Month: August 2019

In the How-To field, Gretchen Rubin is one of my favorites. From each of her previous books on happiness, betterment, etc., I’ve gleaned at least a couple of great ideas for organizing my own life, and I’ve always admired her clarity of purpose and thought. Now, with “Outer Order Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness“,” Rubin takes on Marie Kondo. Her central thesis, that being tidy and organized, even with small matters, can calm the inner beast, is one she’s always espoused, but now she tackles it systematically. The five steps she prescribes are: decide why you’re doing it; declutter vigorously; don’t listen to others, do it your own way; once decluttered, stay habitually neat; and finally, avoid an antiseptic, decluttered life by seeking beauty for your home. As ever, Rubin doles out helpful ideas and methods, while moving the reader along the path of righteous organization. If you’ve been hankering to rectify your lifetime of hoarding, this could be a lifesaver. Me, I’ve already downsized, decluttered, and generally slimmed down my footprint, so for the first time, there’s nothing in this Gretchen Rubin book that I’ll seek to apply to my life. And I also have the feeling that decluttering is a minor topic for this imaginative life guide.

Fans of Frank Kennedy’s Asimov-league series The Impossible Future began the journey with “The Last Everything,”a breakneck adventure featuring three teens: James the hidden Jewel with hidden powers, Samantha with a hidden time-spanning past, and “normal” Michael. The finale of that first volume involved some of the best action scenes of my recent reading, but I had no idea what “The Risen Gods” might involve in terms of storyline. Well, reader, jump in for a treat, for within a page of the Book 2, we’re in the vastly intergalactic Earth of the universe-domineering Collective, and now James, Samantha, and Michael are plunged into a space opera adventure within a brilliantly conceived world as evocative as that of the master, Isaac Asimov, and as politically intricate as James Scalzi’s. Nothing is as it seems, the headlong pace sucks you in, and our three heroes evolve and mature rapidly. Plot twists gyrate, new key characters sizzle, and the action stage keeps expanding. A highlight of this year’s reading, “The Risen Gods” presages an enduring, mind-blowing, kinetic sci-fi feast. May the series’ volumes come thick and fast!

Classy nonfiction writer Susan Orleans was raised in Cleveland. “I grew up in libraries…,” she writes in “The Library Book.” She drifted away from library usage but after a chance visit to the Los Angeles Public Library eight years ago, “the spell libraries cast on me was renewed,” and then she grew fascinated with the 1986 fire that burned or damaged more than a million books. Who caused it and why? The fire’s history proved fascinating, with a local actor-wannabe accused of arson, and “The Library Book” see Orleans digging into it all. But the fire, which provides the book’s narrative spine, is just the launching pad for a generous, contemplative paean to the world of public libraries. As a lifelong library tragic myself, I basked in the artfully constructed mix of reconstructed history and insightful reflection. The writing is elegant, the innards of the Library are vividly described, and one comes away with a renewed sense of how important the world’s libraries are.

The hero whose thoughts we inhabit for the length of “Milkman,” the third novel by British author Anna Burns, is Middle Daughter, a disaffected eighteen-year old enmeshed in the Northern Ireland “Troubles.” From the outset the reader is plunged into a claustrophobic tale of gossip, murder, stalking (a paramilitary type called Milkman), family, love, lust, and friends. The author’s style is as claustrophobic as the plot, a discursive style that can expand a paragraph for pages, a style that warps every conversation into a formal debate, a style that sashays like twenty conversations going on in a crowd. “Milkman” is experimental in a long line of such novels, and normally I relish such challenges, but here I floundered. I could admire some of unpicking of issues, I could enjoy sentences, I could appreciate technical skill, but the unusual style sapped the characters, especially Middle Daughter, of any life off the page. Not much happens and when it does, it is not mined for narrative impact. Reading a Booker winner is always a treat, and this novel was a test worth undertaking, but as a novel it is barely readable.

Lee Kofman is a brave and iconoclastic memoirist with a lyrical and barbed pen. Her second book, “Imperfect: How Our Bodies Shape the People We Become,” tackles a vexed subject I never knew I should be fascinated about, namely how our bodily faults impact our lives, our psyches, and our souls. Kofman frames the book around her lifelong efforts to understand and come to grips with her own imperfect “body surface,” as she puts it, but she then ventures out in an astonishing array of directions through her own reading, through sympathetic interviews, and through reflective thought. The writing sparkles, the ideas are never weak-kneed, and the book’s flow is superb. Very much in the seemingly fresh modern tradition of discursive, lucid memoirs, “Imperfect” is a wonderment.

What a beguiling, touching character Eleanor Oliphant is! Traumatised by a mysterious past, odd to the point of weird, yet luminously human, Eleanor romps through this comedy of manners or existential drama or love story or … you get the picture. One can situate the novel in the stream containing “A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” or “The Rosie Project,” a stream that’s notoriously difficult to nail stylistically, but Gail Honeyman (this is her debut!) immerses us so completely, we’re under her spell. The plot is simple – Eleanor’s regimented solo life is disrupted by falling in love with a distant pop star and a random act of compassion on her part – but swirls in unexpected directions and the climax offers not only twists but also completely solid logic. “Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine” is a treat and a triumph.