Books about Nature

As I have stated earlier, winter is not my best season.  I am an outdoorsy woman, so I suppose it is not all that surprising that at the end of a cold, dark winter, I would find myself gravitating toward books relating to nature.  I recently found myself reading three of these books very close together: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren,  and The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs: Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way, Predict the Weather, Locate Water, Track Animals-and Other Forgotten Skills.  Each of these book was unique, but they seemed to play well together.

I am not sure how The Beak of the Finch hit my radar, but it did.  When planning my books for the quarter, title came to the top of  the list.  So, I checked it out from the library and sat down to read it.  Overall, I found it to be a very focused and detailed account of Finch species in the Galapagos.  I did not find this book to be very engaging.  Much more scientific than my usual fare.  However, while I was reading this, Lab Girl became available on Overdrive.  I began listening to this title when not reading the finch book.  The two stories, one of birds and one of trees, interacted well together.  Consuming them simultaneously, increased my enjoyment of each.

The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs was an impulse pick up at the library.  I frequently wonder about the generations who lived without our technology.  Once upon a time, people actually had to pay attention to the natural world to assure they planted crops at the right time, in the right place, and they had to keep all of that knowledge available.  I can just barely check the weather to put on appropriate clothing for the elements.  Imagine my delight when reading about observing the clouds and noticing the shifting winds to help predict storms and changing weather patterns! There was a lifetime of knowledge in this book and I will not remember it all after a single reading.  As I play and explore in the upcoming months, I will have an opportunity to experience some of the phenomena of this book and share it with my nieces.

All three books discuss evolution and how things fit and work together.  By reading each of these, I have new knowledge and a greater appreciation of the nature around me.  Each book also helped me to focus on different aspects of my surroundings to clue me in to what is happening.

The Drowned World

I am glad I read the edition of The Drowned World with an introduction by Martin Amis.  I found Amis’s essay about the book and how it fit into history enlightening.  The idea of prescience in literature is not new, but it was a fresh concept for me.

The Drowned World is one horrific view of a world destroyed by man’s negligence.  Of course, the world isn’t destroyed, but man’s ability to continue living there is drastically impaired.  As always, nature adapts in amazing ways.

This was a short book about an Earth that no longer has cities, in which most of the land has been swallowed by water and the temperature is ever-rising.  Fifty some years ago, this was probably not a common idea.  With the rise of Global Warming and other environmental concerns addressed by the media every day, the idea of water encroaching our own habitat is less far-flung.

There was some excellent imagery throughout the novel, but one that struck me was: “So his descent into the phantasmagoric forest continued, the rain sweeping relentlessly across his face and shoulders.  Sometimes it would stop abruptly, and clouds of steam filled the intervals between the trees hanging over the waterlogged floor like diaphanous fleeces, only dispersing when the downpour resumed.” (p. 192)  I could easily imagine taking this walk with Kerans as he escapes.

This is certainly not a character study and many of the characters could have been fleshed out into a longer novel.  Instead, this was a cautionary tale and a reminder to me that the idea of rising water levels is not new.

One Last Strike by Tony La Russa

This has been a brutal winter for me.  The temperature stayed low far too long for my liking.  But the promise of spring is in the air.  The birds are chirping, the trees are blossoming, spring training games are on the television and my phone is blowing up with news of player trades and hopes for the coming season.  That’s right, folks, spring is coming!

To prepare myself and to get excited about the season, I re-read Tony La Russa’s awesome memories of his 2011 season with the St. Louis Cardinals.  Tony had an amazing MLB career and I count myself very lucky to have been living in St. Louis during part of his tenure with the team.  I credit his baseball prowess with my own love of the game.  I had been to games in other cities in which I lived, but prior to my Cardinals experience, I didn’t fully appreciate the specialness of baseball.  Having fallen in love with the sport in their city, I will always be a St. Louis Cardinals fan.  (Aren’t I lucky they make it so easy?)

Tony’s book focuses a lot on his last season as coach, but he also manages to weave history throughout the pages of this delightful book.  The story of the fateful season is fraught with tension and I loved reliving the insanity that was September 2011 right into the post-season.  I am sure sportswriter Rick Hummel helped to make this book special.  For a work of non-fiction, I found it completely readable and enjoyable.

I know there will be people who have no interest in reading this book (Braves fans, Phillies fans, people who don’t like baseball), but for me and I am sure for many other baseball fans, this was a fantastic way to get excited about the upcoming season and the end of winter.  The 2011 season epitomized why we watch the game: There is no sure thing and anybody could be the winner, even if you are 10 1/2 games back in August.

May spring bring bright days and plenty of rally squirrels!

Reading by candlelight

I may need to stop paying my electric bill periodically.  Every few years, we experience a large enough storm to knock out my power for several hours (or days).  During these hours, I find myself settling into a candlelit atmosphere and opening a new book.  This year, I was fortunate enough to have a copy of Jesym Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing on hand.

The hype around this book was huge.  Everyone was talking about it.  It won the National Book Award, was nominated for a slew of other awards and made my to read list when it was long listed for the Morning News’s Tournament of Books.  It was short listed long before my copy became available at the library , but such is the life of an avid library patron.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a contemporary look at impoverished life in the southern United States.  At it’s  heart, it is a tale about a dysfunctional African American family struggling through life.  Leonie is a drug-addicted mother living with her parent waiting to reunite with her children’s father.  Jojo is a 13-year-old trying to find his place in the world; simultaneously being a child and raising his 3-year-old sister.  Mam and Pop, Leonie’s parents have stories to tell as well.  Ward weaves this story together through alternating points of view of Jojo and Leonie with the occasional assistance of a ghost named Richie.

