Phyllis Theroux offers readers a gift by letting us peek into the journals she kept during six years of her life beginning at age 61.

The Journal Keeper excels on several levels – for the pure enjoyment of Theroux’s evocative writing, as a tribute to the art of journal writing, and as a meditation on life, love and death.

Aspiring writers would do well to study Theroux. Her gorgeous prose seduces the reader, who may feel compelled to grab a friend and read passages aloud. She describes writing as “laboring long hours to buckle words around an idea and make a sentence slide across the page like Fred Astaire across a dance floor.”

The book consists of six chapters covering the years 2000 to 2005, and includes background notes to give context to the entries.

Like most polished writers, Theroux is a voracious reader. She savors books by Thomas Merton, Harper Lee, Karen Armstrong and especially the poet Mary Oliver. Reading Mary Oliver “enables me to write a few good lines from a place I hadn’t found before. Poetry excavates, blasts, cuts through the flab.”

Theroux has a poet’s eye for detail. Sitting in a friend’s kitchen, “I was aware of how the air in her house has the thick flavor of dust, sunlight, old books, fried chicken, and furniture polish.”

We learn at the start that Theroux is divorced and lives in Virginia with her aging mother, a “high school dropout Buddhist transcendentalist” who listens to spiritual tapes, meditates and does yoga exercises. When her mother dies suddenly, Theroux experiences mixed feelings “but primarily gratitude that she had been with me for so long.”

The author worries about aging, meditates on impermanence and wonders if she is a good enough writer: “I feel at the age of 61 that I should be a sage, not a novice. It is embarrassing to be so shallow.”

But there is nothing shallow about Theroux’s writing and wisdom. Consider this nugget about humility. “It suddenly struck me that true enlightenment consists in being empty, not full, of answers, that people who are full of answers must drag them around all day like an over-packed suitcase, with no room for anything new.”

Theroux wonders if she is captive to writing and imagines “how it would be to let go of writing, to lose my grip on the chain of words that leads me through the darkness. Am I not a prisoner of words, dependent on them in a way that tethers me to my own intellect?”

When friends die, Theroux reflects deeply on life and death, finding that “a funeral is like a train station waiting room. We’re all going to board the train someday.”

Occasionally, Theroux longs “to be 30 again, surrounded by other 30-year-olds who are so bright, clever and beautiful.”

After the death of her mother, the author cherishes her life alone, while conceding that she misses the affections of a male lover. Dealing with ambiguity, she reminds herself that “one’s happiness and worth must come from within.”

And yet out of curiosity she decides to sign up with Match.com. After her initial matches do not go well, she is “faced with the truth that I am not a sex object.” But then she meets Ragan Phillips, who is “tall, bubbly and smart,” and three years older. They fall in love, then break it off, and finally get back together and marry.

“The unfamiliar, unexpected security of having a partner washes over me, changes the landscape the way flowers do,” she writes. “After being alone for most of my life, I cannot quite believe that I’m being given a companion with whom to end my days.”

Those who keep a journal may be inspired anew by this book, and those unfamiliar with the practice may want to begin. Theroux has filled at least three dozen journals over the years. She includes a couple of pages of advice at the end of The Journal Keeper. I wish she had said more.

“Your journal,” she writes, “should be a wise friend who helps you create your own enlightenment. Chose what you think has some merit or lasting value, so that when you reread your journal in years to come, it continues to nourish you.”

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

The Journal Keeper: A Memoir, by Phyllis Theroux; Atlantic Monthly Press, 279 pp., $24

The economy may still look scary, but for South Florida’s four major literary festivals, there will be no double-dip recession. Learning from last year’s challenges, each plans robust programs for the serious and casual book lover over the coming season.

Take Miami Book Fair International (Nov. 14-21), the region’s oldest and biggest literary festival, and the first one on the calendar. Last year, says Alina Interian, executive director, fair organizers found they could do away with some longstanding features, such as the Street Fair parade, and still preserve the essence of the event.

“We constantly monitor our budget to stay cost-effective,” Interian says. “Public funding continues to be limited. Corporate support has improved some, but not as much as we’d like. We’re counting on individual support, vendor and exhibitor fees and admission fees. Thank God for Miami-Dade College, which is our backbone.”

Even with money constraints, however, the book fair will still feature 300 national and international authors. And if anything, the roster (still evolving in late summer/early fall) is more impressive than ever.

