Books mentioned in this essay:

Walden
By Henry David Thoreau
Everyman’s Library, 309 pp. $9.00

Helping Me Help Myself
By Beth Lisick
Harper Paperbacks, 288 pp. $14.00

The Year of Living Biblically
By A.J. Jacobs
Simon & Schuster, 416 pp., $15.00 

Julie Julia
By Julie Powell
Back Bay Books, 336 pp., $14.00 (paper)

We assume that what we think and feel dictates our actions. But the avenue between thought and action is not a one-way street. Many religions and self-help programs operate on this principle: Behave like the person you want to be and that's whom you will become. And it's the idea behind immersion journalism: If you want to really know someone, do what he or she does.  It follows then that if you want to really understand an issue, you need to live it.

And so The Year of __________book is born. The Year of __________ books place a charismatic narrator in an unusual setting, or under unusual constraints, for a limited but substantial amount of time. The idea is to see, at the end of a year, how the narrator's actions have changed her mind. Thoreau’s Walden is an early example of this genre.  Put the narrator in the woods for a while, experience along with him every frost, thaw, harvest and solitary winter evening, then see what he is when he comes out. How does the life he led change him? How might it change the reader?

 There are, all of sudden, lots of these kind of books, maybe because there are now so many choices about how to live one’s life.  These books are like Lonely Planet guides to the tremendous number of choices available to us. We want to know all about what it’s like to be fundamentalist, or working class, or abstinent. But we want a guide still new to the experience, someone we can relate to.  We have a thirst for this kind of insider/outsider voice, the person who’s enough like us to be able to reflect on these new experiences and extract those practices with the most value.  A cursory search of amazon.com will yield not only the more famous examples of this genre, such as Eat, Pray, Love, but books devoted to years of shopping-abstinence, college teaching, chocolate, asceticism, insanity, gender-reversal, French horn- playing, French cooking, and any other thing that a person might do. And if you know of a fairly painless object, lifestyle or behavior that has not yet been featured in a Year of _______ book, call me. I would like to pitch it.

The Year of _________ is a category situated somewhere between memoir and immersion journalism. It's hard to tell at the outset if the book will illuminate the author, the issue or both. For a writer interested in either narrative, it's an appealing format.  A year is a nicely circumscribed territory in which to conduct this sort of experiment. Because it is contained, The Year of __________ has a built-in movement. At the outset there is discomfort, then adjustment. Mid-year there is progress, but also doubt. By the end, the pantomime has wrought something real and provides a natural space for reflection.

 In The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacob’s book about living the bible as literally as possible, the author uses his facial hair as the engine of this trajectory. He tracks follicular development over the course of the year, from peach fuzz to full-on-face-fro, and it becomes the synecdoche for his religious alter-ego, Jacob. At the start of the year, he grows the beard in compliance with a commandment. It's itchy and awkward; his face looks unfamiliar beneath the mask of hair.  In later stages, it draws attention and makes him feel alternately like a pariah and a fraud.  But when he has to shave it at the close of his biblical year, he feels strangely unmoored and naked without it. And when it's gone, he looks adolescent again, reborn.

The Year of_________ also allows the author to view all the familiar seasonal set-pieces through new lenses. Valentines Day, beach weekend, parent- teacher conferences, Thanksgiving, Christmas -- what do these look like when you are a woodsman/aspiring chef/ fundamentalist/ self-actualized person? These scenes are meant to skew the familiar, and they lend themselves to comparisons between life before the project and life now. And comparisons lead to revelations both trivial and profound.

These profound revelations are the meat of the story, the lesson learned about what the identities, affiliations, or activities examined have to offer all of us. The small revelations are more personal, specific to the author. They keep us entertained and assure us that the author is human, fallible and struggling as hard as we might in the same position.  Beth Lisick, who spends her year following self-help advice, is paid to go on a weight loss cruise, though she doesn't need to lose weight (despite twenty years of inactivity). But I can't hate her because when she melts down as a result of a year-old, stale-candy-filled piñata sitting in her closet, I think, "Thank god, I am not the only one." These authors need the embarrassment of small failures to connect with their readers and excuse the indulgence of a year spent cooking, idling, mitzvoh-ing, or actualizing. They also need humor to make the big revelations more “relatable."

