7 books that find gratitude in unexpected places
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Thanksgiving gives gratitude a once-a-year spotlight. If we’re lucky, we gather with people we love, count our blessings, and maybe even go around the table and say what we’re thankful for.
It’s not like we’re not grateful the other 364 days of the year… but life gets busy, and it’s easy to stop noticing some of the things that make it good.
Yet, there are some pretty compelling reasons to make time to notice. Research links gratitude with improved well-being, lower stress, better sleep, and stronger relationships.
I find that books can be wonderful ways to find gratitude in everyday life. And I’m not talking about self-help, practice-gratitude books—although there’s certainly a place for those. I’m talking about stories, poems, and perspectives that help us notice something we’ve been taking for granted, see someone differently, or simply appreciate something we might otherwise have missed.
Here are 7 books that do exactly that in very different—and sometimes unexpected ways.
Gratitude by Oliver Sacks
We’ll start with the most obvious one—and it earns its place.
Gratitude collects four essays Oliver Sacks wrote late in his life, including reflections after learning that his cancer had returned and was terminal. It’s a short book, but there’s nothing slight about it. Sacks writes about aging, mortality, work, love, and the extraordinary luck of having had a life at all.
Knowing when and why these essays were written gives them added weight, but they aren’t gloomy or overly focused on what’s coming. There’s still curiosity, wonder, and a real appreciation for so much that Sacks is glad to have known, experienced, and loved.
Find it: Bookshop.org (indie bookstores) | Amazon (paid links)
Devotions by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver can make a grasshopper feel worthy of your full attention.
Devotions gathers more than five decades of her poetry, much of it rooted in the natural world and the seemingly small things we tend to hurry past. Birds. Trees. A morning outdoors. And the fact that we’re here to notice any of it.
You don’t have to sit down and read this collection straight through. Open it anywhere, read a poem or two, and see if you don’t look at something differently when you put it down.
Find it: Bookshop.org (indie bookstores) | Amazon (paid links)
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
For a year, poet Ross Gay set out to write one essay every day about something that delighted him. Not life-changing events. Just things he noticed: a good song, a pleasant interaction with a stranger, a flower growing where he didn’t expect it.
He didn’t quite make it to 365 essays, and somehow that makes me like the project even more.
The resulting collection is exuberant, curious, funny, and sometimes painful. Gay never suggests that delight makes the harder parts of life disappear. He simply gets very good at spotting it when it shows up.
Find it: Bookshop.org (indie bookstores) | Amazon (paid links)
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
John Green rates Diet Dr Pepper four and a half stars. (Me, too!) Canada geese get two. The Bonneville Salt Flats earn four.
That’s the wonderfully odd premise of The Anthropocene Reviewed, a collection of essays in which Green reviews different parts of our human-centered world on a five-star scale. From there, he can end up almost anywhere.
What begins with something seemingly inconsequential can become deeply personal, funny, sad, or surprisingly moving. And after spending a few hundred pages looking at the world through Green’s eyes, you may find yourself paying a little more attention to the unusual mix of things that make up your own.
Find it: Bookshop.org (indie bookstores) | Amazon (paid links)
Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz
Within the span of about a year and a half, Kathryn Schulz lost her beloved father and fell in love with the woman she would marry.
Lost & Found grew from those two enormous experiences and the unlikely fact of their happening almost side by side. Schulz writes about grief and love, but also about the human experience of losing and finding things throughout our lives—from keys and wallets to people and places and versions of ourselves.
There’s no attempt to make loss worthwhile or turn grief into a lesson. Instead, Schulz explores something harder and more interesting: loving anything means accepting that we may someday lose it. Knowing that doesn’t make the loving any less worth doing.
Find it: Bookshop.org (indie bookstores) | Amazon (paid links)
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
Ove is not particularly interested in gratitude. He’d mostly like his neighbors to follow the rules and leave him alone. But that isn’t what happens.
Fredrik Backman’s curmudgeonly widower keeps finding himself dragged into other people’s problems, from a new family moving in next door to a cat that apparently needs him. Ove is grieving, lonely, stubborn, and frequently exasperating. He’s also much more important to the people around him than he realizes.
This one may leave you feeling particularly grateful for the people who barge into your life, ask too much of you, and refuse to leave you alone.
Find it: Bookshop.org (indie bookstores) | Amazon (paid links)
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
A.J. Fikry owns a bookstore, has very definite opinions about books, and isn’t especially fond of people. We’re already interested.
He’s also grieving his wife, his bookstore is struggling, and a valuable possession has disappeared. Then something completely unexpected is left behind in his shop, and the life A.J. thought he was going to have begins changing.
There’s a mystery here, a love story, plenty of book talk, and a cast of people who gradually become something resembling a family. But one of the pleasures of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is simply watching A.J.’s world get bigger again. Sometimes the life you end up appreciating isn’t remotely the one you had planned.
Find it: Bookshop.org (indie bookstores) | Amazon (paid links)
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