I’m a happy person. Here’s my secret: Every day I anticipate things will go horribly wrong, and when they don’t I am surprised, grateful and a little bit elated. For example, today I don’t have a brain tumor! My children can be obnoxious, but they’re not (as far as I know) plotting ways to trigger my life insurance policy! There’s always tomorrow, of course, but right now things look good. I’m the Queen of Low Expectations, and proud of it.

Many of us seem to want much, much more, and the distance between reality and our expectations is making us miserable. So we live in a state of perpetual disappointment, ping-ponging between wild self-blame (“Everyone loves being home with their infant, except me!”) and virulent finger-pointing (“If my parents just gave me a million for my emu farm, I wouldn’t be living in their basement”). If you search for “books on happiness” on Amazon, you get around 17,000 results. That’s a lot of happy happy joy joy. And I have to say — and this is just a guess — there are probably not a lot of these books published in Somalia. Worrying about happiness is a luxury.

For one thing, becoming happier can be a little time-consuming, so I appreciate books that are (a) basically lists, and (b) basically short lists. Rachel Kelly’s WALKING ON SUNSHINE: 52 Small Steps to Happiness (Atria, $18) falls neatly into this category. It is organized seasonally, since it is based on how the author brought pleasure into her life over the course of one year. Kelly has a history of clinical depression; and while I might not entirely subscribe to her notion that happiness is a byproduct of calm — if I’m not worried, I don’t feel alive — I do think that for those who believe it is, she has some excellent ideas. Take, for example, “habit tacking”: Here, you connect something you want to work into your life with something you already do and love. For Kelly, who loved good coffee, this meant that she got herself to exercise more by biking to her favorite coffee place, and stopping for a cup of joe. This might not work as well if she biked to, say, a crack den, but her point is well taken: “Rather than having to magically transform yourself into the kind of person who always exercises enough, you become that person by building the activity into your pre-existing routine.” It’s also hard to argue with a woman who proposes poetry as a means toward calm, and therefore happiness. She quotes Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “And live alone in the bee-loud glade. . . .” Try it. I took my blood pressure before and after. It dropped.

Great poetry as a means to happiness might fall under the rubric “moral elation” — which Edward Hoffman suggests as a route to pleasure in PATHS TO HAPPINESS: 50 Ways to Add Joy to Your Life Every Day (Chronicle, $16.95). Hoffman, a psychologist and adjunct professor at Yeshiva University, says we are uplifted when we simply witness (never mind perform) an act of moral good. Hoffman organizes his suggestions alphabetically, from Acting Improv to Zen Meditation, and as an animal lover I paused most fondly on his chapter about pets. I learned, among other things, that some of the greatest psychologists believed in the ability of pets to elevate our happiness quotients. (Freud kept dogs — “Run, G-Spot, run!” — Carl Jung, a small pig.) It turns out, too, that the happiness dynamic goes both ways. According to one study he cites, gazing at our dogs elevates our levels of oxytocin, the “pleasure hormone” associated with attachment — and when dogs stare at us, their levels of oxytocin go up too. Try that with a cat, people.