The Best Books from the First Half of 2023
Yes, it’s that time of year already! It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year list, but for now, these are my 20 highlights. Plus, I sneakily preview another great novel that won’t release until September. (For now I’m highlighting 2023 releases, whereas at the end of the year I divide my best-of lists into current year and backlist. I’ve read 86 current-year releases so far and am working on another 20, so I’m essentially designating a top 20% here.) I give review excerpts and link to the full text from this site or elsewhere. Pictured below are the books I read in print; all the others were e-copies.
Fiction
Shoot the Horses First by Leah Angstman: In 16 sumptuous historical stories, outsiders and pioneers face disability and prejudice with poise. The flash entries crystallize moments of realization, often about health. Longer pieces shine as their out-of-the-ordinary romances have space to develop. In the novella Casting Grand Titans, a botany professor in 1850s Iowa learns her salary is 6% of a male colleague’s. She strives for intellectual freedom, reporting a new-to-science species of moss, while working towards liberation for runaway slaves.
The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland: Moving at a propulsive pace, Beanland’s powerful second novel rotates through the perspectives of these main characters – two men and two women; two white people and two enslaved Black people – caught up in the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811 (one of the deadliest events in early U.S. history) and its aftermath. Painstakingly researched and full of historical detail and full-blooded characters, it dramatizes the range of responses to tragedy and how people rebuild their lives.
The New Life by Tom Crewe: Two 1890s English sex researchers (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) write a book called Sexual Inversion drawing on ancient Greek history and containing case studies of homosexual behaviour. Oscar Wilde’s trial puts everyone on edge; not long afterwards, their own book becomes the subject of an obscenity trial, and each man has to decide what he’s willing to give up in devotion to his principles. This is deeply, frankly erotic stuff, and, on the sentence level, just exquisite writing.
Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt: (Yes, another historical fire novel, and I reviewed both for Shelf Awareness!) This engrossing debut explores the options for women in the mid-19th century. Metaphorical conflagrations blaze in the background in the days leading up to the great Nantucket fire of 1846: each of three female protagonists (a whaling captain’s wife, a museum curator, and a pregnant Black entrepreneur) holds a burning secret and longs for a more expansive, authentic life. Tense and sultry; for Sue Monk Kidd fans.
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai: When an invitation comes from her boarding school alma mater, Granby, to teach a two-week course on podcasting, Bodie indulges her obsession with the 1995 murder of her former roommate. Makkai has taken her cues from the true crime genre and constructed a convincing mesh of evidence and theories. She so carefully crafts her pen portraits, and so intimately involves us in Bodie’s psyche, that it’s impossible not to get invested. This is timely, daring, intelligent, enthralling storytelling.
Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain: In this debut collection of 22 short stories, loosely linked by their location in the Appalachian hills in western Pennsylvania and a couple of recurring minor characters, McIlwain softens the harsh realities of addiction, poverty and violence with the tender bruises of infertility and lost love. Grief is a resonant theme in many of the stories, with pregnancy or infant loss a recurring element. At times harrowing, always clear-eyed, these stories are true to life and compassionate about human foibles and animal pain.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano: Oprah’s 100th book club pick. It’s a family story spanning three decades and focusing on the Padavanos, a working-class Italian American Chicago clan with four daughters. Julia meets melancholy basketball player William Waters while at Northwestern in the late 1970s. There is such warmth and intensity to the telling, and brave reckoning with bereavement, mental illness, prejudice and trauma. I love sister stories in general, and the subtle echoes of Leaves of Grass and Little Women add heft.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld: Through her work as a writer for a sketch comedy show modelled on Saturday Night Live, Sally Milz meets Noah Brewster, a pop star with surfer-boy good looks. Plain Jane getting the hot guy – that never happens, right? In fact, Sally has a theory about this very dilemma… As always, Sittenfeld’s inhabiting of a first-person narrator is flawless, and Sally’s backstory and Covid-lockdown existence endeared her to me. Could this be called predictable? Well, what does one want from a romcom?
In Memoriam by Alice Winn: Heartstopper on the Western Front; swoon! Will Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt both acknowledge that this is love and not just sex, as it is for so many teenage boys at their English boarding school? And will one or both survive the trenches of the First World War? Winn depicts the full horror of war, but in between there is banter, friendship and poetry. Some moments are downright jolly. This debut is obsessively researched, but Winn has a light touch with it. Engaging, thrilling, and, yes, romantic.
