2 Books for Cluttered Minds

Dear readers,

I moved apartments recently, a task that made me sorely wish I had added even the breeziest treatise on D.I.Y. organizing to my reading list. How had the “life-changing magic” of decluttering so thoroughly passed me by?

Perhaps one of those neat, cheerful manifestoes from Scandinavia or Japan could have taught me something about writing more tidily, too. In that arena, alas, as in home decor, minimalism is generally not my bag. Give me a lily and I will gild it; sing me a song of semicolons and fat, flamboyant sentences that wrap around corners like overgrown houseplants. Let my windy paragraphs, like my kitchen-drawer hoard of expired Covid tests and obsolete technologies (hello again, sweet BlackBerry), run free!

In the cold light of a moving truck I eventually found some fortitude, consigning piles of personal flotsam and unread periodicals to the curb. Still, all actual houseplants survived the purge, and so did the works of two authors whose prose style evokes its own whiff of Swedish Death Cleaning: direct, purposeful, shorn of sentiment and curlicues. I like to think they both have gorgeous living rooms.

—Leah

“A Woman’s Story,” by Annie Ernaux

Nonfiction, 1988