Decluttering At the Speed of Life by Dana K. White

Title: Decluttering at the Speed of Life

Author: Dana K. White

Pages: 220

Finished: April 23, 2018

First Sentence: Hello. My name is Dana, and I am a Decluttering Expert.

Summary: Dana K. White is a self-proclaimed slob. She's spent most of her life buried in clutter. So, when her second child was in Kindergarten, she started a blog to figure out this clutter issue. What started as a blog solely for herself grew into a system that's helped thousands of people. Decluttering at the Speed of Life is her second book to deal with decluttering and getting one's life in order when one feels completely buried in STUFF.

Thoughts: I have been following Dana's blog for about three years now. I read through her first book two years ago and worked hard to implement the strategies there. Tow years later and I've finally managed to get my daily tasks down. I learned how to most effectively do the weekly tasks to keep my house in order. I switched my laundry from being a daily thing to a designated laundry day. The difference was palpable.

So when this book came out, I tore through it. Yes, it's a bit repetitive, but guys! That's the whole point! You'd better believe it that I have the five decluttering steps memorized, and they're so simple to implement even in five minutes. And five minutes can make such a huge difference.

Read for the Nonfiction Challenge

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Title: The Moonstone

Author: Wilkie Collins

Pages: 559

Finished: April 22, 2018

First Sentence: I address these lines - written in India - to my relatives in England.

Summary: A large diamond, stolen from India in the late 18th Century, makes its way to a country estate in Yorkshire. Of course, upon waking on the morrow, everyone discovers the diamond is missing and an investigation must take place.

Thoughts: The Moonstone is widely regarded as the first detective novel written. As such, it doesn't fully follow what one would expect from a detective novel. After following along with some excellent red herrings, one gets blindsided by the truth halfway through the novel.

The strengths of The Moonstone, however, lie in its characters. With the exception of Miss Clack (a wonderful caricature of ultra religious people), most of the characters are more fully realized than one sees in a detective novel. We get narration from servants. We see ex-convicts treated well rather than with complete suspicion. The novel itself has the typical Victorian racism and sexism, but I think the women rise above it as best they can. Better than I typically see in many novels.

The book itself starts off VERY slow. I will admit, I almost returned it to the library, and the diamond wasn't yet stolen. Betteridge does tend to ramble a bit. But once the diamond turns up missing and the investigation starts, I was very compelled. It took me a week and a break book to get through the first 94 pages. It took me another week to read 495 pages.

Read for my Classics Club Spin.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Title: Wide Sargasso Sea

Author: Jean Rhys

Pages: 111

Finished: April 15, 2018

First Sentence: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. 

Summary: If you read Jane Eyre and wondered about the madwoman stuck in the attic, this is her story. This is the story of her growing up and marrying Rochester. Of her decent into madness.

Thoughts: I got a 4 on my English Literature AP test which meant I didn't have to take English 101 in college. Because I didn't have to take English 101, I missed reading this. But all my classmates raved about it. At least three girls on my dorm floor told me I HAD to read this book. I'd love it. So like a dutiful reader, I stuck it on my TBR list and then forgot it existed.

When it came time to choose a book for my 20th Century category on the Back to the Classics challenge, I figured this would be a great one, particularly as I was using Jane Eyre for my Rereading of a Favorite.

After reading it, my main thought is that I wish I'd read this when I was in college. I think I would have liked it better.

I wanted to like it. But really, I found I had a hard time keeping up with what was happening. Even after reading synopsis, I was shocked at what I had missed. I found myself rereading passages and not retaining the information. Perhaps this was just a bad month for me. I don't know.

From here on out, there will be spoilers. Read at your own risk.

I always thing reading books about madness with a 21st century perspective is very fascinating. Because what they call madness sounds like depression to me. And good lord does Antoinette have a situation ripe to succumb to depression. It's always hard to read a book where you realize things that I struggle with would have me labeled as mad.

