Today April arrives, and April, as you know, is the cruellest month, or, if you are weary of that description, feel free to use the spin I’ve put on it—April, what a bitch.

Why does April have such a bad reputation? Eliot might have loathed April because its buds and shoots presented a challenge he couldn’t rise to, but I loathe it because it presents challenges I know I can meet. I just have to be willing to suffer. It takes grit to transform oneself from a hairy, alcoholic, cupcake-pajama-wearing hermit into eco-Barbie. Yes, I speak of the deaccessioning of winter padding, the cleaning out of closets, the letting-go of wintertime whines and wintertime wastefulness. I speak of spring cleaning in a grand sense, as a time to learn anew how best to live.

For guidance, I turned to

Azby Brown, an architect and artist, is the director of the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo. His latest book proceeds from the premise that the West today—land of gross unsustainability—is similar to Japan in the late Edo period (1603-1868). At that time, he writes, Japan “faced the prospect of collapse from environmental degradation,” but it

overcame many of the identical problems that confront us today—issues of energy, water, materials, food, and population—and … forged from these formidable challenges a society that was conservation-minded, waste-free, well-housed and well-fed, and economically robust, and that has bequeathed to us admirable and enduring standards of design and beauty.

Since this is what I would like to be—an admirable and enduring standard of design and beauty—I read Brown's book with relish, and at the end of it felt that my mindset had shifted, from feeling that I never have enough, to feeling that I undoubtedly have too much. Though most of the recommendations in Brown’s book are of techniques for sustainable agriculture, building design, and waste and water management (all illustrated with his charming ink drawings) that might appeal most to farmers, architects, and city-planners, many items apply to the individual. For instance, “The water that is used for cooking rice, noodles, and vegetables and that might be dumped as waste in the West, is commonly drunk as broth.” And there is a chapter that we all can learn from, called “A Life of Restraint: The Samurai of Edo.” The samurai, in Brown’s telling, are “dignified” in house and dress. They know the power of small gestures:

Though most samurai dress modestly and unobtrusively, a few affect fashions that mark them as cultured connoisseurs of the arts, or “tsu.” They are able to do this through subtle modifications of the pattern and fit of their otherwise standard garments.

And this is how they eat:

a tableau that induces shame (diet so far today: chocolate croissant, four-dollar coffee, two-dollar coffee), which is one of Brown's aims in this book. “We can hope,” he writes in his conclusion, “that our ethical values will soon change so that, instead of feeling proud of megalomanic overconsumption and waste, people will simply feel embarrassed.” If I can just hold on to these feelings of shame and embarrassment for the rest of the month, I think I will have laid the groundwork for a beautiful May.

(Illustration by Azby Brown, courtesy of Kodansha International.)

One of my favorite things about being a parent is introducing my son to books I loved when I was little. He’s only two, so we haven’t climbed very far up the literary ladder, but it’s hard to stop myself from browsing (and ultimately buying) ahead, especially at used bookstores, where the hunt is half the fun. Only once so far, however, have I found a real treasure.

“The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes” was published in 1939 by Du Bose Heyward, who is most famous for “Porgy and Bess” (he wrote the novel “Porgy,” co-wrote the play of the same name with his wife, Dorothy Heyward, and wrote the libretto and some of the lyrics for Gershwin’s opera). It’s illustrated by Marjorie Flack, whom you probably know (if you know her) from “The Story About Ping,” and it is the kid-lit total package. Lyrical writing, glowing illustrations, fuel for the imagination, a sense of humor, and, of course, a message: plucky little girl bunnies who defy prejudice and believe in themselves can grow up to become fully actualized lady bunnies who raise smart, happy, kind children and do fulfilling work outside the warren.

You've done it. You've suffered through February and its special horrors—Valentine's Day, dry skin, snowstorms, the media's adoption of ridiculous made-up words to describe snowstorms, the unfairness of Canada having Kevin Martin, philosopher of ice, as the skip of its curling team—with the result that now, on the first day of March, you find yourself in a threatening mood. I'd like to tell you that the new month will provide respite from your inner turmoil, but I'm afraid not. This is the month when winter lingers past all sense, when Brutus gathers his courage, when madness descends on sports fans, when you think you'll die if you have to wear your puffy coat one second longer.