“An Evening with George Bush” opens the fair, less than a week after the publication of the former president’s highly anticipated memoir, Decision Points. The fair has also snagged literary It-Boy, Jonathan Franzen, whose Freedom is the most hotly debated American novel in years.

Other prominent figures on the schedule: Patti Smith, whose rock memoir Just Kids received rave reviews earlier this year; biologist E.O. Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer-winning science writer; Dave Eggers, novelist, nonfiction writer, publisher, screenwriter, and all around 21^st-century literary renaissance man.

Interian says one item dropped last year – the international pavilion – is returning. But instead of a “village,” with several countries represented, this year’s fair will focus on just one: Mexico.

Mitchell Kaplan, one of the fair’s founders, says a number of Mexican writers and political figures will be on hand, including Carlos Fuentes – who, as a leading Latin American novelist and former ambassador to Britain and France, qualifies as both.

And after a year off, the Rock Bottom Remainders returns. For the uninitiated, that’s the garage band featuring authors like Stephen King, Dave Barry and Amy Tan.

“It’s a good one this year,” Kaplan says of the fair. “Be there or be square.”

In Key West, where the annual literary seminar will celebrate the literature of food, executive director Miles Frieden joked in early September that he was beginning to panic. After many years of early sell-outs, last year’s registrations lagged well into the fall before picking up again.

“We seem to be in the same straits this year,” Frieden says. “We’re not immune from the economy.”

Contributing to Frieden’s nerves is the decision to hold two sessions, one Jan. 6-9, and a second Jan. 13-16. As of early September, neither session was full, though the first will certainly sell out, Freiden says. (For information, see http://www.kwls.org/lit/2011/.)

“We don’t make the decision to do double sessions lightly,” Frieden says. “It’s a risk for us. But when we turn away our regulars because we’ve sold out, they beat up on me and I get bruised.”

Intimate and casual, the Key West Literary Seminar remains a bargain at $495. This year’s list of authors includes Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin, Billy Collins, Frank Bruni, Roy Blount Jr., Diana Abu-Jabr, Elizabeth Berg, Mark Kurlansky, and many others.

Freiden concedes the topic – formal title: The Hungry Muse: An Exploration of Food in Literature – is a bit lighter than usual.

“I fear some people may stay away because they think the topic is frivolous,” he explains. “This may not be the most literary thing we’ve ever done, but I say it’s the most literary food thing ever done.”

But the main reason for slow registrations, Frieden says, is the obvious one.

“I think we’ll be fine, it’s just making me nervous. But I guess a lot of people are nervous.”

Last year’s Palm Beach Poetry Festival may have been a success – the workshops sold out and the public readings were well-attended – but that doesn’t mean founding director Miles Coon isn’t making refinements.

In response to an online survey of last year’s participants, Coon is adding more craft lectures and more opportunities for featured poets to participate in educational events.

“We’ve added value and didn’t raise our tuition rates,” Coon says. “Our numbers of applications to date are almost twice what they were last year at this time.”

Held in Delray Beach from Jan 17-22, the festival’s biggest name this season is former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Award-winning spoken-word poets D. Blair and Taylor Mali are also featured readers.

The workshop faculty includes Thomas Lux, Heather McHugh, Jane Hirschfield, C.D. Wright, Dean Young, Stuart Dischell, V.J. Seshadri and Ellen Bryant Young, all of whom will also take part in public readings and panel discussions.

Registration closes Nov 2 (visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org/apply/guidelines). Full registration is $725, while auditor’s registration is $350 – an increasingly popular choice, says Coon, for beginning poets, who get to sit on lectures and workshop without having to submit their poems to scrutiny.

Big changes, too, are planned for Literary Feast, Fort Lauderdale’s major literary festival – but they are mostly of a scheduling variety.

LitLive! the day of free lectures and readings at Nova Southeastern University, will be held on Sunday instead of Saturday, and start at 12:30 p.m. instead of 10 a.m.

“We hope to target some of the younger college students who don’t get up on Saturday morning,” says Natasha Rogers, special events coordinator for the Broward County Public Library Foundation.

The Night of Literary Feasts will remain on Saturday night, where it moved last year after more than two decades as a Friday event. These scheduling changes save money on airfare – more than 20 authors fly in to participate – without diminishing the scope of the festival, Rogers says.

