Category Archives: Annotations

Annotations of the books I’m reading, studying, and learning from. A good resource for creative writing students

Tidy Marie Kondo

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Is it true that how you acquire, keep, and shelve your books is a reflection of how you maintain friendships? Can a properly folded pair of socks improve your relationship with siblings and parents?

Before you dive down the Netflix rabbit hole and bingewatch Marie Kondo’s hit series on tidying up, check out the book that sparked the joyful spiritual transformation inherent to tidying up.

Kondo, Marie. The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Trans. Cathy Hirano. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2014. Print.

Genre: nonfiction

Summary: Tidying coach and expert Marie Kondo shares in this book the top-secret techniques she normally teaches one-on-one to clients paying top-dollar. Throughout, she defies conventional wisdom and practice so that the act of tidying up can be done only once in your life and never again. And, if you follow instructions carefully, you might just tidy up your soul, too.

Critique: Did you notice how the title of this book sort of repeats itself? Much of the text will do that, too. Many paragraphs will feel not like a progression of thoughts, but more like multiple iterations of the same sentence. I chalk this up to the difficulties inherent in translating — supremely demonstrated in this snippet from RadioLab.

Besides the repetition, the first fifty pages or so feel like the cousins of a Popeil infomercial. Kondo beats a steady drum to advertise that these methods are hers, hers alone, perfected over decades, beginning when she was but a tweenager obsessed with lifestyle magazines, and that she has trademarked these techniques as the KonMari method. (And in case you couldn’t figure out the etymological roots of that mysterious moniker, she tells you: it is her name, flipped and abbreviated. Well played, Ms. Kondo. Well played.)

I promise I am not merely quibbling over this book’s minor flaws and quirks. My hope is that if you know about these flaws in advance, you will smile at them and then read the book all the way through. Because you should. Kondo has an uncanny way of rooting out why we hoard, why we clutter, why we stockpile, why we acquireandacquireandacquire, how these habits hurt us emotionally, and why our repeated attempts to clean up and get organized ultimately fail within a few months.

As I noted above, Kondo defies our conventional tidying habits. She might as well. They don’t work. But the real knock-out epiphany lurking in her methods is not just its originality. Kondo links the way we treat our home and our stuff to the ways we treat the people in our lives. (Especially ourselves.)

Is it true that how you acquire, keep, and shelve your books is a reflection of how you maintain friendships?

How does a properly folded pair of socks improve your relationship with siblings and parents?

Can you really find true love (or better treasure your soul’s mate) by giving an honorable farewell to old mementos?

Will a tidy home actually make you a more joyful person?

These questions may seem innocuous. Inane. Insane? But when it comes to finding enduring happiness, the questions are as worth the asking as the methods are worth the trying. I mean, heck, think about it. What if all that’s keeping us from experiencing joyous and fulfilling lives is a poorly folded pair of socks?

The Language of Spells by Garret Weyr

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Did you say dragons? In turn-of-the-last-century Vienna?? Enchanted and entrapped as everyday working Joes??? What ought to be a most marvelous storytelling feat turns into a lengthy, dozy tellingstory book.

Weyr, Garret. The Language of Spells. Illus. Katie Harnett. Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 2018. Print.

Genre: middle grade fantasy

Summary: Grisha the dragon and his first best friend, Maggie — a young, human girl — set out to find and free the seventy or so dragons Sleeping-Beauty’ed and buried underground by a power-hungry sorcerer.

Critique: You know those old, possibly apocryphal, world maps which pointed to their own outer edges — those fringes marking the extent of human exploration — with dire Here Be Dragons! warnings? I feel obliged to put similar warnings around this book…

Here Be Exposition!

For anyone unfamiliar with the literary component called exposition, I shall unbriefly elaborate. Exposition explains. It’s the information sections included in a book to summarize past events, ongoing actions, or a character’s thoughts and feelings and motivations.

When you’re not reading exposition, you’re most likely reading scenes, which are the moments when characters interact, talk, conflict, pick locks, unload groceries, kiss, dig tunnels, spy, gossip, or eat turnips.

Imagine you’re reading about Tillie, a supermarket cashier who’s beeping items over the scanner while the shopper unloading the cart prattles on about pineapples and their secret homeopathic applications. The point at which the text begins to explain how back in 1992, Tillie developed an extreme aversion to pineapples in the midst of a disastrous, tropical honeymoon getaway is the point at which you are reading exposition.

One minute, you were observing an interaction, gathering clues about the characters, making judgments and assumptions, forming opinions, and anticipating what’s to come. The next minute, you pause your work so that the author can inform you. Fill you in. Get you up to speed. Tell you a thing or two, rather than show you.