When suffering is certain, you must do what humans have always done. You must seek solace in the suffering of those who have been spectacularly martyred for public entertainment: Jesus Christ and Saint Sebastian, for instance, or, if they're not your style, Tiger Woods, the two most recent governors of New York, or, in a pinch, the hundreds of thousands of bulls who have perished across continents and centuries.

"A History of Bullfighting" is a compact, digestible paperback from Reaktion Books, in which the author, Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, takes the reader down the blood-soaked streets of Seville in the eighteenth century to the blood-soaked arenas of Latin America in the nineteenth to the blood-soaked manuscripts of Bataille and Hemingway in the twentieth. Along the way, we learn of the many inventive ways in which bulls were (and are) killed. Of note: death by banderilla of fire (a banderilla is a dart with a barbed harpoon; a banderilla of fire is a dart with a barbed harpoon onto which have been affixed firecrackers); death by tail stomp (the bull's tail is twisted then crushed beneath the matador's foot to prevent it from getting up); death by condor:

It’s the dead of fall. Gray clouds sit atop the skyscrapers. You sit atop your chair. Not even the Yeah Yeah Yeahs can keep you from wondering, What comes next? You’re worried that there might not be a heaven; you’re worried that there might be. And if there is, you think that probably means there’s a hell. And if there is a hell, will you be going there? And will there be anything nice there if you do? For instance, if you go to hell and a loved one is in hell, will it not be nice to see her?

Fear not: such questions have preoccupied many great minds over the centuries. Ovid, for instance, addressed them in book ten of the Metamorphoses, when he sent Orpheus to the underworld in search of his dead bride, Eurydice. It wasn’t a pretty place, I’m afraid, filled with “horrors” “chaos” “sad silence” and “waste.” But Orpheus made the best of it. He sang a song to the shades he encountered, and he found Eurydice, and, yes, it was very nice to see her. Too nice, in fact.

If this version of the myth doesn’t set your mind at ease, perhaps you need one with more color, more nudity, more rock and roll. You need Dino Buzzati’s 1969 graphic novel “Poem Strip,” out in a glossy new paperback edition from New York Review Books, with an English translation by the lovely Marina Harss (I know she’s lovely because she used to work here). In Milan, Orfi, the youngest son of an ancient noble family down on its luck, rocks out every night at the Polypus club. The girls go wild, but Orfi’s not interested. He only has eyes for Eura. One night, he sees Eura disappear through a strange opening in a wall; he approaches, and learns that she has been spirited away to the land of the dead. And so he sets out, guitar in hand, to retrieve her.

Buzzati sends Orfi through a spectacularly surreal landscape (Salvador Dalí and Federico Fellini gave input on a couple of the spreads) colored in mint greens, pale yellows, and salmon pinks, and populated with gorgeous, naked, writhing women, all of whom are drawn to the proportions of sixties screen sirens.

But down where “darkness, misery, and the void rise up from your soul,” such delights hold no power. There is no longing, no temptation, no arousal. Before he is permitted to meet Eura, Orfi is tasked with singing a song that will remind the dead what it felt like to be alive:

Perfectionism: is there any more unfairly spat-upon concept? Google the word, and you get a slew of self-help sites devoted to overcoming this “pathology.” Now look at the results for “Imperfection.” You’d think it was our national credo. (Top news result for today: “Clinton tells Senate Democrats that Imperfection is OK in health care bill.”) Then there are a bunch of quotes by geniuses living and dead. Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack, a crack, in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Goethe: “Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.”

Perhaps the German has a point about his old friends. But can his logic possibly apply to your child? The one that has to get into Harvard or Princeton or what was the point in having him? No, says Elizabeth Beckwith, the author of the new parenting manual/memoir “Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation.” This is her basic philosophy:

A family should be a team. A tribe. A group of people living together who, though all individuals, share a common set of values and principles. It boils down to this golden rule: “We do things a certain way, and everyone else is an asshole.”

Beckwith’s models are her own parents, who, she writes, raised four “well-educated, well-adjusted, kindhearted kids” without the use of any formal discipline. “I was generally a pretty good kid, but when I did do something bad, the only thing I remember was being filled with so much shame and guilt that any further punishment would have been child abuse.” Her parents accomplished this by giving her lots of positive reinforcement, and by constantly trashing “those people.” Just one big happy family-cult.

