Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Happier at Home by Gretchen Rubin




I fully expected to hate this book because it combines three of my least-favorite things:
(1) Anything remotely similar to a self-help book.
(2) The overdone and lame-to-begin-with trend of "doing something weird for a year and then writing a book about it."  (Note:  this doesn't apply to The Year of Living Biblically.)
(3) Any book with the whiff of "this is a second book similar to a first book that was really popular--let's extend the brand!"
(So why did I read it?  Because Janssen won't stop talking about it.)

But I didn't hate it.  In fact, I liked that she:
(1) is sort of a contrarian.
(2) didn't say "you should do X because experts say blah blah blah" but rather "you know what?  I did X and it was awesome!"
(3) got a little philosophical.
(4) has a great collection of quotations.

But I didn't love it either.  I found it sometimes shallow.   But it was a quick read, and pretty interesting overall.

Note:  The publisher provided me a digital review copy of this book.



1 comment:

Janssen said...

Happiness Project was better. This did have a whiff of that third thing you mentioned, what with the extending a popular brand.

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