Books about the senses, monsters, and tidying
Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World by Gretchen Rubin
I always enjoy Rubin's no-nonsense writing about enhancing our lives through our everyday decisions, and this book was no exception: it's a fun narrative focusing on the idea of how we can find happiness in the senses we have. Each section of the book is dedicated to a different sense, talking about her year-long experiment to try to engage each of her five senses in a more meaningful way.
It was fun to read, although I found myself itching to learn more about how the senses actually work (I'm fascinated by things like optical illusions, which she touched on briefly). The book was good encouragement for me to focus more on my "background" senses— smell, sound, and taste— and to generally live more in the present moment. It's a fun and light read.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (as experienced through the Frankenstein Weekly substack) (The version I read was the 1818 version, which is more or less Mary Shelley's original; the 1831 version was apparently edited by Percy Shelley.)
I read this when I was a teenager (maybe 16 or 17?) and remembered very little except for absolutely loathing Victor Frankenstein. Predictably, I got a lot more out of the novel this time— which means that the ending (which was way darker than I remembered) hit really hard. It's got a fascinating structure to it, beginning not with a mad scientist in a lab but a captain on a ship in the Arctic, his mind full of ambition and his heart full of loneliness, stumbling upon the most emaciated, drowned-cat of a man you can imagine (Victor), who tells his tale.
It's easy to see why this was a groundbreaking, genre-inventing novel, even though to my knowledge there has never been a faithful adaptation of it. If you've never read it before and consider tragedy to be cathartic, it's definitely worth the read!
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo
This is a wildly popular book for a reason; it's entertaining and straightforward, presenting her tidying method in a way that sounds easy in theory, even though it's difficult in practice. I'm in the middle of a decluttering/tidying phase so it was good to reread this and consider the criteria of every object in the house "sparking joy."
Previously on What I've Been Reading:
All What I've Been Reading posts
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