“Tidy Up Your Life” by Tyler Moore

I've mentioned Modern General in Santa Fe before, but it's worth mentioning again. It's a kind of cafe (though I've never eaten there--to its detriment, it is right next door to Vinaigrette, where I love to eat lunch) but it also sells a very limited, highly curated selection of books, foodstuffs, and kitchen implements. We always enjoy poking around in there (either just before or just after eating lunch next door). 

Not surprisingly, once again I found a book that spoke to me in Modern General. In case I haven't mentioned it before, I have an affinity for tidying, so of course when I saw a book entitled Tidy Up Your Life, I immediately reached for it. I'd never heard of the Insta-famous Tidy Dad before, but that didn't put me off. (He had me at Tidy.)

As soon as I saw the tidy little table of contents, I knew I wanted to buy this book. I was less interested in Part I ("Tidy Up Your Mind") than in Part II ("Tidy Up Your Space"), although Part I does have a chapter called "Stop Doing All the Work" which sounded great to me. Don't take this to mean I have one of those husbands who leaves me to do all the work, because I don't, and he doesn't. But what if there were a way we could both stop doing all the work?? I'm all about working smarter, not harder. 

I read this book quickly and eagerly, and it's full of relatable anecdotes from Tidy Dad's real life in a tiny NYC apartment with his wife and three daughters, but ultimately I didn't come away with a ton of ideas. To the point where I almost wonder--was I not paying enough attention? Do I need to read it again?? I did take a few notes (about the decluttering cycle, and determining what "just enough" is for us, and how a "routine framework" should serve you, not control you), but looking back over it, I don't see much that I hadn't already heard elsewhere. Except! Right in the middle is a good plan for transitioning elderly parents from their home to assisted living, and I have saved a personalized version of this plan in my Google Drive. (No, Mom and Dad, we don't need this plan yet, but it will be there for us when we do.) Speaking of my parents, though, I am starting to think about gifting this book to them for Christmas. Whereas I am already (slowly but surely) doing Death Cleaning so as not to leave a huge mess for my children someday, my parents are obviously not doing me that favor (yet). Maybe this book will be a gentle nudge in that direction.

“One Beautiful Year of Normal” by Sandra K. Griffith

I usually tend to stay away from ARCs, just as I stay away from self-published novels, for two reasons: one, I prefer to let publishing companies wade through sludge to find gems instead of doing it myself (which may mean I miss out in some cases, but it feels more efficient); and two, then I don’t have to feel bad crapping all over a new author’s efforts if I don’t like the book. 

I broke my unwritten rule and accepted an ARC for One Beautiful Year of Normal, also for two reasons: it takes place in Savannah and Tybee Island, Georgia—two towns I’ve traveled to and have fond memories of; and it promised suspense, family secrets, and “richly layered storytelling.”

Unfortunately, reading this book reinforced my unwritten rule (and here’s the part where I crap all over it, then feel bad, but make myself feel better by claiming the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity). As early as page two, I was finding fault with the writing. By page 6 I had already noted nine things I would have edited if I could have. These ranged from simple annoyance at seeing “Bateaux Mouches” (which would not have annoyed me if it had been written “bateaux-mouches”) to eye-rolling disbelief that a lawyer might call the next of kin fifteen minutes after his client’s death.   

And yet I kept reading. Part of this, of course, is due to my can’t-not-finish-a-book curse that I still haven’t overcome. But also (though related to my curse, and in spite of never really connecting to the characters) I did want to know what happened. 

This book tells the story of August Jules Caine, who has been living under the name Giselle Roamer for the past eighteen years. (Both names strike me as pretentious and unrealistic, which was another of the nine items I would have edited). August (who is called Août by a Frenchman… surely he wouldn’t actually do that!) is awakened in her Paris apartment at 4am by a phone call from a lawyer in Savannah, Georgia (yep, 4am in Paris is 10pm on the east coast of the US, making that lawyer’s quick phone call even less likely). The lawyer is calling with bad news: Aunt Helen has passed away. But August is confused—Aunt Helen died fifteen years ago… which is a pretty good setup for a suspense novel.

Some people will love this book. After all, I am apparently the only person in the world who did not like The Monsters of Templeton, and Lauren Groff has gone on to publish multiple bestsellers despite my criticism. 

