Happiness is a warm puppy

I’ve been keeping up with my Happiness Project follow-up.  You might recall that I wrote a post about Gretchen Rubin’s book, wherein she devoted a year to becoming happy.  Along the way she assembled a series of things she focused on, month by month, to achieve greater happiness.  Any book that can put a spiritual journey, marriage improvement, and decluttering your house together in a coherent whole that actually means something relevant to you, personally, is a pretty big accomplishment.

Of course, it is one of the many books/cultural phenomena which encourage people to believe that if they do something novel for a year, they’ll get rich and famous.  Thus, following Oprah’s advice for a year.  Cooking ala Julia Child for a year.  Doing without buying anything for a year.  I’m wracking my brain for what I can do for a year… so far I’ve come up with:  work at the ADA for a year!  Walk dogs daily for a year!  See a movie every weekend for a year!  And yet, no fortune or fame.

Someone else who was struck by this is Dave Holmes.  He actually has a blog devoted to the topic called My Year of Everything.  He’s reading one of those books a week and blogging about them, plus other life events.  He’s currently reading Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously.  This is a brave man.

Anyway, the point to this blog entry is that I also follow Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project blog and today’s post was about reading books that make you happy.  Starting to think about books that have made me happy reminded me of one of my earliest pleasures, which was reading Peanuts in the newspaper.  It’s not as funny now to me as it was when I was a kid, but my brother and I had tons of Peanuts books.  And I do still agree that a warm puppy greatly increases happiness.

The last book I read that gave me a deep feeling of satisfaction from reading it was the third book in the Stieg Larsson Girl series, Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.  It was extremely exactly what it should be.  But I’m on the prowl for another one, preferably not a mystery.  Perhaps something heartwarming in the Elizabeth Berg vein.  Suggestions welcome.