Literary Feast takes place March 26-27. Attendance at the Sunday lectures is free. Tickets for Night of Literary Feast are $150 each. Only two authors – Headline News anchor Jane Velez-Mitchell and Elizabeth Nunez, author of the novel Anna In Between, are confirmed.

But many more will join them over the next few months Last year’s event included such luminaries as Elizabeth Kostova, Russell Banks, Achy Obeyas and Lisa See. Check the Website – www.literaryfeastonline.org -- for developments.

Each year thousands of Tibetans attempt to flee their homeland by embarking on a perilous journey over snow-covered mountains. Some die along the way, and others are captured, jailed and tortured by Chinese soldiers.

Most often their plight receives little international attention. But the case of Kelsang Namtso, a 17-year-old nun, was different because mountain climbers witnessed Chinese soldiers fatally shooting her as she trudged through deep snow. Moreover, a cameraman captured the 2006 killing on tape.

Now Jonathan Green has meticulously reconstructed events surrounding Kelsang’s life and death. His well-written account will hook readers from the first page.

Murder in the High Himalaya successfully blends several story elements, including China’s brutal suppression of Tibet, the rising number of fame-seeking Western climbers determined to scale the world’s tallest mountain peaks, and the desperate flight of Tibetan men, women and children, first to Nepal and then to India, where they hope to meet the Dalai Lama, their beloved spiritual and temporal leader.

The Dalai Lama escaped to India nine years after the 1950 Chinese invasion of his homeland, and since then an estimated 100,000 Tibetans have followed him over the mountains. Green describes China’s campaign to wipe out Tibetan culture, including the destruction of 6,000 Buddhist monasteries and the torture and killing of dissidents, among them many monks and nuns. Possession of a picture of the Dalai Lama is a crime punishable by torture and imprisonment.

Chinese soldiers patrol the main escape routes in an effort to capture fleeing Tibetans, who pay huge sums to experienced guides who lead them through mountain passes.

Fleeing refugees suffer from frostbite, sunburn, snow blindness, blisters, hunger and thirst. Along the way they encounter corpses sticking out of the snow, a gruesome reminder that many do not reach their destination.

Green captures the incongruity of starving refugees dressed in rags fleeing past Western climbers in expensive gear getting ready to scale Mount Cho Oyu, a peak not far from Mount Everest.

The author criticizes what he calls an “age of egoism and commercialism” in mountain climbing, with its emphasis on “the individual as superman” seeking glory, book deals and speaking engagements. Green relates the heartbreaking story of a 16-year-old refugee who fell into a crevasse, where she screamed in panic. Nearby climbers had the necessary equipment to rescue her, but they “ignored her plight, and carried on up the mountain instead, leaving the girl to die.”

Seventeen-year-old Kelsang was part of a group of more than 70 Tibetans determined to escape through a 19,000-foot-high mountain pass. Some were wrapped in plastic sheets to ward off the cold, which frequently dropped well below zero. Those who could not endure the brutal conditions turned back.

Kelsang’s group was slowly pushing through the snow when Chinese soldiers opened fire with assault rifles. Kelsang plunged forward when a bullet tore into her back. Although scores of climbers were nearby, none intervened or offered to help, Green says. Moreover, most climbers agreed not to report the killing out of fear that China would bar them from future climbing on the Chinese side of the mountain.

Gradually, however, word leaked out. U.S. officials condemned the killing, which was recorded on video tape by a Romanian climber and later posted on YouTube, where it can still be viewed.

Of the more than 70 Tibetans in Kelsang’s group, 41 made it to Dharamsala, India, where they had an audience with their beloved Dalai Lama. One of the ironies, which Green could have explored in greater depth, is that about half of all refugees eventually return to Tibet, in part because life in India proves to be tougher than expected.

The book also could have included better maps, as well as a glossary of names. With so many unfamiliar Tibetan names, readers are forced to jump back and forth in the text to follow the story line.

As part of his research, Green started at border of Tibet and walked the path taken by the refugees through Nepal to India. He encountered paranoia everywhere. Many people refused to talk to him; others spoke only on condition that they not be named. Fear of offending the Chinese was rampant.

Despite the obstacles he encountered, Green has written an absorbing adventure story about a forbidding mountain range and a band of refugees who risked everything to reach the Dalai Lama, who continues to lead a campaign to publicize the plight of the Tibetan people.