“The Clasp” by Sloane Crosley

Yep, it’s official. I like Sloane Crosley’s essays more than I like her novels.  

The Clasp is the story of Victor, Kezia and Nathaniel, college friends who aren’t as close as they once were. They meet up again at the wedding of an acquaintance, where Victor becomes convinced of the harebrained idea that the necklace from the Guy de Maupassant short story of that name was a real item rather than a fictional one. What’s more, Victor decides he might know where to find that amazing necklace. Everyone ends up in France, which is always fun. 

Not that I didn’t like this book. It was a fun read (funny, with a swift plot) and I liked the characters. Crosley is a good writer. But I have decided I would prefer to read essays by Crosley and novels by someone else. 

“Waking Up” by Sam Harris

I can’t sleep. This is not a frequent occurrence for me, but after lying in bed in the dark for a while, trying to be still and quiet and wishing for sleep to return, I finally decided I might as well get up and use my wide-awake mind for reading. And in this situation, what better book to choose than one called Waking Up?

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, is known as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism.”  He spent several years of his early adulthood in India and Nepal, studying meditation with Buddhist and Hindu masters, but his approach to spiritual insight is independent of religious beliefs. Sam (my Sam, rather than Sam Harris) read this book first; he has become interested in meditation, and Harris’s areligious approach appealed to him. He thought I would find this book interesting as well. 

He was kind of wrong. I struggled my way through most of this book, forcing myself to read five minutes at a time. The ideas that self is an illusion and that we can experience “having no head” remain foreign to me. In fact, the aptness of the title wasn’t what really caused me to reach for this book in the middle of the night: it was the expectation that it would lull me back to sleep. 

But I was wrong too. I found the final quarter of this book to be the most interesting part of it. The bulk of the last 50 pages is a chapter on gurus (none are perfect, or perfectly enlightened), death (near-death experiences don’t tell us anything about what we can expect to experience in actual death), and drugs (where Harris recommends a good trip on psilocybin or LSD, while acknowledging that a bad one can be an “extremely unpleasant and destabilizing experience”).

My favorite part of this book doesn’t have much to do with meditation. It was a single line in the paragraph that initiated the discussion of drugs (“The Spiritual Uses of Pharmacology”) and when I read it I paused, then re-read it several times, savoring this perspective I’d never really considered before:

“We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts.”

“Books Make a Home: Elegant Ideas for Storing & Displaying Books” by Damian Thompson

This is the book that the Internet presented to me when I searched for the non-existent Designing With Books. I expected a book full of drool-worthy shelving that was brimming with books and all kinds of other eye-catching elements. For someone who already has a good number of shelves and cubbies, what I really wanted was ideas for how to make those shelves and cubbies look great. Instead, this book provides ideas for where to put all your books when you don't own enough bookshelves and you don't want to solve that problem by buying plain-Jane options. It showcases the libraries and studies of the creative, the rich, and the rich creatives. This apparently translates to lots of quirkiness.

I love books, and I love having them all over my house, but I don't really love the higgledy-piggledy style depicted in this book. The majority of these interiors just look messy to me. Like a junk shop, which is often intriguing to browse in but which doesn't feel calm and tranquil to live in. Generally, I take issue with the characterization of these bookshelves as “elegant.” And the few photos of interiors that are neat and calm are also the ones that are the least realistic (like where everything is white, or where all the book spines match each other). 

While I enjoyed reading through this book and poring over the photos, I am disappointed that I did not come away with more ideas. I need a system--I've organized all of our books, but I don't have a place for us to put new ones, or a place for keepers after I've read them. Also, I need options and ideas for bookshelf decor. (Obviously this book shows bookshelf decor galore, but so much of it is a one-man's-trash-is-another-man's-treasure scenario.) Most importantly, I need to know how I can easily display a paperback so that it is upright (not leaning back on a bookrest or stand) with the cover facing outwards, rather than oriented the usual way (spine out). At least the book gave me one idea: curate the selection in the guest bedroom! And it made me think that maybe the relative messiness of my bookshelves is unavoidable.

I saved this photo years ago (I have no memory of where I even came across it) because I loved the vibe and all of the books everywhere. Plus the girl in the chair reminded me of Bookworm Child with her blonde hair. This photo would have been right at home in Books Make a Home.

