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348. The Sentence is Death

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Anthony Horowitz

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime

384 pages, published June 4, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Sentence is Death is the second in Anthony Horowitz’s bestselling series starring Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne and himself.  “You shouldn’t be here. It’s too late . . . “

were the last recorded words of successful celebrity-divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, found in his house, bludgeoned to death a £3,000 bottle of wine.  Painted on the wall by the body were three digits.  Enter PI Hawthorne and Anthony Horowitz as they follow a series of bizarre leads to track down the killer.

Quotes 

“I’ve met police dogs with more intelligence than those two. You could tell them everything we’ve done, down to the last word, and they’d still end up running around in a circle, sniffing each other’s arses.” 

My Take

I had a hard time following all of the twists and turns of this mystery.  Part of the problem was that I listened to the audio version, so I couldn’t re-read key passages that contained important clues.  Not quite as good as Magpie Murders which is my favorite mystery of the last ten years, but still a good read.

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345. The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stuart Taylor, KC Johnson

Genre:  Non Fiction, Public Policy, Law

384 pages, published May 22, 2018

Reading Format:  e-Book on Hoopla

Summary

The Campus Rape Frenzy is an investigative look into changes in the universities adjudicated sexual assault cases during the Obama/Biden years and the complicity of the media in falsely portraying campuses as hotbeds of violent crime against women.  Taylor and Johnson painstakingly debunk these claims and show how federal bureaucrats forced colleges and universities to essentially presume the guilt of accused students. The result has been a widespread disregard of such bedrock American principles as the presumption of innocence and due process.

Quotes 

 

 

My Take

Reading this book made me very angry.  As an attorney, I have always placed a huge value on the importance of due process to the functioning of our country.  The fact that numerous young men are being expelled from college and having their lives ruined as the result of consensual sexual encounters and are not given the opportunity to confront their accusers or adequately defend themselves is a travesty of justice.  A good companion book is Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, also by Stuart Taylor.

 

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344. Then She Was Gone

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Lisa Jewel

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

359 pages, published April 17, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Then She Was Gone tells the story of Laurel whose 15 year old daughter Ellie disappears.  Ten years later, Laurel is a divorced woman in her early 50’s who starts dating a charming stranger named Floyd whose 9 year old daughter Poppy is a precocious, pretty and reminiscent of Ellie.  Things then take a dark and unexpected turn.

Quotes 

“When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”

 

“I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.”

 

“Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five years old?”

 

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

 

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

 

“That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.”

 

“People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t.”

 

“She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself among the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say good-bye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.” 

My Take

Then She Was Gone was a quick, captivating read.  Author Lisa Jewell does a particularly good job with the main character Laurel and her struggles to keep living after her 15 year old daughter disappears.  There are also several twists that kept me turning the pages of this book.

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337. Still Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Jojo Moyes

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

469 pages, published October 23, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Still Me is the third installment in the story of Louisa Clark.  Having recovered from the devasting loss of Will Traynor (chronicled in Me Before You) and still in thrall to her new romance with paramedic Sam Fielding (chronicled in After You), Louisa accepts a job to serve as a companion to Agnes, the much younger, new wife of uber wealthy New Yorker Leonard Gopnik.  Louisa tries to have it all, an adventure in New York while holding onto her transatlantic relationship with Sam whom she left behind in Britain.  When she meets Joshua Ryan, a man who reminds her of first love Will Traynor, Louisa must make decisions that will impact the rest of her life.

Quotes 

“I thought about how you’re shaped so much by the people who surround you, and how careful you have to be in choosing them for this exact reason, and then I thought, despite all that, in the end maybe you have to lose them all in order to truly find yourself.”

 

“Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy. But you can’t buy books if you barely got enough to make rent. So that library is a vital resource! You shut a library, Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.”

 

“All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.”

 

“You always have one foot in two places. You can never be truly happy because, from the moment you leave, you are two selves, and wherever you are one half of you is always calling to the other.”

 

“If someone likes you, they will stay with you; if they don’t like you enough to stay with you, they aren’t worth being with anyway.”

 

“you can hang on to your hurt out of some misplaced sense of pride, or you can just let go and relish whatever precious time you have.”

 

“You had to seize the day. You had to embrace opportunities as they came. You had to be the kind of person who said yes.” 

My Take

I’m big fan of Jojo Moyes, especially her books featuring the down to earth, very likeable, irreverent Louisa Clark.  While not quite as good as the first two in the series (Me Before You and After You), I still really enjoyed this fun, escapist read.  Perfect for the beach.

