I’m reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin right now, which I actually bought. This is significant, because as much as I love books and reading, I limit the number I own to just a few, and mostly for sentimental reasons, such as the copy of Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs that my dad gave me for Christmas the year that my parents divorced. Or an early–and most unpolitically correct–edition of The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore, because it was one of the first books I read on my own as a child.
Mostly, I own textbooks. Books I paid too much money for to part with. Lately, genealogy books have started to creep into my collection. But mostly, I borrow books from the library. I work there, after all. Why take up permanent space when you can have them over for a visit whenever you want and send them back home when they’ve overstayed their welcome?
Like most books, I checked this one out of the library. I’d read other blogs mentioning it and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It sounded rather self-helpy to me, and that’s not my thing. The books I’ve read for self-improvement so rarely seem to fit my life. A book on grief, for example, didn’t really touch upon the unique issues pertaining to a 28-year old widow.
So, I really wasn’t expecting much when I opened up The Happiness Project. No one was more surprised than me when I sat down to order it from Amazon having barely started the second chapter.
I’m still not very far into the book. There have been other things occupying my time lately, and so I find myself reading it in small bits. I think that’s probably the best way for me to read it, actually. And it’s definitely making me think. It’s almost as though Gretchen Rubin had read some self-help books in the past and realized that none of them really applied to her life either. She’s not saying exactly what I’m thinking, but she’s pretty darn close.
I might be talking about this on the blog in the future. I hope I will be, at least.
You can read? well thats a good skill for a librarian, I suppose.