The prose was absolutely lyrical.  My own reading, in a mostly dark living room with the flickering candlelight may have helped make this ghost story even more haunting and emotional.

While the story takes us on a road trip through Mississippi, it is mostly a character-driven story.  The history of all involved is spooned out quietly and revealed in beautiful, if heartbreaking ways.

This was not a long book (285 pages), but it had depth.  My power was restored before I finished the book, but the haunted feelings remained.  I have previously read Dr. Zhivago and Fall on Your Knees by candlelight and both have certainly remained in my good favor long after I closed the covers.  Not to worry, I will continue to pay my bills, but maybe I will remember to unplug once in awhile and read a new book by candlelight.

Watchmen by Alan Moore

Late last year, I read my first graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, vol. 1. It was nothing like I expected. This illustrated journal of a young girl in 1960s Chicago was surprisingly and compulsively readable. I am anxiously awaiting volume 2.
This experience made me more receptive to reading an earlier graphic novel, Watchmen by Alan Moore. Watchmen was much closer to my expectations: a group of superheroes fighting the evils of the world and discovering their own fallibility and humanity in the process. While reading, I was reminded over and over of the Disney Movie The Incredibles, a naptime favorite of both my nieces. The masked crusaders have been disbanded, but are called back into service when someone starts killing their own.
Watchmen is an example of why I don’t gravitate to graphic novels, it is very violent and the illustrations often make this violence more, well, graphic. I have never been a comic book person, I prefer my stories to come through creative uses of language and the written word. I am not sorry to have read this and I will continue to anticipate volume 2 of My Favorite Thing is Monsters, but I will not be actively seeking out further graphic novels to add to my list.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

I picked this up at my library off the librarian recommendation shelf.  I recognized the author’s name and the title piqued my curiosity.  I love reading and learning about how others read and what they admire, expect, watch for to help make my reading more informed.

Ms. Prose spends an entire book evaluating paragraph after paragraph of classic literature.  She looks at word choice and placement to examine the make up of a story by it’s core parts rather than to take in the whole story and place it into the context of the world in which we live or in which it was written.

When speaking of her MFA students, she wrote: “they had been encouraged to form strong, critical, and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born” (p. 10).  This quote and the following paragraph and a half struck me as I find myself more like her students.  I am definitely more in the context/deconstructionist cap of readers than the close reading camp she is encouraging.

While I may have learned  to read in a way that is different than her recommended method, I do think there are benefits to both. I am glad I picked up this book and can imagine visiting it again. Spending a few weeks with this author’s ideas and working through the examples and exercises she offers would be worth my time.

The fact she spends so little time on plot was also an obvious omission to me.  Regardless of the story to be told, the delivery of words is the most fundamental to this style of reading.  If you can choose the right words, to create the best sentence to form perfect paragraphs, your story will resonate with readers.

The Changeling by Victor La Valle

This book was tagged by multiple people as a HORROR book.  I did not find it to be such.  I can see some elements of horror with the supernatural climax, but through the majority of the book, it could easily have been any other story of loss, family and love.  I found this title on the Tournament of Book’s longlist this year.  There were quite a number of interesting titles found there and this was no exception.

I adored the story of Apollo.  From his early entrepreneurial escapades, to his love of hunting books, to his self-confident mantra right through to his full accepting his role as husband and father.  The hunt for his son took so much of the passion he had cultivated in earlier parts of his life and the challenges he faced were like nothing he had ever known.  Who could have known there were so many eerie things in New York?

While I did not love the magical, otherworldly aspects of this father’s search for his missing son, I did find the emotional path to ring true.  This was a cleverly written love story and one man’s understanding of the life-changing power of parenthood.

 

Book Summary:

One man’s thrilling journey through an enchanted world to find his wife, who has disappeared after seemingly committing an unforgiveable act of violence, from the award-winning author of the The Devil in Silver and Big Machine.

Apollo Kagwa has had strange dreams that have haunted him since childhood. An antiquarian book dealer with a business called Improbabilia, he is just beginning to settle into his new life as a committed and involved father, unlike his own father who abandoned him, when his wife Emma begins acting strange. Disconnected and uninterested in their new baby boy, Emma at first seems to be exhibiting all the signs of post-partum depression, but it quickly becomes clear that her troubles go far beyond that. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act—beyond any parent’s comprehension—and vanishes, seemingly into thin air.

Thus begins Apollo’s odyssey through a world he only thought he understood to find a wife and child who are nothing like he’d imagined. His quest begins when he meets a mysterious stranger who claims to have information about Emma’s whereabouts. Apollo then begins a journey that takes him to a forgotten island in the East River of New York City, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest in Queens where immigrant legends still live, and finally back to a place he thought he had lost forever. This dizzying tale is ultimately a story about family and the unfathomable secrets of the people we love. (from GoodReads book page).

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

For the past 7 years, I have been a stay at home aunt, a nan-auntie, a child borrower? I haven’t figured out a name for it yet.  I spend much of my time playing with my 2 fantastic nieces.  But as the older one is in school full time and the second is nearing that stage in her life, I have more time to dedicate to my passions of reading and writing.  I plan to use this space to share my journey.

My goals is to hone my reading to find greater balance.  I hope to share three books each week: one “old” (published before 2000), one new-ish (published 2000 or later) and one true or at least purportedly non-fiction.

My interests in reading run a large gamut.  I enjoy mysteries, thrillers, horror, literary fiction, classics, fantasy, science fiction, pretty much I like books.  In non-fiction, I have certainly been trying to read more widely.  I am using the Dewey Decimal System to help track my progress, as I feel that will help me to broaden my horizons.

I am very much so looking forward to what this year’s reading has to offer.