Book review: Outer Order, Inner Calm by Gretchen Rubin

The seventeenth book I read in 2019 was Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness by Gretchen Rubin.  This book has the same chunky size as Marie Kondo's books but less content, larger print, and more white space.  It's less instructional and more aspirational, a sort of decluttering devotional with bite-sized chunks of advice and inspiration.

Some of Rubin's aphorisms are remarkably catchy.  I find myself wishing for Joanna-Gaines-style wall-art of a few of them, a visual reminder that's certainly more practical than a big cursive "EAT" in the kitchen. 

There's very little how-to in this book, but I don't hold that against it.  If you want a step-by-step plan, there's KonMari or Joshua Becker.  Rubin is more of a life coach, reminding you why you're doing what you're doing.  On the other hand, her three questions: "Do I use it?  Do I need it?  Do I love it?" inarguably offer more practical advice than Marie Kondo's "Does it spark joy?"  I seriously doubt brooms and toilet plungers spark joy in anyone, but you shouldn't throw them out either.

Book review: Why Children Matter by Douglas Wilson

The sixteenth book I read in 2019 was Why Children Matter by Douglas Wilson.  This book is poorly titled; you wouldn't necessarily guess from the cover that it is a book on parenting.

There is little that is groundbreaking in this book, but Wilson's writing style is engaging and appealing.  He writes from a counterculturally Christian perspective, in which the burden is not on the child to obey but on the parent to imitate Christ and so, like Paul, provide a model for the child to imitate.  His message boils down to, "Love God, love what you are doing, and love the people God gave you to do it with."

New Year neologism

The lead headline in today's Dallas Morning News was Southwest Airlines' CEO Herb Kelleher's obituary.  The first sentence is, "Herb Kelleher moved to Texas in 1962 with plans for a career in law."  Only I read it as "career-in-law," then wondered, what's a career-in-law?  I had time to decide it was when someone like Harry Bailey marries into a family business before I noticed there were no hyphens and it meant he was a lawyer.

Book review: The Buried Book by D. M. Pulley

The fifty-first book I read in 2018 was The Buried Book, D. M. Pulley's sophomore effort following up on The Dead Key.  This book is set in 1952 in Detroit and deals with a nine-year-old boy whose mother goes missing under suspicious circumstances. 

Pulley does a decent job telling the story in the voice of a rather naive and inexperienced boy.  Unfortunately, the book of the title purports to be a diary Jasper's mother kept at the age of fourteen and is utterly unbelievable.  Does even a talented author with an eye to a contract for a memoir write her diary in the voice of a first-person narrator, complete with dialogue and eloquent descriptions of the smallest minutiae of her day?  For instance, would she, when describing arriving somewhere to make a delivery to a particular person, deliver verbatim the exact words spoken by the woman who tells her the man she's looking for is around back rather than just elide the scene with "He wasn't inside, but I found him around back?"  When does the youngest of four children on a working farm with no electricity who constantly complains about how many chores she has to do in how little time find the time to write a secret diary in such painstaking detail? 

Many of Pulley's set-pieces are evocative, particularly the brief sanctuary Jasper finds with a peep-show dancer and the school he attends while living on his uncle's farm, but the overarching mystery isn't terribly compelling.  The writing is more impressive than the plotting in this book.

Book review: Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl by N. D. Wilson

The fiftieth book I read in 2018 was Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World by N. D. Wilson.  Wilson is best known for his children's books, particularly the 100 Cupboards trilogy, but this is non-fiction, a book-length essay describing his worldview.

What this book most approximates is God's monologue in Job, when challenged on the matter of his justice: an overwhelming catalog of things humans can't comprehend whose ultimate end is to emphasize the smallness of man and the brevity of life over and against the infinity of God and of, well, infinity.

Wilson gets it, in a way I have criticized other Christian books for settling for smaller ends, like racial reconciliation, nuclear disarmament, or girls' education.  In the long run, all of us are mayflies: if one is crushed against a windshield rather than dying of natural causes at the end of its allotted lifespan ten minutes later, does it really matter?  Which is better: to enter Hell with an advanced degree, or to enter Heaven illiterate?  Which is not to say that the conditions experienced by most on earth are utterly irrelevant, but that people who profess to believe that everyone is stepping through a door either to eternal beatitude or eternal damnation ought, if they really examine themselves and their priorities, not to major on whether the waiting room everyone is in for a brief time has new carpeting and fresh paint.

