Year Of No Clutter

 

   All of us accumulate stuff. As we live our lives there are things that we receive that seem to mean to us importance.  Our report cards, our first piece of writing, and so on.

  Our parents, especially our mothers, coo over our accomplishments and save them in boxes to pass on to us once we are adults.

   Some of us become what is politely called hoarders, unable to throw away past records of life steps.

   We may even collect our trophies in separate rooms and close off the doors so others don’t catch on we are just unable to organize.

    Schaub in this memoir points out it is generational. At least it was for her family. Her father taught her by example to hoard. It is something taught and then caught.

    Sometimes it makes no sense. You may collect cans or paper or books or food even.  Sometimes even the science projects of long time ago get in your collection.

    But it can be controlled. Schaub took a whole year to get the habit down of control. Her delightful journey she took  along with her husband and children is detailed in a humorous way in this book.

    She had a place called the Hell room where she hide the clutter. Every hoarder has a place of clutter no matter what the name.

    Hoarders will recognize the problem. Non-hoarders will smile and cut the hoarders some slack, with understanding.

    I recommend this book highly. All will recognize themselves as we all are hoarders to a certain extent. If not hoarders we do have clutter of different types.

   Read. Weep. Laugh.

   The book is published by Sourcebooks and retails for $15.99.

 

The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan

    Andrew Klavan is a name known in the literary world in the realm of crime fiction. He is prolific and best known for True Crime among many other works. His work uses at least one character who is a Christian in a major role.

    He did not start out life with that viewpoint. In fact he was not even interested in that area.

His childhood was far from what we would see as religious. His parents were only Jewish in name and agnostic even atheist in practice.

    His early childhood was spent in his mind in stories he made up. No one really knew. Education wise he was able to bluff his way through school. He never read the required books assigned but was able to bluff his way to good grades.

    He had Christian influences as he grew from childhood to adolescence. He knew about the Bible but it was just a book to him that contained great plot ideas.

    But he was intellectual and had to read through the book for himself.  

    This is a memoir that starts at age sixty when he is being baptized than backtracks to carry the story forward from birth to the baptism. It has great fiction technique. You can see he has great command of language. It is an easy read.

    This book was sent to me free from booklookbloggers.com for the purpose of review. I recommend this as a book to be shared with seekers. It is a good evangelistic tool.

My Life In Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself... There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows.”

For Mead such a book was Middlemarch by George Elliot. She has written this book as a biography and a memoir;a biography of Elliot and a memoir of what the book means to her in her development.

Some books can read you, she states. She feels Middlemarch is such a book. Some books expand the more we read them.

Never having read the book, I can’t really say that.

English teachers seem to be fond of issuing book reports to be done favoring Elliot, Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray and Dickens. They ask for theme and plot and message. Teachers seem to be able to ruin the joy of reading for many students. 

If we had a book like this which treats the story development as a reflection of where Elliot was at that period in her life, it would have made the reviewing more pleasant.

It seems this book would be understood better by students and book readers who need context for their analysis of Middlemarch.

I was lost in trying to figure out what Mead was doing. It is not the type of book that I can lose myself in.

I was given this book free for reviewing purposes by bloggingforbooks.org and was not required to give a positive review. Any views expressed are those of the reviewer and not the publisher.