The last time I was at Smith College, I had breakfast with my very first creative writing professor, and we got to talking about the death of her father and my mother. One thing led to another, and she told me that I ought to read HOW WE DIE by Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland. Now if you’ve been following this blog, you know that I usually don’t read non-fiction unless the writer is an editor mate or the book is helping me figure out how to do something. HOW WE DIE is literally a book about how we die, so this is the first time that I’d read something in a very long time — maybe since college — that didn’t teach me so much as learn me. Here are my thoughts:

What’s It About: How we die.

What Makes It Different: It’s interesting, b/c we see death on television and read about it in books all the time. But I think there’s probably very few of us that understand what happens in both medical and physical terms when we die.

What I Loved: Guys, real death is really, really, really oh-so fascinating. Much to my poor MIL’s horror, I could not stop talking about this book as I read it. As a writer, it made me much less blase about death. As a mortal, it made me think about how I would want my own death to go. And as a mother, it made me want to make a living will, so that my own death wouldn’t be an unnecessary burden to others. It’s hard to explain why I liked this book so much, but what I think it comes down to is understanding. By understanding death, I now don’t feel quite so scared of it.

What I Didn’t Like: Dr. Nuland talks a lot about a somewhat poisonous hospital culture and how 85% of us will probably die in one. But he doesn’t talk much about how to avoid that fate. I guess that’s another book.

Dying Lessons Learned

Plan your life out before the age of 65. CH and I often talk about what we’re going to do “after we retire.” But the truth is that it’s probably better to go on the around the world cruise sooner than later — like after your kids head off to college as opposed to after you retire. Unless differ from the majority of Americans and are super-fit, creakiness will set in after 65. It’s probably better to assume that you won’t be able to do as much after that. So save the trip to Las Vegas and the staycations for when you’re in your twilight years, and start planning that African safari for your 40s/50s. Basically live your life as if you won’t be able to physically do as much after you’re 65.

1 out of 10 people gets Alzheimers. That’s a huge statistic, and that’s why it’s so important to have a living will. What’s interesting about the Alzheimers chapter is that it was harrowing — but not so much for the Alzheimer’s patient himself. It’s certainly an undignified way to go, but most often the patient isn’t aware that he has the disease or even that he is suffering. It’s much, much worse for the family of the Alzheimer patient. If Alzheimer’s runs in your family, do your loved ones a favor and make a living will and also save accordingly, so that they can put you in a home if it comes to that. You think this sounds harsh, but if you had read the Alzheimer’s chapter, you, too, will start thinking about all the things you can do to prevent your loved ones the years of pain and suffering (for them, not necessarily for you) that accompanies this disease.

Sudden death is maybe the best way to go. I will say that having read all the ways one could die, it did give me some solace about my mother’s own sudden death by blood clot. At least she didn’t suffer beforehand. At least we didn’t suffer beforehand. In many ways if you have to die early, she had the best possible death. Really, I can’t think of a better early death than the one she had.

To Whom Would I Recommend This Book: This all sounds, really morbid, but I can’t stress enough that I totally get why my old professor recommended this book to me. It truly puts death in perspective, including your own. So this is one of the few books that I would recommend to any mortal living on this earth.

Click on the book cover to buy HOW WE DIE at Amazon!

featured image credit: an untrained eye

Wait a minute, is this by first book by a dude this year? I do believe it is. What’s strange though is that only other women have recommended it to me. And let’s talk about recommendations. Seemingly every other time I told someone that I was working on a book with a one day of one month for two years structure, they would ask me if I read ONE DAY by David Nicholls yet. So when I finally finished the last substantial rewrite of my second novel, I figured a read was in order. Here are my thoughts:

What It’s About: I lost track, but I believe it takes place over 20 years in the lives of Emma and Dexter, two people who connect at a university graduation party. Each chapter visits one or both of them on one day of that year.

