Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt is a slim memoir about grief and loss of an adult child, and becoming parents again to grandchildren. I expected to wiz through it but found that I was forcing myself to go back to this book only to read a couple of sections before finding something else to do. This was not due to the subject matter – I can handle sadness and pathos – but, I think, more to the writing style and manner of presentation. Despite a compelling subject and real human emotions, I was not engaged. Thus, I decided to stop reading and return it to the library so someone else could read it, as it is very popular.
The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchin Rubin sounded really interesting when I read about it in Body & Soul magazine a couple of months ago. Rubin has a good life – a happy marriage, great kids, a satisfying job, etc. But she feels like something is missing, that she is not enjoying life enough so she sets out to change her attitude. Always a planner, she comes up with 12 areas of improvement and focuses on one area each month. I think I made it through April or May, so a quarter to halfway through this experiment. I was torn between being interested and slightly annoyed by this book. Like Making Toast, it was a popular book and I had to wait awhile before it was my turn to get it from the library. I’ll say this: I have no plans to put this on hold again but if I saw it on the shelf at the library, I would likely check it out and give it another try.
Now, Raising Happiness by Christine Carter is a book that I will definitely put on hold again. A parenting book about raising happy kids that is based on scientific research about happiness as well as experiences of the author (Carter runs a psychology clinic/center at UC-Berkeley), it was really interesting. I must have stumbled onto it after reading Kelly Corrigan’s memoirs (see previous posts). I look forward to getting this again and giving it more attention than I was able to this past month.
