The idea that reading may confer healing benefits is not new, but continues to intrigue readers and researchers.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to reading about how to put up the tent, or tidy our piles of household stuff. When we talk about books that might offer a balm for the soul, we mean fiction, poetry and narrative non-fiction (including memoir).
The idea of emotional catharsis through reading is intuitively appealing. But does it work that way? Or do we read for interest, pleasure, escapism – or love of words?
Twice during a recent interview, he artfully, playfully, steadfastly dodged requests at providing a quick pitch for the novel. “I think of my writing as interrogative,” Harding, 55, said. “You just go in there, and you just listen and look and describe. The mode can never be explanatory. There’s no thesis. There’s no argument. It’s purely descriptive, just always asking, ‘What is it like, what is it like, what is it like?’”
Part of the fun of dancing on stairs is giving up control: Are you riding the stairs or are they riding you? No matter how harrowing it feels, part of you has to relax to find balance, to reap the benefits.
In California, if you’re going to spend over $100 for two on a night out — maybe more like $200 these days — the experience must meet certain expectations. The produce should be fresh and seasonal, sourced from your city’s flagship farmers market. The flavors of a dish should come from light sauces, unexpected herbs or chiles, the smoke of a grill, and most importantly, the key ingredients themselves. The presentation should be unfussy and stylish, matching the rumpled linens, rare sneakers, and vintage jeans you and everyone else in the restaurant are wearing for the occasion.
It feels wrong to call this cooking all the same type of cuisine. The restaurants that practice it could call themselves Italian, French, Mediterranean, Turkish, Mexican, Vietnamese, or American. But there’s a term that encompasses this approach, even if it’s old-fashioned and outmoded, weighed down by goat cheese and sundried tomatoes and Napa cabs: California cuisine.
You know the kind of mystery where the explanation comes pouring out at the end in great detail and you, the reader, gnash your teeth because there was no way on Earth you could have solved it because you didn't have all of the facts? Well, Benjamin Stevenson's narrator, Ernest Cunningham, promises he will not do that to you. And he doesn't.
As he tells the story of a string of deaths that take place before and during a family trip to a ski resort, he lays out all the clues. He highlights clues. He reminds us of previous clues. And yet .... good luck solving this. It's incredibly convoluted.
The mystery of where Leigh will end up is so enticing that it’s a shame when the last substantive section of the book returns us to Earth and family life, with a thud of crammed backstory and a few future shocks. But an uncertain finish doesn’t damage what went before. Indeed, it’s an apt approach for a book that reminds us to value above all the journey we are on, and the world we live in.
“The Chinese Groove” by Kathryn Ma is a funny and insightful novel, a satisfying immigration story told by an 18-year-old narrator, Zheng Xue Li, from Yunnan province, China. We can’t help but love the determined and steadfast young man even as we laugh and wince and worry about him.
Russell Banks’ ambitious new novel, “The Magic Kingdom,” uses an early 1900s Florida Shaker community to present profound, if often implausible, arguments about the ardor of adolescent innocence, the transience of purported paradise and the path to the American Dream.
Simon Garfield’s All the Knowledge in the World is a valentine to the monumental significance of encyclopaedias, reminding us how, until the arrival of computers, “they did more than any other single thing to shape our understanding of the world”.