We are in the first week of the new year. And we are facing a whole new set of pandemic restrictions. At least for the next few weeks that is. You know what, chuck that list of resolutions for now. Instead, pick up a book that’ll inspire, motivate, and make you feel good. Here are eight books you can read to start 2022 on a positive note. Once things ease up, these books might just be the push you need to follow through with your resolutions.

Related: 8 Books Written By Women That Should Be On Your Bookshelf

1. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

On a rainy afternoon, in a city bus, Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany. Her life is just passing by and she is not doing everything in her power to live her life. That’s when she undertakes a happiness project for one year. Rubin recounts the adventures that she undertook over 12 months to be a happier person. As she chronicles her journey, you learn that happiness can be found anywhere. You just need to make an effort. Among other things, she found that novelty and challenge are powerful sources of happiness; that money can help buy happiness when spent wisely; that outer order contributes to inner calm; and that the very smallest of changes can make the biggest difference.

2. This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes

In This Book Will Save Your Life, Homes explores the extraordinariness of an ordinary day. Even in the mundane, you can find something to surprise and delight you. Richard Novak, a middle-aged divorcé, gets a hard reality check when he is rushed to the emergency room. For the longest time, he was just a lifeless shell of himself. But the day he ends up in the ER with intense pain and then discovering an expanding sinkhole outside his house hurls him back into the world.

This book is a vivid, revealing novel about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you.

3. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho has become a classic of sorts. If you haven’t read it yet, pick it up. The novel chronicles the travels of an Andalusian shepherd boy, Santiago. Santiago travels from Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried near the Pyramids. Lush, evocative, and deeply humane, the story of Santiago is an eternal testament to the transforming power of our dreams and the importance of listening to our hearts.

4. Survival of the Thickest: Essays by Michelle Buteau

Stand-up comedian and rising star, Michelle Buteau shares her struggle in life and her rise to fame in this collection of essays titled Survival of the Thickest. If you thought the road to success was easy, you have another thing coming. In her collection of essays, Buteau reflects on growing up as Caribbean in New Jersey, her career moves, journey to motherhood, and much more. Funny, heartfelt and honest, this book will encourage you to be a little braver in life.

5. This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World (and Me) by Marisa Meltzer

Every year, a resolution that makes everyone’s list is “lose weight”. From a young age, we have all been conditioned to look a certain way and have a particular body proportion to look beautiful. Marisa Meltzer started her first diet at the young age of five. Even then, weight was the one part of her life she had difficulty understanding. Four decades later, she comes across an obituary for Jean Nidetch, the Queens, New York housewife who founded Weight Watchers in 1963. Meltzer draws parallels between each woman’s weight-loss journey in this humorous book. A good read to help you understand, accept, and love your body.

6. Becoming by Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama’s Becoming is as inspirational as the former First Lady herself. Chronicling her life from childhood to becoming the first African American First Lady of the United States of America, she lays it all out. She tells her triumphs and disappointments, both private and public, with raw honesty. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.

7. Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously by Jessica Pan

An introvert spending a year as a gregarious extrovert? What shenanigans will you end up with? Jessica Pan found herself getting lost in the background and decided to take life by the reigns. Jobless and friendless, Pan wonders what life would have been like had she been able to make friends and do all extrovert things. She decides to spend a year of her life as exactly that. From doing stand-up comedy to going on a solo trip, she is going to do it all.

Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come follows Jess’s hilarious and painful year of misadventures in extroverting, reporting back from the frontlines for all the introverts out there. But is life actually better or easier for the extroverts? Or is it the nightmare Jess always thought it would be?

8. Average is the New Awesome: A Manifesto for the Rest of Us by Samantha Matt

We often see people around us being geniuses and richer than rich. Some of us become stars and billionaires, but the rest of us matter too. That’s exactly what Samantha Matt says in her book Average is the New Awesome. In this book, Matt offers encouragement to us regular humans. Full of hilarious stories and insightful advice, this is a manifesto for ordinary awesomeness, for the beauty that can be found when we acknowledge that good enough really is good enough, and that greatness is ours to define. This one is for all the average people who think they are not special. You are special exactly the way you are. Average is the new awesome — live by this mantra in 2022.

Featured Image Source

Related: 10 Apps And Websites For Free E-Books: Bookworms, We Found Your Paradise