Resolutions, Revisited

About this time last year, I blogged about some books that might help you with your New Year's resolutions. This year, how about something a little different: here are some books by authors and journalists who spent a year (or some other set amount of time) doing something different from their normal lives, with wildly varied results. Perhaps they will inspire you to try an experiment in your life, or maybe they'll just make you grateful to escape their lists of arduous, arbitrary restrictions in 2013.

Drop Dead Healthy : one man's humble quest for bodily perfection by A. J. Jacobs is this intrepid stunt journalist's attempt to be as healthy as possible, based on information from a number of more or less reputable sources. Its humor is balanced by a lot of thoughtful reflection on what health really is, and how to integrate health recommendations in a way that's actually helpful and realistic.

Read on for more stunts (or are they more than just stunts?):

• The Year of Living Biblically: one man's humble quest to follow the Bible as literally as possible is last year's effort by A. J. Jacobs. It definitely skirts a delicate line between blasphemy and spirituality; if you've wondered if it's possible to follow every commandment in Leviticus to the letter, you'll find out in this book.
• The Guinea Pig Diaries : my life as an experiment is one more book by A. J. Jacobs that you might enjoy reading. These are a variety of more short-term stunts, including going to the Academy Awards disguised as a movie star, outsourcing his life's mundanities to India, telling everyone the truth about everything, and doing everything his wife tells him.
• The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by Kevin Roose seemed like it was going to be a joke: an athiest journalism student went undercover at Liberty University. He discovered, though, that he had much more in common with his religious brethren than he'd realized.
• Morgan Spurlock's movie Super Size Me documents his attempt to live on McDonalds alone. Spoiler: it didn't work out too well for him.
• A Year of Biblical Womanhood : how a liberated woman found herself sitting on her roof, covering her head, and calling her husband "master"? by Rachel Held Evans is the female version of A.J. Jacob's Year of Living Biblically. It was written by a religious blogger who didn't come to the topic from a skeptical perspective.
• Self Made Man: one woman's journey into manhood and back by Norah Vincent is an interesting one to end with. Norah Vincent tried living as a man not because she's transgender, but because she wanted to see how life is different for men. She discovered many big and little differences, for instance, the way men look away from other men on the street, rather than staring as they do with women. If you've ever wondered what a nature special about people and human nature would look like, check out this book.

Happy reading, and good luck with your resolutions, weird and reasonable alike!

Jenny