"Heart the Lover" by Lily King

Just got out my List of Favorite Authors and realized Lily King did not appear on it. So, she does now! Squeezed in at #6 between Rachel Cusk and Sarah Moss. (Yep, it's ranked.)

Is Heart the Lover the best Lily King book ever? I don't know. I remember really liking Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, and her book of short stories (Five Tuesdays in Winter) was solid too. But what I do know is that HTL is really really good and it made me want to buy and read all of King's other books (of which, so far, there are three).

Heart the Lover is the story of a college girl who befriends a pair of highly intelligent and intriguing guys, Sam and Yash. It doesn't take long before she's in an weirdly hot-and-cold relationship with Sam. This goes the way of most college relationships (or was it just mine?), and a few months after graduation everything comes crashing down. Then suddenly, disorientingly,  it's Part II---maybe two decades later--and it takes me a minute to get my bearings. And a formerly great story becomes great and terrible. It's not all doom and gloom and sadness, but there's definitely a bunch of all of that. In fact, King imbues the entire book with intense emotion, somehow doing it without overdoing it.

I did not realize until LITERALLY the LAST PARAGRAPH OF THE BOOK that the main character in this one is also the main character in Writers & Lovers. (Is that a spoiler? Should I not have mentioned that? Or is this something that everyone other than a literary amnesiac would have realized far sooner? Anyway, it made me want to re-read W&L so I could solidify that link. Although, knowing me, by the time I get around to re-reading W&L I'll have forgotten everything I learned in HTL . . . ) This last-minute realization bumped it up a notch, from a book I really liked to a book that blew my mind. 

“Elements of Timeless Style: Creating a Forever Home” by Erin Gates

Here's one of the two books I mentioned in my last post. It didn't quite turn out to be what I expected. I guess I would have known this if I'd looked more closely or thought harder about the title prior to purchasing, but this book is not what you should buy if you're hankering for a non-existent book entitled Designing with Books. It's more like what you should get if you're hankering for a book simply entitled Designing.

Or, more realistically, maybe Designing with Money. Because these people have way more money than I’ll ever have, and it's evident in every butler's pantry and baby grand piano and mohair sofa. But that's OK! It was still fun to look at, in a let's-see-how-the-other-half-lives kind of way. Or do I mean the other one percent? 

This book--very photo-heavy--was kind of what I imagine you would get if you bound several issues of Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, and Traditional Home magazines into a small-ish coffee-table-style book, with the difference being all of the decor was selected by one person. If this is the type of thing you enjoy looking at (and I do), you will enjoy this book. But while the interiors are certainly beautiful and striking, this stuff is not my style. Not only can I not imagine my home ever looking like this; the thought of making a transition from what I've got to magazine-worthy seems insurmountable. Even if I wanted to make that leap, I don't have the vision to do so. I look around my house and can't fathom where I would even begin. Ultimately, what I look for in this type of book is how to take what I have and elevate it. I didn't get that from Elements of Timeless Style. Instead, I got, "if you want a house that looks like this, hire a designer (AND get ready for LOTS of wallpaper)."

But! In reading this book I was inspired to reorganize our downstairs coat closet. I think it started when reading the Project Takeaways at the end of chapter 3 ("Lincoln"): "think about spaces in all dimensions . . . consider built-ins with mixed use . . . take awkward areas and utilize them . . . " following which I just happened to notice that there's about three feet of unused space overhead in our closet (which is under the stairs, thus has a slanted ceiling). So I am suddenly off and running on a new project!

“Look Alive Out There” by Sloane Crosley

After a brief foray into Sloane Crosley's novel-writing, I'm back to her essays, which is where I started (with I Was Told There'd Be Cake). And this one was every bit as good as that first one. In fact, it was so equivalently good that I can't help but wonder if I was mistaken about her second book of essays. (I didn’t like the second one as much. Looking back now, I have decided surely I was wrong.)

In reading this book, my consistent experience was an amalgamation of fun and of wondering just exactly how one person can get herself into so many unique situations. Biting off way more than she could chew in a decision to climb a volcano in Ecuador? Check. Playing herself in a cameo on Gossip Girl? Check. Depending on hippie pot-smoking swinger neighbors to keep from starving to death while house-sitting? Check, check and check. I assume it all really happened, though. At least mostly.