So how do you put the philosophy into practice? First, become fluent in the language of groupthink, and use it to invite your child to examine things critically as a member of a team: “‘Can you believe they have the nerve to call this pizza? This doesn’t even come close to __________’ (fill in the blank with the name of your favorite pizzeria).” When rules are broken, respond with a non-punishment phrase:

A sleepy book, for the start of a sleepy season. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's "The Fall of Sleep," in a translation by Charlotte Mandel, is a slender, delirious treatise on what sleep is, what we are doing when we are sleeping, what it means to tomber de sommeil:

By falling asleep, I fall inside myself: from my exhaustion, from my boredom, from my exhausted pleasure or from my exhausting pain. I fall inside my own satiety as well as my own vacuity: I myself become the abyss and the plunge, the density of deep water and the descent of the drowned body sinking backward. I fall to where I am no longer separated from the world by a demarcation that still belongs to me all though my waking state and that I myself am, just as I am my skin and all my sense organs. I pass that line of distinction, I slip entire into the innermost and outermost part of myself, erasing the division between these two putative regions.

Who is the sleeper?

I sleep and this I that sleeps can no more say it sleeps than it could say that it is dead. So it is another who sleeps in my place. But so exactly, so perfectly in this, my own place, that he occupies it wholly without overlooking or overflowing even the slightest portion.

The most gorgeous passages are those that veer toward mysticism:

Are you having a bad September? If so, you’re not alone. An informal poll of my friends and my colleagues and my mother reveals that approximately everyone is miserable this month. It has to do, someone told me, with Mercury going retrograde four times in 2009, instead of the usual three. Well! I thought. Mercury will be Mercury, we can’t just sit around here doing nothing. Let’s create a new rubric!

In fact, “Read This Book If” is inspired not only by the ceaseless misery and whining all around me, but also by a book that has been sitting quietly at the top of the book mountain on my desk for the past week and which, every time I catch a glimpse of it, fills my heart with joy. It’s by the actress and writer Heather Whaley, and it’s released today.

The cover says it all:

I took Whaley’s book to the gym with me last night, and nearly fell off the stair-climbing machine. That pie she’s holding on the cover? That would be “Sky-High Banana Cream Pie Because You Are Dating a Married Guy”: “Preheat oven to 350ºF ... Slice Bananas. Check voice mail to see if he’s called you. He hasn’t. Prepare pudding according to package directions. Check voice mail again.... Go into bathroom, or to nearest mirror, and stare at your wretched self while repeating, “Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.” Bring pie into bathroom and eat while staring at yourself in the mirror, so you can see just how disgusting you truly are.” My other favorites include:

Baby Won’t Stop Crying Nachos Supreme (“Put baby down gently, fighting urge to shake it.”)
Nobody Thinks You Are Funny Orange-Glazed Pork Chops
Twenty-Nine and Still Can’t Pay Your Rent Veggie Sandwich
¡El Chupacabra Ate All the Chickens! Chimichanga (“Dios mío! You wake in the night and hear the terrible squawking of the chickens.”)
Hardtack for Lonely Seamen on Whaling Vessels
Who’s the Daddy? Flap-jacks (“1/4 tsp. vanilla / 1/4 tsp. saliva from each possible daddy / DNA testing kit.”)

I know what you’re thinking: chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, but are the recipes legit? Yes! At least, some of them. The guacamole recipe in Foreclosure Fiesta looks quite tasty, as does the buttery gruyere concoction in Best Friend Is a Total Bitch Grilled Cheese Sandwich (though I wouldn’t attempt Drunk and Disorderly Donut Pudding or Manic-Depressive Brownies, Two Ways!). There’s something about the perversity of Whaley’s voice, too, that actually makes me want to (finally buy a pan and) use my kitchen. Regular cookbooks have the opposite effect on me.

Then again, there’s no need to use the book as anything other than a remedy for the September blues. It promises, on the flap, to “fill your bottomless well of despair with belly-clutching laughter.” For purely selfish reasons, I’d like to give a copy to everyone who plans on coming into contact with me over the next thirteen days—I’ll think of it as laying the groundwork for a wonderful October.