A bonus:
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (Riverhead/Hutchinson Heinemann, 12 September): Groff’s fifth novel combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway Jamestown servant’s struggle to endure the winter of 1610. Flashbacks to traumatic events seep into her mind as she copes with the harsh reality of life in the wilderness. The style is archaic and postmodern all at once. Evocative and affecting – and as brutal as anything Cormac McCarthy wrote. A potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel. (Review forthcoming for Shelf Awareness.)
Nonfiction
All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett: A lovely memoir about grief and gardening, caring for an ill child and a dying parent. The book is composed of dozens of brief autobiographical, present-tense essays, each titled after a wildflower with traditional healing properties. The format realistically presents bereavement and caring as ongoing, cyclical challenges rather than one-time events. Sitting somewhere between creative nonfiction and nature essays, it’s a beautiful read for any fan of women’s life writing.
Monsters by Claire Dederer: The question posed by this hybrid work of memoir and cultural criticism is “Are we still allowed to enjoy the art made by horrible people?” It begins, in the wake of #MeToo, by reassessing the work of film directors Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. The book is as compassionate as it is incisive. While there is plenty of outrage, there is also much nuance. Dederer’s prose is forthright and droll; lucid even when tackling thorny issues. Erudite, empathetic and engaging from start to finish.
Womb by Leah Hazard: A wide-ranging and accessible study of the uterus, this casts a feminist eye over history and future alike. Blending medical knowledge and cultural commentary, it cannot fail to have both personal and political significance for readers of any gender. The thematic structure of the chapters also functions as a roughly chronological tour of how life with a uterus might proceed: menstruation, conception, pregnancy, labour, caesarean section, ongoing health issues, menopause. Inclusive and respectful of diversity.
Sea Bean by Sally Huband: Stories of motherhood, the quest to find effective treatment in a patriarchal medical system, volunteer citizen science projects, and studying Shetland’s history and customs mingle in a fascinating way. Huband travels around the archipelago and further afield, finding vibrant beachcombing cultures. In many ways, this is about coming to terms with loss, and the author presents the facts about climate crisis with sombre determination. She writes with such poetic tenderness in this radiant debut memoir.
Marry Me a Little by Robert Kirby: Hopping around in time, this graphic memoir tells the story of how the author and his partner John decided to get married in 2013. The blue and red color scheme is effective at evoking a polarized America and the ebb and flow of emotions, with blue for calm, happy scenes and concentrated red for confusion or anger. This is political, for sure, but it’s also personal, and it balances those two aims well by tracing the history of gay marriage in the USA and memorializing his own relationship.
All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer: In 2019, Vollmer’s mother died of complications of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Months later, his father reported blinking lights in the woods near the family cemetery. Although Vollmer had left the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in college, his religious upbringing influenced his investigation, which overlapped with COVID-19. Grief, mysticism, and acceptance of the unexplained are resonant themes. An unforgettable record of “a collision with the ineffable.”
Eggs in Purgatory by Genanne Walsh: This autobiographical essay tells the story of the last few months of her father’s life. Aged 89, he lived downstairs from Walsh and her wife in San Francisco. He was quite the character: idealist, stubborn, outspoken; a former Catholic priest. Although he had no terminal conditions, he was sick of old age and its indignities and ready to exit. The task of a memoir is to fully mine the personal details of a situation but make of it something universal, and that’s just what she does here. Stunning.
Poetry
More Sky by Joe Carrick-Varty: In this debut collection, the fact of his alcoholic father’s suicide is inescapable. The poet alternates between an intimate “you” address and third-person scenarios, auditioning coping mechanisms. His frame of reference is wide: football, rappers, Buddhist cosmology. The word “suicide” itself is repeated to the point where it becomes just a sibilant collection of syllables. The tone is often bitter, as is to be expected, but there is joy in the deft use of language.
Lo by Melissa Crowe: This incandescent autobiographical collection delves into the reality of sexual abuse and growing up in rural poverty. Guns are insidious, used for hunting or mass shootings. Trauma lingers. “Maybe home is what gets on you and can’t / be shaken loose.” The collection is so carefully balanced in tone that it never feels bleak. In elegies and epithalamiums (poems celebrating marriage), Crowe honors family ties that bring solace. The collection has emotional range: sensuality, fear, and wonder at natural beauty.