My only real complaint about Look Alive Out There: on page 122, during the story "The Grape Man," Crosley mentions "a glossy photo book called Designing with Books." Like, how to decorate your house (or at least your bookshelves) with books, right? Like, basically, bookshelf porn (but classy), right? So of course I immediately stop reading and pick up my phone and Google "designing with books book." And what does the AI summary tell me? "There is no single book titled Designing with Books." Ugh! I did, however, find Books Make a Home and Elements of Timeless Style, both of which are currently heading my way, so hopefully those will help me scratch that itch.

“Severance” by Ling Ma

Weekend before last, we had the opportunity to go to a cute little bookshop in Atlanta's Ponce City Market: Posman Books. I guess there were more customers in the store than I prefer, but the shelves were full of lots of good books, along with fun bookish appurtenances. As we browsed, the title Severance caught my eye (along with the cover's pretty pink color!), and I wondered if the book had anything to do with the Apple TV show that has so baffled me (it doesn’t). But then I ended up standing there and reading the entire prologue in the store, oblivious to anything going on around me. And I did not want to stop reading. 

But by the time I actually sat down to read the book several days later, I had already forgotten what I learned from the prologue, so I just had to start over again. And weirdly, I did not find it so compelling the second time around, which made me worry for the rest of the book. But now, having reached the end, I've decided that this was just an effect of re-reading the prologue after having read it so recently.

This is the story of Candace Chen, a young-ish Chinese-American woman living in New York City in 2011 and working in a publishing consulting firm (specifically, the Bible production division). But it's also the story of her childhood, from the age of four when her parents immigrated to the US without her, to the age of six when she moved to the US to join her parents, to her older, teen-aged years and the loss of her parents. AND it's the story of a devastating global pandemic and its aftermath. 

It was, of course, the pandemic part of the book that stood out to me the most. In fact, this book brought back so many not-so-fond memories of 2020 that this fact blows my mind: Severance was published almost two years before the term "COVID-19" even existed. How could this book NOT have been based on our real-life pandemic? Yeah, maybe the fictional pandemic was fungal instead of viral, but it even originated in China. Quarantines, travel bans, wearing masks, working from home, arguments over the ethics of allowing people to mass together to protest . . . it's like Ling Ma was predicting the future. 

Was anyone else a little unsatisfied with the ending? Kind of like this one?

“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan

I haven't read all of Ian McEwan's books, and he has written quite a few of them (like, enough that I may not get around to reading them all), but a new one is kind of an event. So when I heard about What We Can Know, I pre-ordered it without really knowing anything about the story. When the book arrived, I spent a moment reflecting on the cover (is that a mirror pictured? I wondered if the title could have been continued with "about ourselves." But as I read, I decided that didn't apply). 

I'm not quite sure whether going in blind was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe if I'd known a bit about where the plot was heading, I would have been quicker at finding my bearings. As it was, I was continually distracted by how weirdly like a David Mitchell book this seemed to be. Even weirder, I wasn't really enjoying it (which I don't think has ever happened to me before with David Mitchell. Or with Ian McEwan. Except maybe with Saturday). 

The majority of the Mitchell-ness came from the timeline (although the characters and the setting fit right in as well). The narrator, Tom, is an academic and a university professor whose area of expertise is the famous poet Frances Blundy. It's said that in 2014, Blundy wrote a poem as a gift for his wife's Vivien's birthday. He recited it at her dinner party, gave her the only copy, and then no one ever saw or read it again. In 2119, the mysterious poem still eludes the world, and it is Tom's holy grail.

Yeah, that's right, I said 2119 (which seems to me like a very David Mitchell plot point). And the world is no longer the world as we know it (there's Mitchell again). It was uncomfortably different: not different enough to be a fantasy, but different enough to be depressing. But somewhere around the time that Tom and his quasi-estranged wife Rose were digging holes, I started to get into it. 

