The Happiness Project: If you're in the mood to read a novel about happiness...

The Happiness Project

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT is the memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier – happily, it was a #1 New York Times bestseller. As one of the hundreds of experiments I've conducted, I started this blog. Here, I recount my daily adventures in pursuit of happiness. –

Gretchen Rubin

What Started Me Thinking

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up." Mark Twain
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
“Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
“Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope

Happiness Theories I Reject

Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

A reader suggested that once a month, I include a suggested reading list. Great idea: I’ll include this list on the last day of every month.

Because it’s summer, when people tend to have more time to read novels, I’ll start with a list of novels that I found most interesting on the subject of happiness.

All of these books are TERRIFIC. You may be cowed by the thought of reading War and Peace, but I was staying up late to read it every night until I finished it--there's a reason it's a classic of world literature. Or if you're in the mood for something more light and fun, start with Happy All the Time. But I promise, you can't go wrong with any book on this list.

Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
J. P. Marquand, Point of No Return
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time
Michael Frayn, A Landing on the Sun
Lisa Grunwald, Whatever Makes You Happy
Nick Hornby, How to Be Good
Ian McEwan, Saturday
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Comments

Thanks for the list. I'm always looking for a good book and these sound great!

Posted by: Sandy | July 05, 2006 at 10:03 PM

I missed this the first time around (you're in my Bloglines list), so I thank you Gretchen for pointing it out to me from the comments in a different entry.

Posted by: Lucy | July 24, 2006 at 05:57 PM

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