Gratitude Diaries Book Report

Janice Kaplan is a Yale University graduate who grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a novelist, magazine editor, and television producer. Kaplan is the author and co-author of ten novels and three non-fiction books, the book “Mine Are Spectacular” was a national bestseller just after its release in 2005. In the book “The Gratitude Diaries”, also a bestseller, we get to see her personality and feelings more deeply than in her other books.

On New Year’s Eve, she makes a promise to be grateful and look on the bright side of whatever happens. She realizes that how she feels over the next year will have less to do with the events that occur than with her own attitude and perspective. She gets advice from doctors and professors she brings in readers through her journey of love and gratitude in hopes of inspiring others to do the same, but not only for a year, throughout their whole lives.

She divides her plan in a way so that she can be grateful of one area (“whether husband, family, friends, or work” Page 12) especially that month, she organized this as a research project and worked very hard on it because she “wanted to see what happened when I (Janice Kaplan) developed an attitude of gratitude” (12).

She starts out by appreciating the little things like the details of the sunshine every morning, every cup of “Häagen-Dazs chocolate gelato” (12), every