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335. The Immortalists

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Chloe Benjamin

Genre:  Fiction

346 pages, published January 9, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Immortalists opens in 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side.  The four adolescent Gold children seek out a mystical woman to hear their fortunes.  When she tells each of them the date when they will die, her prophecy irrevocably defines and alters their lives.   Youngest child Simon, who has the soonest death date in his 20’s and who is coming to terms with his homosexuality, escapes to San Francisco.  Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy.  Eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11.  Bookish Varya becomes a noted longevity researcher.

Quotes 

“She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child.”

 

“Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence–fall in love, have children, buy a house–in the face of all evidence there’s no such thing?”

 

“When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility. The point is not to negate reality, but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality’s peculiarities and contradictions. The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add.”

 

“In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right, and the next few years are his last? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.”

 

“But Varya disagreed. She knew that stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. She had been an agnostic since graduate school, but if there was one tenant of Judaism with which she agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations.”

 

“Character is fate—that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror.”

 

“In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.” 

My Take

While I found the main premise of The Immortalists to be fascinating, i.e. how would you act if you knew the date of your death, I felt like the book could have done a bit more with it.  Still, it was well written and with compelling enough characters to keep me interested throughout.

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334. Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Arthur C. Brooks

Genre:  Non Fiction, Politics, Cultural

256 pages, published March 12, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Love Your Enemies, author, economist and former president of free market think tank The American Enterprise Institute, diagnoses a problem we all familiar with, namely the polarization of our country into “us versus them.”  His solution is bring Americans back together around principles of respect, kindness, and dignity.  Brooks advocates adopting a culture of warm-heartedness toward our political foes coupled with a vigorous, but respectful, competition of ideas.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I, along with many other Americans, am sick of the partisan rancor and divisiveness that has engulfed our country for the past 20 years.  I have a personal rule never to post anything political on Facebook as there is nothing to be gained by doing so.  I’m not going to convince anyone to abandon their position and will most likely only alienate them from me.  In fact, I adopted a rule that family gatherings which I host are “politics free zones.” This has made for a much more harmonious and loving co-existence.  I’ve also taught my children (now young adults) that ad hominen attacks are for the weak minded and should be avoided like the plague and that they should strive to disagree without being disagreeable.  As such, the premise of Love Your Enemies really appealed to me.   Brooks offers some interesting and practical ideas to improve our civil discourse.  Our country would benefit if more people read his book and adopted its principals.

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333. Asymmetry

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:    Frank and Lisanne

Author:   Lisa Halliday

Genre:  Fiction

277 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Told in three distinct sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations:  inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer.   The second section, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. The final section is an NPR interview with Ezra Blazer.

Quotes 

“I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom.”

 

“But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes—she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view—but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.”

“Some of us wage wars. Others write books. The most delusional ones write books. We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don’t actually exist. And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess—this necessary folly—that sparks and sustains love.”

 

“for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.”

 

“We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high. By its precipitousness, but also by the humiliation you feel for having failed to see the plummet coming. . . . Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don’t earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don’t have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works? Is it too late to think about it now? . . .”

 

“This is because my mind is always turning over this question of how I’m going to feel later, based on what I’m doing now. Later in the day. Later in the week. Later in a life starting to look like a series of activities designed to make me feel good later, but not now. Knowing I’ll feel good later makes me feel good enough now.”

 

“the more time you spend writing things down the less time you spend doing things you don’t want to forget.”

 

“As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again.”

 

“The older you get,” he explained, “the more you have to do before you can go to bed. I’m up to a hundred things.”

 

“the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create—to channel all her own energies into the making of something beautiful and unique to herself—but it also made her want to love. To submit to the loving of someone so deeply and well that there could be no question as to whether she were squandering her life, for what could be nobler than dedicating it to the happiness and fulfillment of another?” 

My Take

I wasn’t sure what to make of Asymmetry.  While she is a gifted writer, Halliday has a unique style that takes a little getting used to.  Nevertheless, I still captivated by parts of Asymmetry, especially the first part of the book which chronicles the relationship between a talented, but somewhat aimless young woman and a much older and much more accomplished man.  The second part, which focuses on an Iraqi American detained at Heathrow Airport was much less interesting.  While Asymmetry was not one of my favorites of the year, I would read more from this author.

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330. The Library Book

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Susan Orlean

Genre:  Non Fiction, History

336 pages, published October 16, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library experienced a devastating fire.  It reached 2000 degrees, burned for more than seven hours, destroyed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more.  A thorough investigation failed to solve the mystery of whether someone purposefully set fire to the library.   Author Susan Orlean set out to answer that question and also incorporates her love of books and reading, as well as a history of the Los Angeles Library, into this book.

Quotes 

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

 

“In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”

 

“Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”

 

“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”

 

“Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.”