There are two different timelines (one for Tom and Rose, one for Blundy and Vivien), thus two different groups of characters. And I think what I will remember most about this book was the way one of the main characters goes through the sad and depressing ordeal of watching her husband disappear into early-onset dementia. It's a particular kind of loss, when the body is still present but the person you loved no longer exists. (New fear unlocked, by the way.) But before his disappearance, she had this to say about him: "What's so lovely is that basically, in a quiet way, he's simply glad he exists. Whatever the difficulty, the baseline isn't disturbed. Then that line becomes mine too." A worthy aspiration if ever there was one. And I also want to remember this gem, as one of the characters explained why she kept a journal: "...most of life is oblivion. To rescue fragments of the past would be to claim a bigger existence."

Do you want to know what I decided about the title in the end? I'll try to explain it without any spoilers. Basically, Tom knows all that it's possible to know about Frances Blundy (which is a lot, given his life in the Information Age; a multitude of his papers have been preserved, along with myriad emails and text messages). Despite that, there were multiple layers to Blundy's story that Tom could never have uncovered from Blundy alone, despite his deep scholarship.

“Cult Classic” by Sloane Crosley

I’ve already read three different books by Sloane Crosley (two books of short stories that I assumed were autobiographical, but I could be wrong, and one grief memoir). But somehow the fact that Crosley has also written two novels had escaped my notice until very recently. This discovery surprised me. Somehow I'd gotten the idea that Crosley was a young, debut writer. (This is probably because I just stumbled upon her in 2022 and didn't realize the book I was reading had come out nearly a decade and a half earlier. I mentioned my surprise to Sam, explaining that I'd thought Crosley was young--too young to have already written so many books; then I looked up her age and said, "Well, she is quite young," which made Sam laugh, because she was born in 1979. Funny what constitutes young these days.) But as usual, I digress. The point I wanted to make was that, of course, as soon as I became aware of Crosley's novels, I had to buy them. 

I started with Cult Classic (published in 2022). I found it a bit disconcerting at first, because I kept trying to figure out where the story fit into the author’s life, and then remembering that this was a novel and was therefore unlikely to be autobiographical. Even once I got to the point where I felt I was regularly recognizing the story as fiction, I found the voice of the protagonist was quite similar to Crosley's voice in her other books. And New York City looms large, as usual. 

Lola, newly engaged to Boots (which is, thankfully, a  nickname), is out to dinner in Manhattan (Chinatown, specifically) with former coworkers when she unexpectedly runs into an ex she hadn't seen for years. They have a pleasant enough conversation, then they go their separate ways. The next night: same song, second verse. This time it's an ex from ten years ago. And the next day, you guessed it--she sees another ex. On one hand it was starting to seem like a literary device allowing the author to describe a handful of different relationships--like a bunch of short stories all linked to the same character--but as an actual plot point, it felt a bit contrived. Granted, I am not George Strait (because only one of my exes lives in Texas), so who knows what it would actually be like if I'd had a decade-long, extremely active dating life in NYC? Maybe running into an ex a day wouldn't be as implausible as it sounds. 

But then it turns out it actually was contrived. In a really quirky and unexpected way. That twist was both welcome (because we see it wasn't just a parade of exes for the sake of anecdotes) and a bit surreal. But it also allowed for more depth, bringing interesting introspection on love, commitment, and letting go of the past--all in a witty and stylish package. (The Classic, of course...)

“Ask Again, Yes” by Mary Beth Keane

Oops... I did it again. 

I don't even remember when I finished reading this book, but it was probably close to two weeks ago. I had intended to blog about it while sitting around at the airport on my way out of town on Friday the 12th. But when the time came, I realized I had forgotten to take a cover photo, which threw me off enough that I decided to wait until I got back home. But I didn't manage to squeeze it in until this evening. While I'm sure I never had anything profound to write, I'm also sure that if I had, I would have lost it to the mists of time by now. 

So you'll have to settle for whatever synopsis I can scrape from my brain, plus a brief verdict. This book starts in July 1973 with two rookie cops in NYC: Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope. They end up as next door neighbors in a small (fictional, I think, but idyllic) town north of the city, where they are friendly enough, but definitely not friends. Brian's wife Anne certainly never warms up to Francis's wife Lena, anyway. But eventually there are children in the picture, and Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope establish a strong bond despite the lack of connection between their parents. 

This is one of those really complicated family dramas. I honestly did not expect to like it that much, but it was very engrossing. At least I think that's what I thought. But I may need to read again, yes?