The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I’m so “done” with happiness.  I think I’ll seek out some books about finding curmudgeonliness next.
No, seriously, I’m afraid I won’t be able to give this book a fair review, because I don’t exactly remember what led me to obtain and read it, and I’m not really that interested in happiness anymore… I’m kind of there, not meaning I’m happy all the time, but I kinda know everything there is to know about my own happiness, now, after half a century.
So the book – it’s fine.  It’s one woman’s one-year project.  (Yet another “My Year of…”)  At least she wasn’t surreptitiously trying to come to terms with the death of a parent or anything like that.
She tries so many things, you’re bound to come across a couple of good ideas to apply to your own life.
God, I felt bad for her husband, though.  Is this what married-with-children life is like?  The abyss was one scene where her two little girls were fighting, and she discovers her husband upstairs taking a nap.  She wakes him up and says, “This is your problem! You need to fix this!”  Kill me now, I can imagine him thinking.
She sprinkles in scenes like this where she is decidedly NOT happy, which always starts to feel like a nice, humanizing, relatable touch – but then they always end with a sappy, happy ending.  You’re missing the point of showing us your less-than-perfect side, Gretchen.
But hey!  This is supposed to be a HAPPY book…  why all of this, who woke who from a nap, and who failed to live down to my imperfect expectations..  I’m sorry, though, I’m failing to come up with one excellent life lesson that I can apply to my life going forward, except to really and truly this time STOP with the happiness books.

Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer by Barbara Ehrenreich

What a title!  Some really great food for thought; sections where Ehrenreich shares her own perspective and personal experience are the best.  She is well into her 70s, and has made the honorable and sane decision (IMHO) not to pursue any further medical tests or disease-related interventions.  She also eats whatever she wants.  You’ve heard it before: Exercise, eat right, die anyway.  She still exercises, though.
Unfortunately, most of the book reads like a research paper, a style of non-fiction I don’t enjoy.  “Here’s the point of this chapter.  Here is every single bit of research I could find – here’s a quote, here’s another quote, but look at this quote.”  At one point I even felt she was contradicting her own self from a previous chapter; chapter 2 makes some really spot-on comparisons between the “rituals” of modern medical care and those of what we’d consider “primitive” healing ceremonies and techniques, a later chapter (I can’t find it, I really need to keep stickies nearby when I’m reading) quotes with implicit outrage some new-agey source making the same comparison.
The chapters written from a personal perspective were very worthwhile.  The book is short at barely 200 pages, so it’s not a slog.  A-OK.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I liked the main character very much, and generally liked any scenes that examined his thought processes and his interaction with adults around him.  Unfortunately, the author is not really strong in building characters.  And the story involved not one but two bratty kids.  Once the second bratty kid grew up, I started to really feel how paper-thin the characters were, and started to actively dislike the book.  Again, I did like the Count, and liked watching his evolution over the years of house (hotel) arrest; but the story had too many silly plot elements and holes; and the angelic, perfect, flawless, divinely talented Sofia who could do no wrong annoyed the daylights out of me.  By the end it really read like a bad forgettable movie.

This is the 51st book I’ve read this year.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

This was two totally separate books barely hinged together. Part of it is: luck plays a very important role in success. The other part is: what we really need is a progressive consumption tax, to rein in wasteful spending that people only engage in because everyone else is doing it. I finished it, including the appendix that answers FAQ on the progressive consumption tax, and suddenly remembered, “Wait, the title of this is SUCCESS AND LUCK, what happened to that topic again?”
The loose hinge is that when people realize and acknowledge how big a role luck has played in their success, they become more generous and willing to accept more public spending… hence, we can push the progressive consumption tax, which we need for these other reasons. Get it? It’s loose.
I didn’t learn much from the success & luck part – I’ve already read Malcolm Gladwell. One takeaway is how depressing and non-motivating it is to acknowledge the role of luck; so from a mood perspective, we’re best adopting the following attitude: all my PAST success was due to luck, but all my FUTURE success will be due to effort.
I do want to note that the guy has got a wonderful skill at spinning his own attitude, based on this personal information he shared: he was an adoptee, and discovered in adulthood that the family that relinquished him was quite well-to-do, coming from old money. And he is THANKFUL, because if he’d grown up with a trust fund, he wouldn’t have made the effort to achieve any of the things that he ended up doing. That’s really something, being so grateful to have been given up for adoption into circumstances MORE needy than you would have otherwise. Hey, whatever works for you!