Category: Recommended Read Page 2 of 8

When Eve Schaub sees an opportunity for improvement, she takes a year and works on the problem. That is what she did in her 2014 book “Year of No Sugar.”  Now she is tackling a “Year of No Clutter.” A monumental pile of clutter housed in what she affectionately calls “The Hell Room.”

I always thought I had a clutter problem, but I do not have a whole room dedicated to things I cannot let go. Who knows? Maybe if I had an extra room it would fill up the same way all empty countertops in my home magically attract piles of paper. Schaub treated this room – a large room by her description – how others treat the guest room closet or the space under the bed. Don’t know what to do with it? Throw it in, quickly close the door, and think of it no more!

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Heller’s newest introduces a very likable, elegant, private investigator in her later years. Blue-blooded Celine lives in a small apartment almost beneath the Brooklyn Bridge with husband #2, Pete. She is sixty-eight, she has emphysema, and her heart is broken. In the year since the Twin Towers fell her younger, then older sister passed away. She is just finding her way past the fiercest stages of grief.

Relaxing one morning (by working on a macabre sculpture involving taxidermy) Celine receives a phone call from a young woman. Gabriela is a fellow Sarah Lawrence alum wondering if the famous “Prada P.I.” still takes cases. Celine is a daughter of privilege and an outlier in her family, preferring to forge a less-conventional route through life. She takes cases she considers “lost causes” – no spying on cheating spouses for her.

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A collection of the extant Norse myths, retold with Gaiman’s unique voice, “Norse Mythology” recounts the stories of the gods and goddesses of Asgard from creation to the end of all things – Ragnarok.

In an informative introduction Gaiman tells of youthful hours poring over library books filled with the exploits of Odin, Thor, Loki, and the rest of the  Norse pantheon, as well as the giants, serpents, and wolves that also populate the myths. These beings bicker, compete, play pranks on each other. They are funny, petty, and cavalierly cruel. They speak to ravens, own boats that can be folded and stored in a bag, shape-shift, and drink so much beer and mead.

Throughout Gaiman keeps a good balance of serious and silly with a stories-told-around-the-campfire tone. Chapters stand alone as simple short stories that beg to be read aloud. The themes, morals, and messages of “Norse Mythology” are familiar in the way of most myths and fables, but Gaiman’s assured, occasionally laugh-out-loud retelling makes this a must-read. Ideally on a cold night with lots of extra blankets.

An advance galley of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest opinion.

It has been a while since I read a book as visceral and harrowing as this one. Relatively short at just over 200 pages, “Natural Way” is a powerful feminist allegory that gets up to speed quickly and does not relent.

Yolanda wakes up in a strange place, feeling drugged, and wearing odd rough clothing – the homespun cloth of a homesteader. Soon she notices a second girl in the room with her, in the same strange costume and looking as bewildered and frightened as Yolanda feels. Her name is Verla. When a man comes in with no information and leads Yolanda off for “admissions” she is thrown into a yard of even more confused young women. They are on an abandoned sheep farm in the dusty remote outback of Australia. They are about to be punished.

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