In good writing, exposition and scene go hand-in-hand. One is not better than other. Each involves the reader in a different way. Scenes make you work and spark your curiosity while exposition affirms your budding theories. In the best writing (which is also the best kind of storytelling), you never notice the narrative switching between the two tactics.

But in this book, you cannot help but notice that you are perpetually in exposition. Chapter after chapter, the author tells you this and tells you that. You are told that the dragons with golden eyes are put to work as tour guides in old museums and castles around Vienna. But what you want is to see this dynamic play out. You want to witness some of those interactions. You want to experience this strange, unfamiliar world where these chosen dragons must work or be eliminated; where these fire-breathing work-a-day Joes gather once a week at 2 a.m. at a hotel bar to share old war stories.

Heck, you want to hear those war stories, but instead, you are told about young Maggie sleeping under the nearby bar table where her poet father and his eccentric artist friends gab until dawn (amongst themselves and not with the dragons, by the way). You are told her entire backstory, about her mother’s tragic and untimely death, about her troubled interactions with other children, about her homeschooling, and her wanderings through the city on its new cable cars.

And bear in mind, much of what I have described here doesn’t arrive until you’re halfway through the book. The preceding chapters have been telling you about Grisha’s time enchanted and entrapped as a teapot.

Yes, you heard me right. You’ll spend nearly half a book watching a dragon teapot watch the world the change.

And so, dear readers, believe me when I tell you: He Be Exposition! Here be a book that opts for tellingstory instead of storytelling.

The Push by Tommy Caldwell

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In this memoir, doubt dances with glorious vistas where success, aspiration, and limits all fight for a grip on the same dime-thin ledge.

Caldwell, Tommy. The Push: A Climber’s Journey of Endurance, Risk, and Going Beyond Limits. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017. Print.

Genre: nonfiction, memoir

Summary: Caldwell’s memoir chaperones readers up treacherous escarpments and deep into the human psyche. Doubt dances with glorious vistas where success, aspiration, and limits all fight for a grip on the same dime-thin ledge.

Critique: As bullet points, Caldwell’s life story is remarkable and riveting. The young climbing phenomenon who is taken hostage by terrorists; who loses is confidence to searing self-doubt; who continues climbing and redefining the sport even after he loses an index finger in a freak DIY home carpentry project…

Expanded into entire paragraphs, the story is about as claggy as an under-whipped Genoise sponge. I suspect a faulty combination of ingredients may be the culprit. Each chapter either begins with or is punctuated with italicized vignettes. These short scenes combine succinct sentences and punchy verbs to land the reader smack-dab in the middle of a climb or dire situation. The memories encapsulated in these scenes are rich and poignant. The writing is gripping. All too soon, however, these vignettes break off and yield to “the text.”

The text comprises dense paragraphs flooded with long, wordy sentences. Perhaps not ironically, each paragraph resembles a sheer cliff…a Dawn Wall built not from granite, but instead, from daunting exposition.

Why grunt through the pages when you could just jaunt through those zesty, refreshing sloped, slanted sections? In other words, why eat the claggy cake when you could just lick off the fantastic frosting?

With a new movie featuring Caldwell’s amazing feats, perhaps now is a prime time to reassemble the ingredients and convert the mountainous memoir into a graphic novel.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

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I need only one word whenever I am asked, “What’s your all-time favorite book?”

Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial life. 1872. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1994. Print.

Genre: fiction (19th century British)

Summary: An idealistic young woman and a noble-minded doctor enter disastrous marriages. The consequences of their choices ripple through the wider community. Both doctor and woman might find redemption and rediscover hope if they can find each other amidst rigid class structures and isolating social barriers.

Critique: True, all print editions of Middlemarch are roughly the size and weight of a brick.[1]

Doubly true, you are unlikely to heed even my most urgent pleas and gushing recommendations to read any brick-like book.[2]

I urge you nonetheless because Middlemarch is precisely the brick we all need to come crashing through our windows.

Writers can gawk at Eliot’s tenacity. To construct the masterwork, she wove together two going-nowhere projects that chewed up countless months of her writing time. At first, there was the tale of an ambitious doctor, Tertius Lydgate, foisting modern medical treatments on a backwards British village. When that rough draft petered out, Eliot switched to a new story about the ingenuous Dorothea Brook, whose marriage to a fusty scholar twice her age does not result in the spiritual and intellectual self-refinement she desires. Once again, the rough draft stymied. While most writers might have abandoned the second project and gone on to a third, Eliot saw a connection between the two protagonists. She identified parallels in the stories and combined them.

I suppose she hit two stones with the same bird.

All readers—whether they are writers or not—can marvel at how Eliot’s narrator[3] repeatedly expands the focus out from the two heroes to the supporting cast of characters as the repercussions resulting from the unfortunate marriages rumble across the community. The more we learn about other characters and how their lives are impacted by Dorothea and Lydgate, the more we discover our untold potential for compassion.