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Murder in the High Himalaya: Loyalty, Tragedy, and Escape From Tibet, by Jonathan Green; 272 pp.;

PublicAffairs; $26.95

Why is it that genre writers, just when they are about to step onto a wider stage of literature, tend to lose heart – or nerve?

I first noticed this in 1998 when Stephen King, after almost a decade of increasing critical acceptance, retreated to the comforts of Bag of Bones, an overlong, overstuffed supernatural thriller of the kind that made him famous earlier in his career. Perhaps spooked by reviews that took him seriously (from the likes of The New York Times), King abandoned, if only temporarily, the more rigorous pleasures of novels such as Misery, Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne.

Now China Miéville seems to be following a similar pattern. Last year Miéville, already a popular figure in the neo-horror genre sometimes known as “weird fiction,” gained new readers and critical acclaim with the spare but deeply inventive fantasy-detective novel, The City and the City. Some critics named it to their year’s best list and at least one (uh, that would be me) said it was the top novel of the year.

Miéville’s follow-up to that breakthrough, alas, is an exercise in apocalyptic excess titled Kraken (yes, “kraken” as in Liam Neeson thundering, “Release the Kraken!” in Clash of the Titans). It’s a huge disappointment, not only because it signals an aesthetic retreat from the high-wire performance of The City and the City, but also because it’s only so-so, even on its own weird fictional terms.

The ponderously convoluted plot starts when a kraken – a rare giant squid – disappears from the Natural History Museum in London, along with its tank of formalin. This is an impossible crime, of course, requiring dozens of men to carry out, and besides, the huge tank would not fit through any of the available doorways.

Genre geeks (or at least those unfamiliar with the kitchen-sink aesthetic of weird fiction) will think they know what kind of story this is when the police send the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime (FARC) Unit to investigate. We’re well familiar with occult cops via The X-Files, Torchwood, Fringe, etc., and we’re primed to admire their interaction and heroics.

Miéville has bigger, er, calamari, to fry, and the FARC squad is soon revealed as unequal to the present apocalyptic crisis. Billy Harrow, the squid’s young curator, doesn’t trust them, casting his lot instead with a cult of kraken worshippers who, to his discomfort, regard him as a prophet. The kraken cult proves impotent as well, and soon Billy is careening around London in the company of Dane, a stupendously competent kraken-cult apostate, trying to recover the missing squid and thereby avert a Fiery End of Everything.

While I’m all for subverting genre expectation – surprise is the soul of great horror, not to mention comedy – Miéville packs so many ideas, characters, and spoofs into this trunk that the fun goes out of the thing. One minute it’s a parody of Star Trek, the next it’s a labor comedy, with magical familiars going on strike against their oppressive masters, and the next it’s a religious thriller. And it’s always a Lovecraft spoof. No matter how clever Miéville is (and he is), this is not storytelling, it’s riffing.

Much can be found to admire in Kraken. Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and an idiot boy, make for a supernatural team of hit men fit to scare the small child in all of us. Likewise the Tattoo, an occult gang leader turned into, well, a tattoo by a rival – not that this hinders him much in the administration of his underworld business interests.

Kraken also is admirable for taking religion seriously – or, if not religion, then at least the faith of those who believe. Of course, it turns out that all religions are equally true, which, in a tiresomely predictable bit of triumphant secularism, means they cancel each other into mutual irrelevancy. This is nicely illustrated when various cults find they have scheduled their competing apocalypses on the same date, one of Miéville’s more successful stabs at humor.

Overall, though, Kraken is just too, too much. On top of everything else, it’s needlessly long. This book would have been significantly more effective with 200 pages cut out. It has too many passages in which the narrator explains what’s just been made abundantly clear in an exchange of dialogue. Wati, a spirit who can inhabit statues and figurines, spends much of the story in a Capt. Kirk action toy. He’s an important character – yet we do not need the detailed account of how he made his way back from the afterlife to become the leader of the magical helpers’ union.

A little restraint might be hoped for next time out, the kind Miéville used to craft the superior The City and the City. Does he know his Lovecraft? Indeed he does. But the way Miéville includes every Lovecraftian idea he’s ever had robs the Cthulu tropes of all their uncanniness, leaving them about as scaresome as a pickled specimen in a museum.

