Books and Literature

A gentle and clever comic novel; a poetic and tender essay on addiction.Édouard Manet/Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial CollectionDear readers,Anyone who is bad at meditating will be familiar with the tension that obtains when you try to force serenity. Nothing could be more aggravating than being told to relax — especially when you’re issuing the order yourself.In lieu of attempting to clear my head through more direct means, I’ve been gravitating toward contemplative novels and poetry this spring. Two of them below, for your consideration.—Molly“Judgement Day,” by Penelope LivelyFiction, 1980First, the place. Laddenham is a country village in England The time is 1980-ish. Light industry is booming and new houses are going up to capture prosperous overspill from London.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

A spare elegy; a weird journey.Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear 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 ErnauxNonfiction, 1988We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More