Of course I could readily empathize with Dorothea—the pitiable young dynamo who marries an abusive nerd-turd, Mr. Casaubon. I was that young dynamo at one point in my life. I was in that very relationship. But then, the narrative shifts and presents Casaubon’s inner working. Suddenly, I discover how, at other times in my life, I have also been a nerd-turd—jealous, suspicious, and trying to mask my paralyzing self-defeating fear with pedantry. The more I read, the more I realize how many “others” I am and have been. When I read Middlemarch—which happens annually at this point—I feel my fundamental connection to all beings.

When I read Middlemarch, I feel my own infinity.

This brick-like book smashes my perception of the world made of strangers. Through the eyes of the Middlemarch narrator, we are all familiars.

[1] I am borrowing, and promise to give back, the brick comparison from Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014), a memoir told through the guise of a literary examination of the novel plus a biography of George Eliot.

[2] Naxos AudioBooks produced an exceptional, unabridged recording of the novel. Juliet Stevenson’s reading is powerful. Her finesse with diverse character voices is also stunning!

[3] Jonathan D. Culler notes in his 2004 essay “Omniscience” that Eliot’s narrator is not actually omniscient, but heterodiagetic. That is to say, a person who is not directly involved in the plot or the world of the novel (AKA the diagesis), but who has elected to sift and present germane information for the reader’s consideration. Indeed, the Middlemarch narrator refers to itself as a historian making a case study of the town and its folk. (Culler’s larger point about the impossibility of god-like omniscience in any story is well worth reading.)

 

Note: As always, I do not earn commissions or other compensation for any of the books/audiobooks I recommend.

The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy

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Eyes do not see; they touch. Vision evolved from skin gathering light in minute detail. The brain does not think; it smells. It evolved from a large olfactory nerve in skull. It helped us sew memories and scents together.This book will change how (and who) you are in the world.

Meloy, Ellen. The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. Print.

Genre: nonfiction (nature essays)

Summary: A collection of essays explore color’s spiritual, emotional, and biological importance to humans; how our humanity has been shaped and how our impact on the planet shifts as our connection to colors diminishes.

Critique: Touch. Contact. Connection. Having a tactile experience with the physical, natural world is at the heart of each essay in this collection. Meloy demonstrates through her own adventuring how to be fully alive and awake and seduced and ecstasied in the great outdoors.

To bring readers into her experience, she converts our ability to perceive colors–especially one as slippery as turquoise–into a haptic experience. More than that, she stretches into synesthesia when she reminds us the eyes can touch and the brain can smell. It can even smell colors. Turquoise, in its hybrid not-quite-blue-not-quite-green existence is really just the scent of the wind (or so said ancient Middle Eastern cultures). Native cultures across the Americas transcribed the color into sound, one that guided souls to the afterlife.

Magical and sensual though that is, Meloy laments the modern world’s loss of color. Or, it’s increasing colorblindness to the natural world which has been dammed, funneled, paved, monetized, and commodified. Either every scrap of this planet is put to our direct use and benefit, or those scraps which will not submit to our utilitarian desires will be removed. However, this very practical and clever war-rationing approach to nature strikes Meloy as too narrow.

On a recent trip to Moab, I marvel at a stone’s skin.

Instead of using the world, why not enjoy it? Marvel at it? It is a place we can revel in. Get lost. Drown. We can be bedeviled. Seduced. Overwhelmed. Ignored. All these things, and more, the world can do to us if we only let it. But why allow it to take such liberties with our bodies and souls?

Because it cracks us out of our slumbering shells. It enables us to live in a constant euphoric state of quivering, goose-prickled tingles.

Even better, enjoying the world enables us to be what we truly are, rather than what we think we are. And what we are, according to brilliant biologist E. O. Wilson, is a species of biophiliacs. Forget sapiens! Biophiliacs are insatiable lovers when it comes to nature.

“Our sense of wonder grows exponentially,” Wilson writes, “the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery and the more we seek knowledge to create new mystery.”

Or, as Meloy phrases it, “Lives without access to sensation are lives that edge out the earth’s raw, pervasive sweetness, that deeply biophilic connection to all life.”

But these essays come from an almost gentler, more idyllic time: the late 1990s and early 2000s. Back when we were taking our first baby-steps into sustainability and renewable energies. Today, we cannot be sure the EPA will survive the current White House administration. We cannot be sure our public lands will remain in our hands or wind up so privatized that in order to enter them (let alone enjoy them), we will first have to download and accept a standard EULA.

Now more than ever is the time to read this book and feel the world in a whole new way. Now is our best chance to confront the essential questions: are we locusts or lovers to this natural world? And, given the savage, ravenous course love takes, is there any difference between those roles?