 

“It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries — and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up–not just stopped but saved.”

 

“books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.”

 

“A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive in a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang from the printing press — a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, …”

 

“I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?”

 

“People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren’t. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.”

 

“There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does—I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.”

 

“The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage — the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come.”

 

“librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.”

 

“Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”

 

“The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”

 

“Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”

 

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.” 

My Take

As a dedicated and appreciative patron of my local library (the remarkable Boulder Public Library), I am already a big library fan and was interested to read this book, a love letter by author Susan Orlean to books and libraries.  Her beautiful prose and well researched passages made me appreciate libraries even more.   If she had focused on that, I think the book would have been better.  It gets off track when she reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the prime suspect in setting fire to the Los Angeles Public Library.  Despite this, The Library Book is still an interesting read and I recommend it.

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329. The Great Alone

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Kristin Hannah

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

435 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Great Alone takes place in 1974 Alaska when 13 year old Leni Albright moves there with her father, Ernt, an impulsive and unstable former Vietnam POW, and her mother Cora, whose alternating deferral to and taunting of Ernt causes even more trouble for this already troubled family.  The Albrights move to Alaska for yet another “fresh start” and attempt to make a go of it with little in the way of resources or knowledge necessary to survive.  When Ernt’s mental state deteriorates and her family begins to fracture, Leni must make difficult decisions in order to survive.

Quotes 

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”

 

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”

 

“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

 

“Everyone up here had two stories : the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any Life that could be imagined could be lived up here.”

 

“A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”

 

“How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I …. forget ?

Mama sighed.

Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe , a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”

 

“You have a child, so you know. You are my heart, baby girl. You are everything I did right. And I want you to know I would do it all again, every wonderful terrible second of it. I would do years and years of it again for one minute with you.”

 

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”

 

“They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.”

 

“Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst?”

 

“Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?”

 

“It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.” 

My Take

As a big fan of Kristin Hannah, having previously really enjoyed Winter Garden and The Nightingale, I was looking forward to reading The Great Alone.  I liked it, but not nearly as much as her previous books which were more gripping page turners.  The characters and the plot in The Great Alone were not quite as compelling as Hannah’s previous efforts.  Still a good, just not great, read.

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328. Outer Order, Inner Calm: declutter & organize to make more room for happiness

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Gretchen Rubin

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement

208 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Outer Order, Inner Calm is Gretchen Rubin’s take on the idea that maintaining order in your surroundings is an important contributor to your overall happiness.  Rubin argues that getting control of the stuff of life makes us feel more in control of our lives generally.  By getting rid of things we don’t use, don’t need, or don’t love, as well as things that don’t work, don’t fit, or don’t suit, we free our mind (and our shelves) for what we truly value.  The book is organized around helpful ideas and suggestions for achieving order and organization.

Quotes 

“Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started.”

 

“What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.”

 

“Outer order isn’t a matter of having less or having more; it’s a matter of wanting what we have.”

 

“Getting in control of our possessions makes us feel more in control of our fates. If this is an illusion, it’s a helpful illusion–and it’s a more pleasant way to live.”

 

“When deciding what to buy, remember that some things are easy to buy—but then we have to use them. If they’re not used, they don’t enhance our lives; they just contribute to guilt and clutter.”

 

“One of the biggest wastes of time is doing something well that didn’t need to be done at all.”

 

“Rather than striving for a particular level of possessions—minimal or otherwise—it’s helpful to think about getting rid of what’s superfluous. Even people who prefer to own many possessions enjoy their surroundings more when they’ve purged everything that’s not needed, used, or loved.”

 

“Actually spending ten minutes clearing off one shelf is better than fantasizing about spending a weekend cleaning out the basement.”

 

“It’s easier to keep up than to catch up…”

 

“Just because we’re busy doesn’t mean we’re being productive. Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.”

 

“Having less often leads us to use our things more often and with more enjoyment, because we’re not fighting our way through a welter of unwanted stuff.” 

My Take

As my friends well know, I am a huge fan of Gretchen Rubin (Better than Before, The Four Tendencies, The Happiness Project) and consider her as my personal happiness guru.  I have internalized her many of her numerous pearls of wisdom on happiness and truly believe that I am leading a happier life as a result.  Perhaps because I am such a Rubin devotee, I found that most of the ideas presented in Outer Order, Inner Calm are ones that I have seen before.  However, it was still useful to have them collected together in one place and I think Rubin is spot on when advocates for getting rid of the clutter and organizing your physical surroundings.  I AM much happier when I live this way and I love the little jolt of happiness that I get every time I open a drawer or closet that I have recently cleaned out.

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