The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

[clementine]

I will tackle what I liked first. I thought Rubin's approach to her project was very clever. She focused on one area each month, and then added the previous months' goals to the new month, constantly building on what she had. This was a great way to break things into manageable chunks and gradually build up to her goals. I also thought that she had some decent tips and insights, although they could easily be condensed into about 5 pages.

Gretchen Rubin does not come across as a likeable person. She gets points for honesty, but overall I found her rather insufferable, which detracted from my enjoyment of the book quite significantly. It's not just that she seems to find little pleasure in her husband or kids (who she's always complaining about or micromanaging, and who she very rarely mentions in a positive light), it's not just that despite the fact that she's trying to be positive she is SUCH a downer, it's that this whole experience was very shallow and doesn't make up for any of her irritating character flaws. While some of what she did was surely useful to her, most of it wasn't very meaningful - cleaning her closet, reading children's books. The few times that she did do something a little deeper, she barely skimmed the surface. I was so frustrated by her horribly simplistic and shallow brushes with Buddhism and books about mortality. It just makes me feel like she didn't really get anything new out of this project, and like it was less about deep spiritual happiness than about doing a few things differently. I could be totally wrong, but I never got the sense that anything changed fundamentally within her, and she just seemed so irritatingly superficial.

Stylistically, this book irked me. First of all, she had a tendency to pepper the text with quotes and examples from other people. This can be effective when used sparingly, but it seemed like she did it every other page! I found myself skimming over these quotes without losing anything. She also did the same with comments on her blog, which I also skipped. Finally, her constant referencing of her own truths, commandments, etc, was pretty annoying. We get it, you want to be Gretchen.

Overall, this book left me cold. It doesn't bother me that it's one of those fad stunt books. I actually think that the format of her project could be useful to people if they adapted it to suit their needs. But her own experience, and the way in which she writes it, is shallow, self-indulgent, and irritating.