Book review: A Stranger in Mayfair by Charles Finch

The forty-ninth book I read in 2018 was A Stranger in Mayfair, the fourth book in Charles Finch's Charles Lenox mystery series.  Lenox is newly married to Lady Jane Grey and newly elected to Parliament, but despite the wishes of his new wife and new companions, he can't quit his hobby of amateur detecting.  The mystery this time is the case of a murdered footman in the household of a fellow MP.

The mystery isn't quite up to snuff.  As soon as the victim's room was searched in chapter nine, I knew who had done it and why, though it took Lenox all the way to the end of chapter forty-six to reach the same conclusion.  Still, Lenox and his faithful servant/private secretary Graham are pleasant companions to spend the length of a book with, enough that I'm going to forgive the infelicities about to be discussed and snatch up installment five as soon as I can find it in the used book store:

Firstly, that Finch straight-facedly makes the ridiculous claim that whist was invented in London in the early 1860s, when anyone who has ever read Jane Austen knows that it was widely played everywhere in England by the turn of the nineteenth century.  Wikipedia tells me that a book on the rules of whist was published at the club in question in 1862, but the game clearly existed prior to that.

Secondly, Lady Jane Pepper-Pottses it up out of the blue, whining about Lenox's detecting and the risks he runs while indulging the habit.  Turning the new bride into a wet blanket about the very thing that makes the protagonist interesting to the reader is a misogynist stereotype.

Thirdly, Finch tries to be a little too coy and cutesy when Lenox buys a painting in Paris during his honeymoon.

"May I ask who painted it?" Graham asked.
"A chap called Monet," said Lenox.  "Rhymes with bonnet, I think.  I never heard of him myself."

Oh, ha ha, he's a famous painter to the reader but the characters haven't heard of him yet!  Except that A) if you're speaking aloud rather than writing, you don't have to tell the person you're talking to how to pronounce the name you just pronounced;  and, B) Charles Lenox is supposedly well-read, well-educated, and widely traveled so there's no way he wouldn't know how to pronounce a French name.

And, finally, the B-plot in the novel centers around Lenox and Lady Jane's emotional decision whether or not to have children.  As badly as writers of historical fiction want to believe it, people from different eras did not, in fact, under the funny clothes, behave just like modern Westerners.  In the 1860s, conceiving a child was not a decision made by the couple, like buying a house or going on holiday; the only way to ensure that a married couple did not have children was abstinence or, alternatively, some not-terribly-reliable stabs at primitive birth control.  Unless we are to believe that Lenox and Lady Jane have, during their honeymoon and upon their return to their joined homes, newly renovated to share a bedroom, not consummated their marriage, discussion after the fact is rather pointless.  When Lady Jane (*dumb spoiler alert*) gifts Lenox a pair of puppies for them "to practice on" before deciding whether to have a child, it's the most Millennial thing she could possibly have done.

Book review: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The forty-eighth book I read in 2018 was Moneyball by Michael Lewis.  I was fifteen years late to this best-seller, but that fact only made it clear how very wrong Lewis (and by extension, Billy Beane) was about pretty much everything.  At the time, moneyball was supposed to be the future of baseball, as the Oakland As were supposedly right at the threshold of postseason success.  Only, of course, the As have just kind of hung around at stasis since then.  They do well for a low-budget team, but, as Beane himself is purported to assert in the book, no one is going to take him and his ideas seriously until he wins the World Series.

The success of the As alone might not have mattered so much as, when the book ends, the Red Sox are portrayed as converts to the moneyball cause and Beane acolytes J. P. Ricciardi has taken over as general manager for the Toronto Blue Jays.  While the Red Sox have certainly enjoyed great success in the last fifteen years, they haven't done it by eschewing superstars and lowering the budget but rather by using sabermetrics to help them decide whom to give their huge contracts, and the Blue Jays haven't made a big smash and have since fired Ricciardi.  What seemed like it was going to be a Big Deal in 2003 has, in fact, barely made a ripple in the business.

Reading with the benefit of hindsight really points out the limitations of Beane's approach, as he emphatically doesn't want Jeremy Bonderman (pitched in the World Series) or Scott Kazmir (three-time all-star and AL strikeouts leader in 2007),  giving instead a list of his dream pitchers available in the 2002 draft which includes only Joe Blanton as a recognizable name.  The overwhelming majority of the players which he believe sabermetrics had revealed to him as sure things never made it as far as Triple-A ball.  Which just goes to show that maybe the numbers guy isn't actually that much more reliable than the old-school scouts whom Lewis's book denigrates.