What Makes It Different: A former actor and a screenwriter on the side, Nicholls has an innate sense of drama that lends itself to a cinematic story with fully universal truths. I didn’t have much in common with either of the main characters, but I found myself identifying with these two people more than I’ve identified with fictional characters in quite a long time. The book just resonates.

What I Loved: Everything. I liked that Nicholls really “gets” your 20s. I love that he really “gets” your 30s. I love that I didn’t always necessarily like the two main characters at the beginning, but by the end of the book I loved both characters beyond all reason, not because they were likeable, but because they were so very real. So looking forward to the movie version, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, which comes out this summer!

What I Didn’t Like: Much like Lev’s Grossman’s THE MAGICIANS, this book really takes it time. Toward the beginning that might grate a bit, but by the end, I could see the writing lesson in taking so long. You’ll find it below.

Writing Lessons Learned.

If your characters, aren’t likeable, really let us get to know them. If you have a likeable character, we don’t really have to spend a ton of time getting to know him or her. All likeable characters are pretty much likeable in the same way: they’ve got pluck and beauty. They’re smart and loyal and tend to embody all those heroic traits that we’re taught to admire as children. Unlikeable characters either have to fall into two camps: funny or relatable. In the absence of things in common, the easiest way to relate to someone is simply to understand her or him. And the easiest way to understand someone is to spend tons and tons of time with someone. Voila, your audience is relating. But if you attempt this make sure your character is truly engaging and interesting. There is nothing worse than reading a long tome with boring characters. In other words, if you’re going to attempt unlikeable protagonists, you had better have a talent for character.

Ixnay on the expositionay. A lot of important stuff happens in between the days that are detailed in each chapter. And many times as opposed to telling us what happened, Nicholl’s either has it come up in conversation or even more simply has his characters responding in some non-expositional way to what happened in-between. It’s hard to explain this device as I’m still not entirely sure how he did it, but the result was that it felt like a book without exposition. And it made me think about how to better handle exposition myself for future books.

Read the book. ONE DAY is terrifically written and terrifically engaging. Figuring out how Nicholls pulled off this feat is a writing lesson in itself. I think this might be my favorite book by a British male since Alex Garland’s THE BEACH.

To Whom Would I Recommend This Novel: Anyone Writing About Relationships, Gudrun Cram-Drach, Roya Hamadani, Reads4Pleasure, and Those Who Didn’t Go to Their 10-Year College Reunions But Are Thinking About Going to Their 2oth.

Click on the book cover to buy ONE DAY at Amazon!

I can’t remember the last time I read a novella. But ya’ll know how much I’ve loved i09’s reading suggestions so far — they were the ones that hepped to be both A HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS by N.K. Jemisin and my favorite web comic of 2010. So when they started raving about THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS by Ted Chiang (which can be read for free HERE), I had to give it a chance.

What It’s About: A laidoff zookeeper is recruited to help with the development of of a highly interactive and consumer-programmable animal and robot avatars.

What Makes It Different: You know how most future fiction says that robots will eventually take us over? This says the opposite of that. It’s kind of like Spielberg’s AI, except it’s not precious or mind-numblingly illogical.

What I Loved: It really made me think about the emotional side of technology. It also made me think about human nature, how some of us fully commit to certain devices, and how some of us (including me) jump from gadget to gadget searching for that next big thrill, without a thought for the gadgets we leave behind me. It also made me feel bad for MySpace — you’d have to read this to understand why.

Writing Lessons Learned:

Try focusing on the gadgets. So many books and movies use technology as either a cool trick or a villain that we have to vanquish. I always find it intriguing when an author or screenwriter zeroes in on one piece of technology. Think Pixar’s WALL-E or THE TRUTH MACHINE (a now hopelessly out-of-date book that hung its entire plot on the near-future development of a piece of technology that allowed people to irrefutably tell whether others were telling the truth — of course this changes the course of humanity forever).