Rochester was absolutely appalling in this novel. As much as I may not have liked him in the original novel, young Rochester was awful. He was brought up during British Imperialism. England was the best. Women were commodities. And here he was relegated to a British colony to marry a woman who wasn't even fully white like him. And let me tell you, my own husband has changed a ton in the ten years that I've known him... and he was never as bad as Rochester was. I can fully believe that Rochester was this horrific as a young, twenty-something year old man.

I confess I was confused at first that her name was Antoinette. Since we only know her as Bertha in Jane Eyre, I assumed that it was her name. To find out that, in Rhys' mind, Rochester gave her the name Bertha to torture her more was really chilling.

The book also brought to mind the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. I never got the sense that Antoinette was horribly mentally ill. But due to the lack of understanding or support for any sort of mental illness, what she had to endure just made it worse. Similar to the Yellow Wallpaper where the narrator is suffering from what is likely Postpartum Depression and is forced to do nothing and so descends to insanity. These stories are so chilling to me, and they make me so grateful that we've come so far in understanding mental illness. They also make me grateful that I have wonderful doctors who I trust.

This is a super rambling review that I'm going to end fairly abruptly. To sum up, I didn't particularly enjoy the book, but I did find it a very thought provoking piece of literature. I think that what Rhys wrote is a very plausible possibility of the before.

Read for the 20th Century novel in the Back to teh Classics Challenge.

A Blind Guide to Stinkville by Beth Vrabel

Title: A Blind Guide to Stinkville

Author: Beth Vrabel

Pages: 246

Finished: April 3, 2018

First Sentence: Even I could see that Tooter was no seeing-eye dog.

Summary: Alice has just moved to Sinkville, North Carolina. Things are not going well. Her mother suffers from depression, her dad spends all his time at work, her brother leaves her at the library every day, and Alice herself has to find her way around town where she clearly sticks out being both blind and an albino. But she decides to prove to everyone just how much she can take care of herself by entering the Sinkville success contest.

Thoughts: Much more charming than I thought it would be. Enough that I wanted to keep reading. Of course, it's your standard outcast kid finds outcast stories and ends up being the underdog who learns more than everyone else. But cute enough story. 

April Reads

A Blind Guide to Stinkville by Beth Vrabel - 2018 Bluestem
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins - Classics Spin

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - Back to the Classics

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell - Personal Challenge

Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana K. White - Nonfiction Challenge
Love, Sex, and Staying Warm by Neil Rosenthal - Nonfiction Challenge
The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman - unaffiliated
The Subtle Knife by Phillip Pullman - unaffiliated
The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman - unaffiliated

Ambitious? Of course it is. Because I apparently can't have a month of only three books. That being said, the His Dark Materials trilogy is lowest priority and the two nonfiction books are middling priority. Of the high priority books, most are sub 300, so it should definitely be possible to get those. The two nonfiction books should be fairly quick as well. I'm confident I can get through all those in April. And I imagine once I start His Dark Materials, I won't want to stop.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Title: Cloud Atlas

Author: David Mitchell

Pages: 509

Finished: March 31, 2018

First Sentence: Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.

Summary: The first time I read this, I intentionally didn't review it because I hadn't a clue how I could possibly manage it. I find myself again, unable to do so. The book is really six stories, nested inside each other like a matryoshka doll (as we are reminded of multiple times in the book.) Each follows a character who may or may not be the same character reincarnated through time. Okay, so it's a bad summary. Just read the book... or find a summery online.

Thoughts: Like the last time I read this, I still don't know how I feel about it. That being said, I had planned on my second read through to be story by story rather than page 1 to page 509. For the sake of this challenge though, I did go ahead and read it beginning to end and will save the story by story for next time.

As with the last time I read it, the first half is slow, the last half is a race to the end. I particularly like Sonmi's story, though I dislike the way it ends. I immediately went ahead and watched the movie on Netflix. It's the third time I've seen the movie and I definitely prefer some of the storylines in said movie to the ones in the book. But the book is fantastic even if I can't talk about it in any sort of way that would be useful to anyone who wanted to read it.

Read for my own personal challenge.