I picked up this book after reading an article by Gretchen Rubin in the Huffington Post. It is a stunt memoir where the author attempts to live by several different happiness principles for an entire year. Rubin's project involved tackling a different area of her life each month and applying several different principles to making it better. One month it would be marriage, another month parenting, another month friendships, and so on. In preparation for this, Rubin read a lot of books on happiness as well as interviewing people who seemed to be successful in certain areas.

My one takeaway from reading this book didn't come from the author herself but from a person she interviewed who had a long successful marriage. The advice was that a married couple should always have one indoor game and one outdoor game that they like to play together. Simple things like this resonate with me, and this sounds like something that my husband and I could manage.

Overall, The Happiness Project was just OK to me. A lot of the book had a "See? All you have to do is this" tone to it that works in a crafting book, but was somewhat off-putting in this case. I wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading it, but I don't think I'd recommend it.