Working on a book about the inexplicable ending of that showdown game between Cal and Stanford, I interviewed coaches and players, fans, journalists and officials. I learned a lot about football, but more about brotherhood, regret and hope.
Yet, until this fall, I had never met Niualiku, the individual who literally loomed largest in my memory of Nov. 20, 1982. I wanted to know what he remembered of our encounter, so many seasons ago, and what The Play meant to him.
Focusing such that your mind is occupied but not excessively challenged, James says, is incredibly helpful for people with depression, anxiety, and stress because it offers what she describes as “a little holiday from yourself.” For some people, this “gentle focus” takes the form of tending to a garden or tidying a room, while for others, puzzles fill this space.
The difference between traditional gentle focus and puzzles, though, is the satisfaction of an “elegant solution” at the end, according to James. In a world filled with ever-changing norms and expectations, the clear-cut rules and codes present in puzzles make the solver feel in control—the rules of the puzzle won’t change willy-nilly, so the only question is whether you can solve it.
Lily King isn’t afraid of big emotional subjects: desire and grief, longing and love, growth and self-acceptance. But she eschews high drama for the immersive quiet of the everyday. King’s latest book, her first story collection, “Five Tuesdays in Winter,” explores some of the same territory as her beloved novel “Writers & Lovers.” Here we inhabit the worlds of authors and mothers, children and friends; we experience their lives in clear, graceful prose that swells with generous possibility. This is a book for writers and lovers, a book about storytelling itself, a book for all of us.
This book’s subtitle is exactly right, for Wells did change our world. And Tomalin’s account of his early years educates and entertains, despite the difficulty of delivering the large life and legacy of H. G. Wells in a single volume.
In the hour before dawn, I rise up
to give myself a little bit
before it all starts again.
“Rise up” is not really what I do;