The Blood Spilt
by Asa Larsson. This is the second in Larsson’s Rebecka Martinsson
mystery series and it is an excellent read! Like the first, it again
takes place up in Kiruna, Sweden, or close to it, and picks up a half year or
so after the first one ended. Rebecka the lawyer is traumatized from the
events in the first book and her role in them and is not able to concentrate
much on work. She travels north with a partner in her law firm to help with
a minor matter, and stumbles into an unfolding series of crimes in a nearby
town. Larsson switches back and forth between Rebecka, the detective Anna
Maria Mella, some new characters, and even a yellow-legged wolf who has
recently arrived in the area. She does so with great skill and fast pacing
– she’s very good at creating characters and letting you know about them
without oversharing the obvious bits. The new story and murders are
shocking and sad and as they unfold and poor Rebecka unwittingly gets caught up
in the goings on, it was very hard to put the book down. And although I
kept hearing my grandparents say something along the lines of – why are you
reading Swedish mysteries when there are perfectly good Norwegian mysteries to
be read? – I was very caught up in this one. I shall pace myself a bit
before beginning number three. And here’s a bonus – although this book
was set in the north of Sweden, most of it takes place in September, so there
were barely any cold temperatures! No parkas. No snow.
The Life-Changing
Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
by Marie Kondo. I am late to this bandwagon, I know. I’ve been
reading about the book for the last half a year, and couldn’t decide if I was
intrigued or not, but then was able to borrow the book from a friend. And
I’m glad I did – a lot of what she says I had already heard or read about, but
it seemed worthwhile to me to read about her KonMari system in detail.
She basically comes across as kind of an idiot savant of tidying. She
portrays herself as being obsessed with organizing and tidying since the age of
five, and whether or not that is true, she certainly proves herself to have
thought a lot about the topic. It is rather fascinating in its
simplicity. With Kondo’s help, her clients tidy their homes and in doing
so change their lives – and she claims none of them ever return to their untidy
ways. The main way she is able to get them to reach success seems to me
to be that she recommends throwing away more than half of what you own.
She believes you need to go through all your possessions, hold each one (each
book, each item of clothing, each memento), and only keep “what sparks
joy.” If you are having trouble getting rid of an item that doesn’t spark
joy, then it is because you can’t let go of the past or are fearing the
future. Once you’ve done this, it’s easy to keep your house tidy because
you have nothing left! But also, everything you keep has a place and so
it is simple to always put everything where it belongs. Simple, no?
There are a few things I resisted, while reading. For one, I don’t see
why you HAVE to do it at once, in a period of a few days, as Kondo
suggests. She says if you do a room at a time, it won’t work, but that
doesn’t seem to me to have to be the case. (She does recommend organizing
by category rather than room – and has a specific order you should use for the
categories. Clothes, books, etc.) There are also a few
extremes: everyone mentions her proclamation of not balling socks, that
socks want to relax in the drawer etc. But another of her proscriptions
also seemed a little extreme – and that is unpacking your purse at the end of
every day. If you are going to put the same things back in the purse in
the morning, then what is the point? Other than rigidity? But she definitely
got me thinking, and I plan to implement some of her ideas, if not all.
(Update: I did try her method of
folding clothes in drawers, and was very surprised at how well it works! I have twice as much room in my dresser
as I did when I folded items and stacked them. Mind blown!)
The Fever
by Megan Abbott. I read an interview with Gillian Flynn a while ago, in
which she said that this was one of her favorite books, so I added it to my
queue. And it is good, although it’s not the most comfortable of reading
experiences – on purpose, I am sure. The novel takes place in a high
school in a small town (whose location is specifically not identified, I’m not
sure why), and events begin when one of a group of three high school
girlfriends falls rather violently ill. She ends up in a coma in the
local hospital, and no one can figure out what is wrong with her. Then
other girls in the school start falling sick with some of the same
symptoms. The point of view is mainly that of one family – the father,
Tom, who is a teacher at the school, and his son, Eli, a hockey player, and
daughter, Deenie. The book basically documents the slow build-up of mass
hysteria, and that is where the reading gets a bit difficult. I got tired
of being in the school and in the small town and witnessing the growing
hysteria of the kids and their parents, as everyone tries to figure out what is
going on. There’s a lake in the town that is fenced off and is covered
with algae, so for a while people think that the lake is the culprit, since
some of the victims went swimming there. The writing is good, and her
characters are believable and well created. As I said though, I did get
to feeling rather claustrophobic and tired of the hysteria, but right when I
was really beginning to work up into a snit, the tension shifts as we learn the
real cause of events. It’s a thriller that moves in slow motion.
New And Selected Poems, Volume Two by Mary Oliver.
After finishing volume 2 of her collected poems, I’ve reached the conclusion
that I don’t really like Oliver’s poems as much as I feel I should. And
when I say “should,” I don’t refer to any outside pressure, but just that the
style of her poems are what I usually like in a poem: the language is
direct and clear, she uses an observed incident to reach an interesting
conclusion, and she never seems to be difficult just for difficulty’s
sake. That said, I found that with this volume, I really liked ten or so
poems and then was indifferent to the rest (but perhaps discovering ten or so
poems in a book that really speak to me is enough, and I’m being greedy to
expect more? That is up for
debate.) At any rate, Oliver is a
nature poet, whose language tends to verge towards the simple side of the
colloquial: and when she gets it right, I think she really gets it right.
