> THE READER
A novel to feed your heart and mind and a self-help book to improve the physical space around you.
How a Woman Becomes a Lake, Marjorie Celona
This crisply constructed novel begins on New Year’s Day, 1986, with a young cop responding to a call from the pay phone not far from a lake. The caller, a woman who identified herself as Vera Gusev, said she’d found a boy in the woods. The child was fine, she said, keeping warm in her car. Then the call ended abruptly, with a cry that could have been “hey” or “wait.”
When the police officer arrives, he finds the car, its doors open, the engine running. No woman. No boy. Just a dog.
And from that absence, the novel opens up to encompass the events of that day and the seven individuals whose lives are touched: There’s Lewis, the cop, a good man living with the emotional residue of a distant father; the missing boy, Jesse, 10, who went to the lake that day with his volatile father, Leo, and his brother, Dmitri, 6, the favoured child; Evelina, the boys’ mother, a woman whose life is on hold since Leo left her, her greatest pleasures buying lottery tickets and remembering the carefree woman she had once been; Denny, the missing woman’s husband, shattered by her disappearance — has she killed herself, has she left him, has she died in an accident? And, finally, Vera, the missing woman, the woman who becomes a lake.
Though this sounds like the set-up for crime fiction, it is a meditation on family, loyalty and memory, a thoughtful examination of how lives collide.
This is the Victoria-raised, Oregonbased author’s second novel. The first, “Y,” was longlisted for the 2012 Giller Prize and won the Amazon.com First Novel Award.
Joy at Work, Marie Kondo and Scott Sonenshein
Marie Kondo has created her own brand of clutter (or
komono, to use her Japanese term) — through her bestselling “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and its spin-offs, notably her current Netflix tidying series and KonMari, her new online store. And now this book, a collaboration with organization expert Scott Sonenshein in which they turn their minimalist gaze on an area of our lives that doesn’t always spark joy: our workplaces.
Could there be a better time to publish such a book, with so many of us suddenly confined to hastily erected and woefully disorganized home offices? Plus we’ve got enough times on our hands to make use of a self-help guide that combines personal experience, behavioural research and plenty of tips for revamping our physical and digital working lives.
There are lots of books our there about organizing. What elevates Kondo’s brand above others is her gentle respect for inanimate objects: A sample insight: “Let go of your digital data with gratitude, as we do for material possessions.”
Here are five interesting things I learned:
1. Divide everything in your work area into categories and keep only objects that spark joy, those that are useful (stapler, paper clips) and those that will spark future joy (receipts, paper related to ongoing projects). Then have a “tidying festival” by category, getting rid of what you don’t need in one go.
2. One-third of programs installed on computers are ever used.
3. Books have their own shelf life — if you don’t read them shortly after you buy them you probably never will.
4. The average person has 130 online accounts per email address, and the annual loss of productivity from forgetting passwords is about $600 ($430 U.S.) per employee.
5. When it comes to paper, “the rule of thumb for papers is to discard everything.” This blunt approach gives you the resolve to keep only what is necessary.
Sarah Murdoch is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Reach her via email: smurdoch49@gmail.com