365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life Book

What a goofy little book. i put this on hold at my local library after reading a favorable review in "book page," so i had not actually seen the book in person before i picked it up. i was surprised to find that it is very tiny. i mean, it's an average length of pages for a hardcover book (about 250), but the dimensions of the book are wee, which made me feel like i was reading one of those embarrassing gift books you get from, like, your uncle, who picked it up from the remainder bin at the airport bookstore. i'm sure that is indeed the fate for most copies of this book.

basically, the author has a really crappy year full of getting divorced yet again, his girlfriend splitting up with him, & his law clients not paying their bills, & he decides that maybe writing one thank you letter per day will help him make note of the fact that there are things in his life worth feeling some gratitude. he goes into this whole boring back story about how his grandfather taught him to write thank you letters by bribing him with silver dollars, but it didn't really take, & therefore, he was so unfamiliar with the concept of gratitude that he spent 53 years of his life spelling the word "grateful" incorrectly. the fact that a lawyer seeking a judicial appointment would admit that he didn't know how to spell "grateful" really made me question the decisions in my life that led to me reading this book. admitting to being functionally illiterate is not really the way to make me your like your book.

i mention the back story because i find it telling & weird that a dude would come to this year-long gratitude project via a path of childhood bribery & over-thinking a card from an ex-girlfriend. (the woman that breaks up with him right before xmas, grace, sends him a handwritten thank you card for the xmas gift he gave her, which makes him think maybe they have a chance for reconciliation. her card also helps to inspire the gratitude project.) i feel like there's not a single woman i have ever known who has not been counseled by a therapist or a parent or some well-intentioned person in her life to start keeping a gratitude journal, but this dude basically does exactly that & seems to think that it's incredibly novel & groundbreaking. women are basically conditioned their entire lives to constantly be feeling a sense of gratitude, but when a dude does it, he thinks he's christopher motherfucking columbus.

also, as the book progresses & the author starts to tally up the coincidences of positive things that are happening in his life (his adult sons paying back some monetary loans he gave them, clients starting to pay their bills, etc), the book starts to go in a very weird direction a la the secret. he goes on & on about how putting this gratitude out into the world is sowing rewards to be reaped at a later date, & how he is "investing" in the downtrodden by thanking them for crap or doing them little favors. he repeatedly uses the word "secret" to refer to these investments, further increasing my feeling that i was reading a remaindered airport bookstore gift book. all i could think was, "this is cheap & gimmicky. how the fuck did this get good reviews?"

the book also reads as 250 pages of the author begging grace to get back together with him. so...that was embarrassing. nothing like watching a stranger commit a complete lack of dignity on to the printed page. it was a lot like a car crash. i wanted to look away, but a morbid force compelled me to keep reading.

it's not, like, the worst book i ever read or anything. it wasn't offensive at all. but it was goofy. kind of like stumbling across your dad's diary or something. not necessarily something you throw down in disgust, but also not the kind of reading that makes you proud to have a library card.