The Happiness Project

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.

Gretchen Rubin has a good life. She is happily married, has 2 lovely kids, her writing career is going well and she lives in New York City.

Still she thinks she could be happier so she reads up on happiness (authors as diverse as the Dalai Lama, Malcolm Gladwell,) & starts her own year long happiness project.

She decides to spend spend one year achieving careful, measurable goals in different areas of life (marriage, work, parenting, self-fulfillment) and build on them cumulatively, using concrete steps (such as, in January, going to bed earlier, exercising better & getting organized). By December, she's striving bemusedly to keep increasing happiness in every aspect of her life.

The outcome is good - Rubin's funny, perceptive account is both inspirational and forgiving, and sprinkled with just enough wise tips, concrete advice and timely research (including all those other recent books on happiness) to qualify as self-help.

The book is surprisingly compulsive reading, parts of it were not to my liking but it was an i intersting, sometimes fun read.