Last Updated on August 8, 2014 by melissanreynolds
In line with my current fascination with being well, which includes being happy, I’ve been reading a lot of books in this area.
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Gretchen Rubin’s Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life has been an excellent addition to my reading list.
She has studied happiness extensively and has a blog and another book dedicated to it. Her bibliography reads like my new to-read list.
Synopsis from GoodReads:
Starting in September (the new January), Rubin dedicated a school year—September through May—to making her home a place of greater simplicity, comfort, and love.
In The Happiness Project, she worked out general theories of happiness. Here she goes deeper on factors that matter for home, such as possessions, marriage, time, and parenthood. How can she control the cubicle in her pocket? How might she spotlight her family’s treasured possessions? And it really was time to replace that dud toaster.
Each month, Rubin tackles a different theme as she experiments with concrete, manageable resolutions—and this time, she coaxes her family to try some resolutions, as well.
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Rubin combines personal anecdotes and thorough research as she outlines her monthly experiments. Being somewhat nerdy, nothing excites me more (in a non-fiction book) than a sentence that begins – “research suggests…”
“Research suggests that mindful people tend to be happier, are more likely to feel self-confident and grateful and less likely to feel anxious or depressed, and have heightened self-knowledge.” P41
She’s not selling a universal prescription for happiness. She’s offering her experience and research so that we can find our own keys to happiness. Rubin writes in a genuine, easily accessible manner. I find her writing a joy to read. All non-fiction writers ought to be able to weave a story in the same way a fiction author does -and Rubin does this beautifully.
You can find for yourself Gretchen Rubin’s Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life. If you’re curious about her first book 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 you can get that here. I highly recommend them both, mouthful titles that they are.
Nerdy note:
If you read a lot, like me (I read around 100 books per year), then you might like Amazon Kindle Unlimited! Just sign up here. Amazon Kindle Unlimited gives you unlimited reading (say what?) and unlimited listening to their audio books. If brain fog is an issue and you need to re read over again, it’s all there. Happy reading!
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