Walden, a product of its time, couldn't have taken this tone, which is why Thoreau’s narrator can appear to modern readers insufferable in his proficiency, dedication and unrelentingly ecstatic toil. I picture him hoeing seven miles of beans, or staring for hours at a dying hare and smiling in self-satisfied beatitude. And I want, with all my heart, to punch him in the face.  Our modern addiction to irony and over-sharing had made the discourse that comes from an earnest adherence to principle uncomfortable and suspicious.  Simply put, I can't stand to see anyone get it right the first time, and it feels false.  Epiphanies don't mean much to me if they come floating, fully formed, across a frozen pond. But Walden's original readers didn't have today's developed palette for self-deprecation. It was already fruity enough to take hermitage in the woods. I don't know how they would feel if they heard he cut the support beams five times before he got the right measurements, or that after a week of legumes and forest berries, his mother's donut-laden care-packages made him weep with gratitude. Maybe he felt that stories of his particular trials and mishaps would muddy the point, or at least dull the shine of his message.

But these narratives can falter equally if they lean too hard on personality and comedic self-flagellation.  Beth Lisick's Helping Me Help Myself reads like a series of very funny, very clever personal essays, a genre that landed her on the New York Times best-seller list and is clearly her forte. Her year is spent working her way through the programs of leading self-help gurus, one guru per month. Though each month/chapter was honest and entertaining, as a whole the book was scattershot. There are plenty of images of frazzled Beth running from plate to plate trying to keep them spinning, but not enough material on the essence of self-help, and our cultural obsession with it, to make the book cohere. She met some interesting people, subjected herself to some crazy situations, but it doesn't add up. At growth conferences, finance conventions, closet seminars, and weight loss cruises, Lisick's focus is on her own ability to buy-in, which leaves a lot of interesting questions about the larger phenomenon of self-help unanswered.

Julie Powel's Julie Julia is an account of Julie's year cooking everything in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  It originated with a blog and maintains that ethos of humorous self-revelation in bite-sized chunks; the book becomes an attractive arrangement of petit-fours in place of the intended meal.  Like Lisick, Powel revels in a personality at odds with her project, they both use the f-word to let you know how ill-suited they are for lives of domesticity and organization.  And like Helping Me, the drama in Julie Julia derives primarily from Julie's personal struggle to complete a complex task. The nature of the cooking itself is less crucial. Powel feels floaty in an aimless life of temp work and Julia Child gives her an occasion she can rise to, a hurdle she can jump, and a few good cooking metaphors for love, family, and dinner party conversation.

A.J. Jacobs’ Year of Living Biblically is the most impractical of this group; he spends a year trying to follow the Bible as literally as he can. His task requires more preliminary research than the others. The bible is a historically disputed text and Jacobs spends a good part of his year sifting through a library of biblical exegesis. He also employs a small army of practicing religious folks to guide him through his year, and the book is as much about them as it is about his year-long experiment. His practice informs his conversations with the experts; he keeps the Sabbath so that he can ask the right questions about Sabbath. Though there's plenty of slapstick and embarrassment in his attempts to perform these rituals, the focus stays on the rituals and their intended meaning. He waves a chicken over his head, takes the egg of a pigeon, ties tassels to his clothes, and throws stones at adulterers in the park, not only to see what these activities will do for him, but to see what they might do for the thousands who regularly practice.

Any of these, even the lighter examples, may inspire in the reader a craving for some sustained project of their own, some deep study and novel structure that can lift them out of their life as they've lived it and help them see from another angle.

LESLIE RUTBERG works as a faculty consultant at the University of Oregon, helping instructors improve their teaching.  She is also a graduate student in the Literary Nonfiction program.