Sci-fi verite. I love it when we get heroes doing jobs that you often don’t see featured in stories. In LIFECYCLE, instead of the usual hero battling the evil “lone” developer, we get a stripped down story, featuring real developers as the heroes. These developers work with a team — much more realistic than the corporate head that’s somehow responsible for both running the company and developing its main technology [looking at you TRON]. Unlike most futuristic sci-fi, LIFECYCLE feels like a completely real set of circumstances that could and might really happen. Call it sci-fi verite. It made me want to see more future ordinary people in future ordinary situations. And it was really quite fascinating to think about what our future technology might look like, without all the world-ending, dystopian rigamarole.

Finish your effing love story. I think all authors should think about how they use love stories. If you use a story and then don’t follow it through, you might think of it as “art,” but to the reader if feels like you’ve tricked us by asking us an engaging story question that you weren’t fully planning to answer, which leaves us dissatisfied and wondering why you asked the question in the first place if you weren’t going to satisfy us with a complete answer. This for whatever reason is a problem that plagues male writers and in my opinion the literary equivalent of trailing off right when you get to the good part.

To Whom Would I Recommend This Novella: Anyone Who Works at or Used to Work at MySpace, People Who Used to Own Digipets, Futurists, People Interested in Our Probable Immediate Future.

Click on the pic to read the novella!

Dearest,

I know, I know that I’ve yet to do a graphic novel this year. I think that must be some kind of record, and the sad thing is that I have two really cool ones waiting in the TBR wings: BAYOU Vol. 2 by Jeremy Love and GOOD EGGS by (fellow Smithie) Phoebe Potts. I’m going to get to those sooner than later, I promise. But this week, I’m going to review a book that’s like the total opposite of cool: SINK REFLECTIONS by Marla Cilley

Why I Decided to Read It: This post about my newfound obsession with cleaning should just about explain it. Basically Friend of FaN, Janice from Sew Girly mentioned that she had just started this system.

What’s It About: It’s a self-help book meant to make cleaning a quick and everyday part of your life, but it’s also a compendium of the information provided on the Fly Lady website. So if you don’t feel like spending the money or checking the book out from the library, you can get all this information for free HERE. But warning, the site is like 90s-level clogged and disorganized. I thought it was well worth the $10.20 the book cost just to have the information presented in an orderly fashion.

What Makes It Different: You know that saying, “Cleaning is next to godliness” — well, this woman really, really believes that. Also, it’s based on the theory that a clean house begins with a “shiny sink.”

What I Loved: I’m only six days into about 31 days of the getting-started “Baby Steps,” but it seems to be working. Not only is my house slowly but surely getting generally cleaner, but it doesn’t feel like I’m killing myself to get it that way. Unlike a lot of other books that I ordered from the library, this one was written by one woman, who has a family and husband. Therefore, unlike say, Real Simple’s CLEANING tome (which felt like it was written by a crew of people who think women have hours and hours to clean), SINK REFLECTIONS makes practical sense. And it feels like my house will indeed be unexpected-visitor ready in no time.

What I Didn’t Like: If you’re not religious, you might find the deeply spiritual language that Cilley uses throughout the book a little much. Actually even if you are religious, you might still find it a bit heavy-handed. Also, it skates the line of being anti-feminist. But even so, I found that like her tips, her instructions made a kind of practical sense. She advises against “whining” that your husband and your kids don’t help out with the housework and just doing it yourself. But then she goes on to point out that leading by example is the best method and that your loved ones will probably fall in line if you just work the system. Being a feminist, I married a fellow feminist, so CH and I don’t have housework-split issues. But even I was surprised by how quickly both he and my 20-month-daughter started pitching in within 24 hours of me quietly switching to the Fly Lady system. Wow.

Cleaning Lessons Learned:

Rinse off dirty dishes and put them directly into the dishwasher. This is so obvious, that I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it myself. But with everyone simply rinsing off their dishes and putting them directly into the dishwasher all day, we pretty much have no dishes at the end of the night. We just rinse off our dinner dishes after we eat and run the washer.

