The Fast and Furious 5 Step Organizing Solution: No-Fuss Clutter Control from a Top Professional Organizer by Susan Pinsky (4 stars)
This book is sticking with me. Pinsky is an organization RADICAL, and while reading it I often just thought about how a little over the edge she is. Like, she thinks keeping more than four days of food or household supplies in your house at any given time is a total throwback to depression-era hoarding. FOUR DAYS, folks. And she means it. Having an extra container of salad dressing in your pantry is apparently totally cluttering up your life. I'm really not on board with the food thing. (What if you get the flu or there is a snowstorm?) But she means it, and because she is so hard core the principles sunk in. I rethought several kitchen cabinets and got rid of stuff that I hadn't used in years and that was making accessing things I use often very inconvenient. It has seriously improved my life. She emphasizes that you really do not need to be prepared for everything - you can be resourceful! If someday I need an angel food cake pan (even though I hate making angel food cake and will avoid making one for the rest of my life if possible), I will somehow get one. I can borrow one! Or buy one! I don't need to keep mine for some obscure, unlikely day. It's a fast, efficient book to read and the pictures are helpful and nice to look at.
Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks (2 stars)
Me and historical fiction again... we just don't work very well. The characters seem imposed upon events, and it just bothers me. This is the second of Brook's books I haven't enjoyed. I felt like I was reading polished character and plot sketches - here we see a strength, here a weakness, here a plot twist. Her writing just doesn't breathe for me. It doesn't help that the subject matter is so uncomfortable and sad - the civilized white Christians evangelizing to the savages and leaving such a tragic path of destruction everywhere they (and their germs) turn.
Organized Simplicity: The Clutter-Free Approach to Intentional Living by Tsh Oxenreider (3 stars)
Simplify your life so you can spend energy on things that are important to you! How can you argue with that? This is a good organizing book. I'm looking forward to trying out some of her natural cleaning product recipes she includes.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (4 stars)
This is a very clever way for a talented writer to bring together all those interesting characters she's been keeping notes on for years into one story. And because she is so talented, it does not feel forced. I loved the way the story unfolded; Patchett paces things intentionally and well. I loved how the characters unfolded for us also; they felt real and deep. It was beautiful how the artificial constraints of the situation became liberating to the characters and they were slowly free to become more themselves in the absurd situation they found themselves. Loved it.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (2 stars)
Huh. I know it's a classic and I'm supposed to love it, so I kept waiting for the characters to deepen or mature in any way. I have to say I'm always a little weirded out by the motif of the father who cloisters away his beautiful, innocent, dimpled daughter who is the light of his life until adolescence, at which point she is bowled over by the cruel world because she has no experience dealing with anyone except her strangely obsessed and doting father (e.g. Les Miserables, Silas Marner). It just has no emotional resonance with me. And the predictable "diamond in the rough" which emerges at the end was a bit unconvincing. So... didn't love it.
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (3 stars)
I really enjoyed reading this - there is lots of lush description and tension builds imperceptibly but effectively. I couldn't quite tell if I was reading a mystery or a thriller or what, just that I was enjoying the ride. The main character Marina is very well done, in that she is such a controlled, unemotional, almost sterile person. It must have been tempting for Patchett to break her out of that as she's having these wild experiences down in the Amazon rain forest, but she never breaks character. The extremely measured way she experiences this organic, wild place makes for its own interesting tension. But it has its problem in that she's not especially warm or likable or inviting, so it's hard to be invested in her. It was a great, engaging read.
Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor by Jana Riess (2 stars)
I can't overstate how surprised and disappointed I was by this book. Having read a few things on Riess's blog and general love of her and this book around the internet, I fully expected to love it also. The idea of following various spiritual practices for a month to deepen one's relationship with God is an interesting idea. But from the outset I was already a bit concerned: spiritual practices are generally a form of discipline that slowly change people, not a magic trick with guaranteed results, and a month seems like an awfully short period of time, and twelve in a year seem like an awful lot. But by her biography, Riess seems like a substantial and spiritually mature and engaged person, with advanced degrees and training in theology. So I was so taken aback by the half-hearted way she seemed to approach so many of the practices. It was almost like halfway through the year she decided to throw in the towel on any actual spiritual progress and embrace the "flunking" idea and threw in a lot of sass and humor to try and cover it up. It just took me over the edge when she didn't actually go an entire month without eating meat. I mean, one month! Come on! You're writing a book! Look, I'm no stranger to half-hearted attempts at interesting sounding self-improvement ideas, and even abandoning them out of laziness or when they don't seem very rewarding. I just don't write a book about my failed attempts, because they aren't very interesting and say more about me and my unremarkableness and frailty rather than the spiritual practice itself. The most interesting part of the book happens in the postscript, when a genuinely trying experience presents itself in Riess's life, and she finds that her year has actually prepared her to deal with it. But there is so little reflection and explanation of how, that it is even a bit hollow. We are all human and fail, and I even think there is a book in that. But it requires more meat and reflection and substance than Riess manages to muster here, unfortunately.
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