7 Books Besides 'Eat Pray Love' That Cover A Year In Someone's Life

Elizabeth Gilbert got her book contract to write about a year in her life after leaving her husband, and it turned into megahit 'Eat Pray Love.'

Gilbert wasn't the only one to grab onto this conceit. AJ Jacobs lived the Bible for a year. A student transfers from Brown to an evangelical Christian school and writes about being a sinner in America's holiest university. One woman writes about her year in prison while another experiments with happiness. Readers seem to like this slice of time approach. What about you? Ready for a new idea, or happy to keep grabbing these books up? And we're sure we left out really great "year in the life" books, so let us know, in the comments section below, what we missed.

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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

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By Gretchen Rubin Gretchen Rubin decided to spend a year test-driving the world's wisdom and the latest scientific discoveries on happiness. Did she find what she was looking for? Maybe: it became a #1 bestseller.

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By Gretchen Rubin
Gretchen Rubin decided to spend a year test-driving the world's wisdom and the latest scientific discoveries on happiness. Did she find what she was looking for? Maybe: it became a #1 bestseller.

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This Year

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Comments

[eagoldman]

10:58 AM on 08/25/2010

You forgot "A Journal of the Plague Year" Good stuff. Bring out your dead!

[MariaShimizuChristensen]

10:50 PM on 08/24/2010

Not that I'm recommending it, but don't forget Judith Levine's 'Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping.' I'm not really into books by people who give up things by choice, and not because they belong to the millions who have no choice, and then write a book about how hard it was.

[IHAIKI]

08:12 PM on 08/24/2010

I spent a year without lying and I'm now living 365 days of happiness - the guys at Freakonomics wrote about it all recently - http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/a-year-without-unhappiness/

[dpruth]

07:09 PM on 08/24/2010

"How Coffee Saved My Life" by Ellie Roscher is her story of living as a volunteer in Uruguay and having to let go of all expectations.

[Sue Langland]

05:49 PM on 08/24/2010

I highly recommend Sue Hubbell's "A Country Year" about the 12 months she spent living in rural Missouri--wonderful!

[seedoubleyou]

04:19 PM on 08/24/2010

In film, indie Director Caveh Zahedi made the very interesting "In the Bathtub Of the World," in which he chronicles the best of a single minute from every day of his life for one year.

http://cavehzahedi.com/films-bathtub.html

[DrSophi]

04:14 PM on 08/24/2010

You might consider 'Riding the Bus with My Sister' a memoir by Rachel Simon. Simon spends a year with her developmentally disabled sister who enjoys riding the public transit bus. Lovely insightful book.

[Our Year at The Fahm]

04:13 PM on 08/24/2010

My partner and I moved from Berkeley, CA to a 270 year old farm in rural Massachusetts, and I'm keeping a blog about our adventures: http://ouryearatthefahm.blogspot.com . The only problem is, we've decided to stay another year, so our slice 'o' life/time will be 24 months instead of 12. A single year is a very quick thing...

[Andy Davis]

12:30 PM on 08/24/2010

I would say this article missed my book but they have no idea it exists.
I lived in NYC for about a year, sampled the nightly culture and tried to be more social.
The book I wrote is called City Girls Will Always Outclass You.
It is available on Lulu.
I am excited to have been invited to my first book club for a reading.

The glut of memoir/confessional books reached its tipping point but if you write with your heart, words that come up from your guts, not from what others would like, the work finds its own legitimacy in your soul.

[Zweiback]

12:24 PM on 08/24/2010

Dave Margolis' "It Was A Very Good Year" is a dark and funny road trip with a middle-aged guy trying to effect a take-over of what he views as a failed life. One might call it "Drink Rant Lust".

http://www.amazon.com/Was-Very-Good-Year/dp/1449928420/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1282666554&sr=1-2

[macgyver51]

12:19 PM on 08/24/2010

Some of these are pretty self centered and a part of a sadly growing genre of literature that so selfish and out of touch with reality it makes me sick. That being said, any of these are better than Eat Pray Love, Gilbert needs to have her bubble popped.

[Patty S]

10:18 AM on 08/24/2010

How about "A Year By the Sea" by Joan Anderson. I also loved "A Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion.

[carolwill]

10:45 AM on 08/24/2010

Two great books!

[pootchka]

09:52 AM on 08/24/2010

What about "A Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion
or
"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver

[naschkatze]

12:23 PM on 08/24/2010

Beat me to the punch. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now there is someone who really had to overcome something bad in her life. BTW, your name is adorable.

[miaotsai]

12:39 AM on 09/06/2010

I loved "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" - so interesting and inspiring.

[Allen Michie]

09:44 AM on 08/24/2010

Or go for just one day. Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" and James Joyce's "Ulysses." (Although I doubt the latter will get far with the "EPL" demographic.)

[mrs adler]

09:51 AM on 08/24/2010

"Mrs. Dalloway" is one of my favourite books. What a classic!!

[byla]

11:47 AM on 08/24/2010

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

[naschkatze]

12:24 PM on 08/24/2010

I love that book.

[floater]

08:33 AM on 08/24/2010

could not we just have a list of books? going thru all the pictures adds nothing.