework of daily life is really smart.

So, this book: after realizing that she wasn’t as happy as she thought she could be, Gretchen Rubin decided to research happiness, and to embark on a year-long “happiness project” in which she would keep resolutions each month, with the aim of increasing her happiness. She organized her happiness project by theme, with January focused on “vitality,” February focused on marriage, March focused on work, and so on. For each month, she came up with resolutions ranging from the very concrete (“go to sleep earlier” or “launch a blog”) to the slightly more abstract (“enjoy now” or “be a treasure house of happy memories”)—though these latter end up getting more concretely defined as well, e.g. “take steps to help everyone in the family to experience happy times more vividly,” based on the fact that “studies show that recalling happy time helps boost happiness in the present” (101).

The book, in turn, is organized by month and then by resolution within each month, with some why-I-focused-on-this-theme introductory text and some here’s-what-I-learned wrap-up text. That the book is divided into chunks like this is mostly appealing: it’s very readable, both in short stretches of time on the subway or in the laundromat, and in longer stretches, like on a train from New York to Philadelphia. But it also means that you only get a little bit on each subject, and I sometimes wished for a more seamless narrative instead of all these bits and pieces—though I realize that’s probably more a statement about my reading mood at the moment than about the book itself. (I also found myself occasionally conscious, while reading this book, of how hard it is to deal with dialogue in a nonfiction work like this. I seem to feel this way a lot: like something that was probably a perfectly normal conversation becomes, when written down, like an example scene from an English as a Second Language textbook, where you’re just waiting for the summary questions at the end about what person A said and how person B felt.)

Quibbles aside, I am glad I read this book, as it does contain lots to think about in terms of choosing happiness and building happiness, and Rubin is appealing and relate-able as a narrator. Just some of the “oh yes” moments: when she writes about feeling short-tempered and snapping way too much, and wanting to be happier because it’ll make it easier to be kinder; when she writes about how much she loves reading; when she writes about realizing that what’s fun for other people isn’t necessarily fun for her (and how hard it can sometimes be to be true to that kind of self-knowledge); when she writes about her love of lists; when she writes about being “tough to please”/having a “critical streak” that she knows isn’t really serving her well.