Guest blogger Gretchen Rubin is working on a book, The Happiness Project—a memoir of the year she spent test-driving tips, theories, current scientific studies, and wisdom of the ages about how to be happy. On her daily blog, she recounts her adventures and insights as she grapples with the challenge of being happier—we especially enjoy the tips she runs every Wednesday. If you haven't checked out her blog yet, we encourage you to visit—you'll be happy you did. Trust us.
Rubin is also the author of Forty Ways to Look at JFK and the bestselling Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill. Each biography plays with the biography form to capture the crucial aspects of the subject's oversized character and life.
Guest Blogger Gretchen Rubin
Yes, I’m working on a book called The Happiness Project —an account of the year I spent test-driving every principle, tip, theory, new scientific study, and wisdom of the ages about how to be happy.
One terrific thing about this project is that I get to read books like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Julia Morgenstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out, Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness, and Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, and tell myself that I’m working while I’m reading.
Zoikes, it feels like the perfect scam.
At the same time, my happiness project has convinced me that I need to be a more impulsive reader. I’d fallen into the habit of only reading books I thought I “should” read. Now I follow Randall Jarrell’s advice: “Read at whim! Read at whim!”
That’s how I discovered Christopher Alexander’s brilliant, strange A Pattern Language. I’ve become obsessed with it, even though I’m not the slightest bit interested (I thought) in architecture. Ditto, Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
That’s why I’m slowly amassing a library of every book published in English about St. Thérèse of Lisieux. For reasons completely obscure to me, I can’t learn enough about this modern saint. I read her memoir, Story of a Soul, for the first time two years ago and have
probably read it five times since then.
I’m letting myself read as much of children’s literature as I want. I just finished Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (fantastic) and bought M. T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing (looks fantastic).
Is reading at whim making me happier? Absolutely.
I do still find myself thinking, “Is this book going to fill a gap in my thinking?” or “Will this book spark some ideas that I can use for my blog post today?” or “I should be reading more science-of-the-brain books, not more Chuck Palahniuk.”
But I’ve discovered that if you love to read, to be happy you must make time to read for fun. And that often means reading at whim. So for a quick shot of happiness, go to the bookstore or the library or the internet, and choose a book just because it catches your fancy.
Roar of approval.
Posted by: Kate Dino | April 09, 2007 at 09:14 PM