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris: This debut collection addresses the symptoms and side effects of breast cancer treatment at age 36, but often in oblique or cheeky ways – it can be no mistake that “assistance” appears two lines before a mention of haemorrhoids, for instance, even though it closes an epithalamium distinguished by its gentle sibilance (Farris’s husband is Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky.) She crafts sensual love poems, and exhibits Japanese influences. (Review forthcoming at The Rumpus.)
The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly: Kelly is half-Danish and has single-sided deafness, and her second collection engages with questions of split identity. One section ends with the Deaf community’s outrage that the Prime Minister’s Covid briefings were not translated into BSL. Bizarre but delightful is the sequence of alliteration-rich poems about fungi, followed by a miscellany of autobiographical poems full of references to colour, nature and travel.
What are some of the best books you’ve read so far this year?
What 2023 releases should I catch up on right away?
Books of Summer, 3–4: Anthony Bourdain and Meron Hadero
Back to the foodie lit. A chef’s memoir of adventurous travel and eating, and a short story collection about Ethiopian American immigrants – for some of whom learning how to cook traditional American food is a sign of integration.
A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain (2001)
Anthony Bourdain also appeared on my summer reading list when I reviewed Kitchen Confidential in 2020; I have both books in an omnibus edition. The chef acknowledges there’s no such thing as a perfect dining experience as there are many subjective factors apart from the food, but a few of his meals here are pretty close to ideal. Others are horrific. But everywhere he goes, from England to Cambodia, he gives a fair try. Four interspersed chapters are set in Vietnam, a country he falls in love with, but the rest are like individual essays with a different destination each time: Spain, Russia, Morocco, Japan, Scotland…
Some places are chosen due to personal significance or professional connections. He goes back to where he spent childhood summers in France, but it doesn’t live up to expectations: “I’d thought everything would be instant magic. That the food would taste better because of all the memories. … But you can never be ten years old again.” His boss arranges a pig roast for him in Portugal; he travels to the state in Mexico where most of his kitchen staff come from. With several other chefs, he journeys to Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry in California for a 20-course tasting menu – the rundown of the dishes takes him several pages. The key ingredients of this and the other near-perfect meals seem to be excellent quality of food, innovative flavors, a variety of dishes, and a languid pace with the alcohol flowing.
Bourdain sheepishly confesses that his travels were documented for television; the Food Network made him agree to some filming opportunities he would otherwise have avoided. Vegetarians be warned: some of these involve slaughter, and/or eating exotic animals. Aside from the pig, there’s a whole lamb cooked over a fire in the desert in Morocco, a turkey he beheads, and rabbits he shoots. And while you might think he’d eat anything with pleasure, there are in fact a few meals that leave him feeling ill: iguana tamales, bird’s nest soup, and dishes that use up all parts of a cobra. A notorious vegetarian hater, he even agrees to attend a vegan potluck in Berkeley, but reports that “not one of them could cook a f***ing vegetable.”
This was fast-moving, brash and funny; just as good as Kitchen Confidential and something I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys cooking shows or stunt travel. (Free – swap shop) 
A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Meron Hadero (2022)
Debut author Hadero won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for this work in progress, many of whose stories had been published in periodicals in 2015–20. The 15 stories are roughly half in the first person and half in the third person, and apart from a couple whose place or character origins aren’t specified, I think all are about Ethiopians or Ethiopian Americans. Often, the protagonist is a recent immigrant. Yohannes, in “Medallion,” is recruited by his taxi driver almost immediately upon his arrival in Los Angeles, but finds that his American dream never comes through. In “The Thief’s Tale,” an old Ethiopian man who speaks no English is lost in Prospect Park. When the man who holds him up at knifepoint realizes there is no watch or wallet to take, he lets him call his daughter from a payphone and, as they wait, the two strangers share their stories of failure and regret.
Sometimes Ethiopia is the setting instead. “The Suitcase” has Saba getting ready to return to the USA after a one-month visit to Addis Ababa, her bag 10 kilograms too heavy because of everything people are sending back with her. In “The Street Sweep,” Getu hopes to impress a departing NGO worker enough at his leaving party at the Addis Sheraton that he’ll get a life-changing job offer. This one was a standout, though distressing for how it rests on misunderstanding.
