In The Blue Star, Tony Earley picks up the story of Jim Glass—which he began eight years ago in Jim the Boy—as a senior in high school in Aliceville, North Carolina in the early 1940’s.

Jim is contending with an increasingly complex world. School is mostly fun and being a senior certainly has its privileges. But more sober realities — relationships, love, decisions, race, class, war, the past, the dead (who even speak from the grave), and the uncertain future—reveal themselves and demand Jim’s response.

How does the boy respond? Will he begin to assume responsibility? Earley suggests that having a community helps. Jim’s mother and the three uncles with whom he lives give him a model for how adulthood looks and the stability and love that allow him to press forward, however awkwardly, into what he must become. Jim must learn how to live.

Wendell Berry, who has much to say about another boy, Huckleberry Finn, grappling with growing up, elsewhere writes, “A young person, coming of age in a healthy household and community, will understand his or her life in terms of membership and service.”

If you haven’t read Jim the Boy, start there and read straight through The Blue Star. It’s an easy and enjoyable read since the books maintain an almost juvenile form. Their stylistic simplicity can at first be deceiving, but before long you realize that Tony Earley is describing experiences that are all too familiar. It’s this recognition that leads to the conclusion that The Blue Star is more than good young adult fiction, it’s good fiction.

Alain de Botton’s basic premise in the The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon, 2006) is that the physical places in which we live, work, and move, influence us in profound ways. De Botton, who lives in London, is the author of several books, including How Proust can change your Life and The Art of Travel.

De Botton describes how buildings speak to us, however quietly, about intangible qualities: order and balance, elegance and coherence, and we ought to pay attention to their messages, “Architecture may well possess moral messages; it simply has no power to enforce them. It offers suggestions instead of making laws. It invites, rather than orders, us to emulate its spirit and cannot prevent its own abuse.”

De Botton’s brand of philosophical writing is engaging and fun. He makes aesthetics seem simple and potentially obvious. In fact, the tone he maintains is one of the book’s greatest strengths: “Beautiful architecture has none of the unambiguous advantages of a vaccine or a bowl of rice. Its construction will hence never be raised to a dominant political priority, for even if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modelled to rival Saint Mark’s Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotonda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood.”

The book reads like a conversation with a fascinating new acquaintance who has thought - and is thinking - long and hard about ultimate questions, and yet has not lost touch with reality. Instead, de Botton seems to be more in touch with— more concerned for— the nature of the physical world.

On almost every page sentences or paragraphs demand to be re-read, not because they are so complex (they are utterly readable), but because they describe crisply our own emotional responses to places, buildings, and even people around us.

De Botton writes perceptively about the significance of our physical surroundings and says architecture matters. To believe otherwise, more than leaving us less than happy, actually might leave us less than human.