Two JAK eBook reprints

JAK has been steadily reissuing her older contemporaries as eBooks. Generally speaking, these are unchanged (altho there have been unfortunate exceptions). I noticed that _Private Eye_ and _Silver Linings_ are out in eBook format.

_Silver Linings_ starts out as an island adventure with some backstory. There is a classic she discovers dead body of older man she was supposed to meet followed by an encounter with him, then a run through the jungle to a cave and some of the backstory starts to come out. On the second island, they meet a hooker with a heart of gold and there's a pretty classic misunderstanding as well as a bar fight. Then they are back to Seattle -- her home base where she has her business, an art gallery. She has crazy artist family. He has a business in the islands. Where will they live? Along the way, he is trying to figure out who is responsible for the dead body, and problems from his past resurface. The backstory continues to get ever more convoluted with her as the rescuer of multiple damaged men from her sister's past (he is an ex fiancee of the sister as well). So, all kinds of fun here, a pretty long book. Hooker with a heart of gold winds up playing an ongoing role, and retires to design clothing (a little Seattle seamstress reference, there, I think!).

_Private Eye_ takes place on a Not Tropical Island. She's running a b&b with some permanent residents who were friends of the great aunt who left the place to her. There are Problems and various theories as to the source of the problems. She "hires" him not for money but a month's free stay at the currently closed inn. He takes the opportunity to recover from a sprained ankle and other damages from a case, and to work on a novel as he contemplates a career transition. The permanent residents include "the Colonel" who is also an Inventor, the shabby chic woman who owns some (worthless) stock, and the former moll of a gangster long imprisoned -- clearly, JAK was having fun with some tropes here. All the various theories are neatly tied up. This one is a lot shorter and very, very funny.

I think I owned these both in paper at various points, but I'm very happy to see them out in eBook form, if only because it is so very much fun to see "contemporaries" become accidental "historicals".

Psychic Debris, Crowded Closets by Regina Lark

Subtitled: The Relationship Between the Stuff in Your Head and What's Under Your Bed

I skimmed it. I really did skim the whole thing tho -- I didn't skip large chunks of it.

I was primarily looking for sourcing on a statistic attributed to the author (average american household has 300K things in it). I can't find it in this book. In addition to skimming, I tried a bunch of searches. If you manage to find it in the book, please tell me where you found it!

I got the book for free through kindleunlimited.

Lark is lesbian, so if you find it more amenable to read self-help books by someone you can relate to on an identity / orientation level, that information might be handy to you. The point came up in the context of her describing major decluttering episodes in her life (one was in advance of coming to terms with her identity, the other was in advance of the end of a relationship).

Lark likes Hill (_Think and Grow Rich_) and Louise Hay. I am not such a fan of these. So again, this might be useful information; if you these kinds of approaches work well for you, perhaps this book will as well.

Lark spends a lot of time at the beginning and throughout the book discussing negative self-talk and its interaction with our stuff.

As a source of "tips and tricks" for decluttering, there is little here that I found new. Of course, every decluttering book has _some_ technical information and this one was more or less adequate along those lines, and above average in terms of discussing converting decluttering into something that has subtasks and is on the calendar, not taking too much on at a time, cleaning up after each bout, etc. Lark's strengths lie in discussing what are probably depression and anxiety that maintain themselves through negative self-talk and which manifest in our physical world as clutter.

Since I spent no money and not much time on the book, I don't feel at all bad about having skimmed it. And I can definitely imagine that this book has an audience; I hope it finds it.