Miéville seems to have written Kraken in that café where Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams take tea. His debt to each one is plain as a nametag or a numbered jersey. While Miéville is as gifted as these esteemed Brit fantasists, this novel, alas, is neither as charming as Gaiman, as funny as Adams, nor yet as sexy (or terrifying) as Barker. I’ve seldom opened a book with as much anticipation, after the satisfactions of The City and the City, nor been so keenly disappointed.

Kraken, by China Miéville; Ballantine Books; 509 pp.; $26.

Most civilians are unaware of the physical and psychic horrors endured by soldiers, according to this timely new book by Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University.

Sherman says up front that The Untold War “is not a political tract for or against a war.” Rather, it is about “the inner battles … the moral weight of war that individual soldiers carry on their shoulders and don’t usually talk about.”

Sherman interviewed numerous soldiers and officers who described their conflicted emotions on and off the battlefield. “They feel pride and patriotism tinged with shame, complicity, betrayal, and guilt,” she writes. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, with symptoms that can last for decades.

Soldiers should “not have to bear the moral burdens of war on their own,” Sherman writes. “We need to begin to cultivate the kind of empathy that will allow us to support our soldiers properly when they return home to our communities.”

One can’t help but feel sadness and anger when reading about the brutality and ugliness of war, the occasional resort to torture, the killing of civilians referred to as “collateral damage” and the heavy toll of smashed bodies and minds.

Sherman describes the work of one expert who tries “to turn reluctant-to-kill soldiers into ready-to-kill soldiers” who know the difference between “murder and justified, lawful killing in war.” One challenge, she says, is making sure that soldiers “preserve their humanity” in the midst of killing.

Soldiers must be encouraged to get in touch with their emotions, rather than bottle them up and pretend that everything is fine, the author says.

Because Sherman is a professor, philosopher and psychoanalyst, her writing sometimes has an off-putting academic tone. She calls this book a “philosophical ethnography” and quotes liberally from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud and others to make her points about war and ethics, which sometimes leads to dry prose.

Sherman is more compelling when she offers case histories based on her interviews. One poignant story involves Maj. Tony DeStefano, a married man in his 50s who was diagnosed with severe post-combat trauma and mild traumatic brain injury related to the war in Iraq, and is racked with guilt and shame about not being able to support his family because of his injuries. One of DeStefano’s teenage daughters told Sherman, “The second time he came home he was totally different. He wasn’t the dad I knew. He snapped a lot; he’d go 100 miles per hour in the car. It’s so scary.”

When DeStefano suffered a massive panic attack, his doctor suggested inpatient treatment at a Veterans Administration hospital. DeStefano balked, saying that if he sought such help, it would be “a disgrace to the officer class,” explaining later that “we’re taught to suck it up and truck on.”

Unfortunately, many of the profiles are too short and superficial to leave lasting impressions. Sherman talks in general terms, for example, about returning soldiers who engage in “risky and aggressive behavior: motorcycle accidents on bases, bar-room brawls, and domestic violence.”

Some officers and soldiers, according to Sherman, feel profound shame “that we have become a country that has morally and legally justified the use of torture. … The fact of torture has opened disturbing questions of identity – just what does the uniform stand for and what are the ideals that they have signed up to defend?”

Sherman also describes the moral ambiguity of various interrogation techniques that involve stress and deception, but fall short of torture, and she faults health professionals for their role in the mistreatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Detention Center.

An estimated 30 percent of soldiers return from Iraq with emotional problems. The number of those who need treatment for brain injuries, lost limbs and post-traumatic stress symptoms is growing.

Soldiers struggle with ambiguity. One soldier thought that his killing an enemy soldier was fine, until he approached the body and took out the wallet, which contained family pictures.

“The pictures were like those he carries in his wallet,” Sherman writes. “That empathic moment unleashed a torrent of guilt.”

Many people do not realize the extent of limb injuries and disfigurement in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We don’t see the wheelchairs, the canes, the stumps, the prosthetics, the burns, the empty eye sockets.” Soldiers often are scarred by the memory of collecting the body parts of comrades killed in roadside bombings, sometimes having to retrieve limbs from tree branches.

Although this book has weaknesses, it nevertheless sheds light on an important topic that has received too little attention from the general public – the crushing burden carried by soldiers who return home broken by the terrors they have experienced or witnessed.

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers, by Nancy Sherman; Norton; 338 pp.; $27.95