Set out your clothes the night before and shower first thing in the morning, put on non house-slipper shoes, and keep them on throughout the day. Now this is the piece of advice that has yielded the most surprising results so far. I usually squeeze in a shower somewhere between PRICE IS RIGHT, which goes off at 11am and DAYS  OF OUR LIVES, which comes on at 1pm. But this week, I’ve been setting out the clothes that I plan to wear the next morning down to my shoes. And to my surprise, that’s made me way more productive. It doesn’t take as much time or energy to get ready and I find myself starting my day earlier. I’ve also been following through with my gym plans a lot more, because if I get up and my gym clothes are waiting for me outside the bathroom door, then that’s what I’m going to wear, and I guess I don’t really have any excuse not to go to the gym. Nice!

15-Minute Cleaning Projects: Everyday I get an email with a new fifteen-minute cleaning project for the next day. This means you set your timer for 15 minutes, and then go at the day’s project for fifteen minutes and fifteen minutes only. This is really freaking awesome. On Monday, I washed my counters. On Tuesday, I decluttered the kitchen. On Wednesday, I wiped down all of the kitchen appliances. Today I’m going to clean the kitchen faucet with a tooth brush. With only fifteen minutes at stake, it feels more like a game than cleaning really. But the kitchen looks great!

To Whom Would I Recommend This Book: Surprisingly enough — Men. It’s really easy, and I actually think that they could use this information more than women. But other than that Stay-At-Home-Moms, Single Moms and Working Moms — okay, really just moms in general.

Click on the cover to buy the book at Amazon!

Sadly, this is going to be a purty short review, since I don’t want to give away any spoilers. But if you’ve already read the book, meet me in the comments section. We’ll talk more about MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins there.

Standing in the series: This is Book 3 of the HUNGER GAME trilogy. I reviewed the first book HERE and the second book HERE.

Better Than the First Two? Good golly, yes. Seriously J.K. Rowling could learn a thing or two here about how to wrap up a series without going overlong. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my few quibbles with the second book were so thoroughly resolved, that I felt silly for voicing them in the first place. Collins really puts her love triangle in perspective to what’s happening, and I felt that by the end of the book I understood Katniss even better than she understood herself. Also, if you’re listening to the audiobook, Collin’s author note is worth the extra few minutes. Her inspirational source material for the story made me both gasp and nod my head, because of course that was the inspiration. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

Writing Lessons Learned

Three books is sometimes better than seven. As a huge fan of Stephen King’s multi-volume DARK TOWER series, I think there might be something to be said for keeping a series limited to three books as opposed to seven — especially when action is involved. I felt fully present for MOCKINGJAY with none of the exhaustion that comes from having spent too long with a story. Also three is a charming number writing-wise. It feels just right, like the author was going somewhere from the start as opposed to trying to find or milk the story over the course of several books. Stephen King is good at taking readers along on his journey to find the story — most other authors are not. I say stick to three books for any given story.

Have a big piece of irony. I think that Collin’s book, as opposed to the HARRY POTTER series, will eventually be taught in schools. I think this because her writing is clean and neat and inspires great discussion questions. I also think this because there is a hugely ironic moment that is pulled off so well, I can see students discussing it in essay questions for years to come. It also reminded me that sometime the most interesting answer to a main story question is “No.”

What Should I Read Next? I, like most other HUNGER GAMES enthusiasts, got very caught up in the series and ended up reading all three books back to back. The only problem with doing something like this is that you feel terrible when it’s done, forlorn, like you’ve lost a best friend. It’s very much like a break up. And much like a break-up, perhaps the best course of action is to have a quick and dirty fling with some other  random book that is nothing like the one you just read — in my case a paranormal romance novel . Then after this palate cleanser of sorts, you can go in search of another deep and meaningful book. But I’d be interested to see what other people chose to read after finishing the HUNGER GAMES series. Let me know in the comments.

Click onthe pic to purchase at Amazon.