For example, in her poem, “The Measure,” she writes of stopping her car to help
a turtle cross a road, and then ends up musing on who is lucky in that
scenario, the turtle who gets perhaps life-saving help, or the woman who gets
to stop and help the turtle. She simultaneously raises the question of her life being
manipulated by higher powers in a parallel way to how she is manipulating the
life of the turtle. In “The Owl
Who Comes,” she sets the scene of an owl on the hunt and then wonders, “and if
I wish the owl luck,/ and I do,/ what am I wishing for that other/ soft life,/
climbing through the snow?” It
doesn’t get much better than that.
So be sure to read “Touch-me-nots,” her famous “Snow Geese,” and “Some
Things, Say The Wise Ones.” You
will stop and think, you will be all the wiser, you will be sure to notice
details in the world around you that you hadn’t noticed before.
The Lake House
by Kate Morton. This is an excellent read – Kate Morton seems to get better
and better with each book she writes, and I really enjoyed this one from start
to finish. It shares the format with the other two books of hers that
I’ve read (there are two I still want to read) – and that is that the book
jumps from a certain time in the past to a certain time in the present, and
keeps going back and forth between the two timeframes. Basically, a
detective, Sadie Sparrow, who is on leave from her job, is staying with her
grandfather in Cornwall. While out running with his dogs, she stumbles
upon an old overgrown estate on a lake. Curious, and with too much time
on her hands, Sadie starts to investigate and discovers that the house has been
closed up since 1933, when the family who lived there had a 1 year-old child
who went missing. Sadie decides to try to solve the still unsolved
mystery of the missing Theo Edevane. The narrative then keeps returning
to 1932 and 1933 and fills in the story of the Edevane family, with the
patriarch, Anthony Edevane suffering from shell shock from WWI, and focusing in
particular on the middle daughter, Alice, who went on to become a famous
mystery writer and is now living in London in her late eighties. We also
get Alice’s point of view, both when she was a girl of 15 in 1933 and
currently. Then there is the added bonus of the reason Sadie is on
temporary leave, which has to do with a case of hers in which she became too
emotionally invested, regarding a mother who seems to have abandoned her 4
year-old daughter, whether on purpose or due to foul play. It is all very
well done: Morton is really skilled at creating interesting characters
who seem real in their flaws and strengths, and also very real and interesting
in how they respond to the actions that befall them. Some might find the
ending a little too pat or wrapped up, but I was so enjoying the story that I
couldn’t even criticize the improbable way it all came together. It’s a
really fun read!
Palace Walk
by Naguib Mahfouz. I have heard a lot about Mahfouz, but had never read
any of his prodigious amount of novels, so I finally borrowed this trilogy from
my father. One 500-page novel down, two to go! I read it very
slowly – maybe one or two chapters three or four times a week, and enjoyed
reading it, although wasn’t really compelled to move through it at a faster
pace. It seems to me that its value lies in how it portrays a certain
slice of upper middle class Egyptian life in the early twentieth century.
There are of course elements of that life that are hard to wrap one’s mind
around – especially when it comes to how the patriarch of the family makes
every important decision for the family completely on his own, and his word is
law. Plus, the female members aren’t allowed out of the house – basically
ever – so are more or less in a kind of house arrest. The mother, Amina,
will visit her mother every now and then, but those visits are escorted, and
she is never allowed out in her own neighborhood, even to go to the market or
to walk around the block. The same holds true for the adult daughters,
Aisha and Khadija. It is hard to fathom. In this first novel, three
of the five children of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad get married – all
marriages arranged by their father. Mahfouz shows one son, Fahmy, a 19
year-old law student get swept up in the anti-Britain demonstrations, and try
to balance his obedience to his father with what he thinks is right morally and
politically. Then there is Kamal, a boy of 11, who only half understands
what is happening when his sisters get married and don’t return home, and other
incidents that occur around him. Kamal enjoys the English soldiers who
are billeted across the street from his house, and is not thrilled when they
are forced to withdraw. The next two books in the trilogy are about the
same family, and I look forward to reading them, a small bit at a time.
Your Three Year-Old:
Friend or Enemy by Louise Bates Ames and
Frances L. Ilg. My mother’s friend
recommended this series of books about parenting; she warned that since they
were written in the seventies they are outdated when it comes to issues of
gender (in most examples the fathers work while the mothers stay at home; boys
like trucks, girls like dolls, etc), but that in her experience as a teacher,
they were still the most accurate and helpful. I haven’t read many parenting books at all, so I don’t have
much to compare them to, but as I read each year, they are definitely helpful
and are uncannily accurate. It’s
not like I think Owen is the rarest of special snowflakes (I mean, of course I
do, but I know that as his mother I can hardly think otherwise), but it was
still very surprising to read this book about three year-olds and see that so
much of what I would have considered Owen’s traits, are really developmental
phases that he is going through, as are all kids. It is odd that we are such predictable, formulaic
beings! But after experiencing
certain days packed with petty arguments with a small, lovely tyrant, it is
also very reassuring to know that this too, will pass.
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