My favorites seem like they could be autobiographical for the author. “The Wall” is narrated by a man who immigrated to Iowa via Berlin at age 10 in the mid-1980s. At a potluck dinner, he met Professor Johannes Weill, who gave him free English lessons. Six years later, he heard of the Berlin Wall coming down and, though he’d lost touch with the professor, made a point of sending a note. The connection across age, race and country is touching. “Sinkholes” is a short, piercing one about the single Black student in a class refusing to be the one to write the N-word on the board during a lesson on Invisible Man. The teacher is trying to make a point about not giving a word power, but it’s clear that it does have significance whether uttered or not. “Swearing In, January 20, 2009” is a poignant flash story about an immigrant’s patriotic delight in Barack Obama’s inauguration, despite prejudice encountered.
The title story is the only foodie link, but it’s a sweet one. Two women who attend church Amharic classes in New York City admit that they can’t cook, but want to impress at the PTA bake sale, so go in search of a quintessential American cookbook, and in the years to come prepare dishes from The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook every time there is a crisis. “When Yeshi’s husband left her for a blonde waitress, they made Broiled Hamburg Steak, just the once. … When Jazarah’s credit cards were stolen and maxed out, they made trays of Corn Fritters.” Eventually, they start to make a living from their own food truck.
There were no bad stories here per se, but several too many, and not enough variety. I also didn’t warm to the couple of political satires involving manuscripts. “The Case of the Missing _______,” set in 2036 and counting backwards from Day 100, is a document full of erasure, produced by the Minnesota newspaper The Exile Gazeta and concerning an absent authoritarian leader. It made me think of Ella Minnow Pea, or perhaps novels by Jonathan Safran Foer and Hernan Diaz, and felt different to the rest, but not in a good way. It would be interesting to try a novel by Hadero someday. See also Liz’s review. (Other challenges this met: review catch-up, set-aside) 
With thanks to Canongate for the proof copy for review.
Books of Summer, 2: The Story of My Father by Sue Miller
I followed up my third Sue Miller novel, The Lake Shore Limited, with her only work of nonfiction, a short memoir about her father’s decline with Alzheimer’s and eventual death. James Nichols was an ordained minister and church historian who had been a professor or dean at several of the USA’s most elite universities. The first sign that something was wrong was when, one morning in June 1986, she got a call from police in western Massachusetts who had found him wandering around disoriented and knocking at people’s doors at 3 a.m. On the road and in her house after she picked him up, he described vivid visual delusions. He still had the capacity to smile “ruefully” and reply, when Miller explained what had happened and how his experience differed from reality, “Doggone, I never thought I’d lose my mind.”
Until his death five years later, she was the primary person concerned with his wellbeing. She doesn’t say much about her siblings, but there’s a hint of bitterness that the burden fell to her. “Throughout my father’s disease, I struggled with myself to come up with the helpful response, the loving response, the ethical response,” she writes. “I wanted to give him as much of myself as I could. But I also wanted, of course, to have my own life. I wanted, for instance to be able to work productively.” She had only recently found success with fiction in her forties and published two novels before her father died; she dedicated the second to him, but too late for him to understand the honor. Her main comfort was that he never stopped being able to recognize her when she came to visit.
Although the book moves inexorably towards a death, Miller lightens it with many warm and admiring stories from her father’s past. Acknowledging that she’ll never be able to convey the whole of his personality, she still manages to give a clear sense of who he was, and the trajectory of his illness, all within 170 pages. The sudden death of her mother, a flamboyant lyric poet, at age 60 of a heart attack, is a counterbalance as well as a potential contributing factor to his slow fading as each ability was cruelly taken from him: living alone, reading, going outside for walks, sleeping unfettered.
Sutton Hill, the nursing home where he lived out his final years, did not have a dedicated dementia ward, and Miller regrets that he did not receive the specialist care he needed. “I think this is the hardest lesson about Alzheimer’s disease for a caregiver: you can never do enough to make a difference in the course of the disease. Hard because what we feel anyway is that we have never done enough. We blame ourselves. We always find ourselves deficient in devotion.” She conceived of this book as a way of giving her father back his dignity and making a coherent story out of what, while she was living through it, felt like a chaotic disaster. “I would snatch him back from the meaninglessness of Alzheimer’s disease.”
And in the midst of it all, there were still humorous moments. Her poor father fell in love with his private nurse, Marlene, and believed he was married to her. Awful as it was, there was also comedy in an extended family story Miller tells, one I think I’m unlikely to forget: They had always vacationed in New Hampshire rental homes, and when her father learned one of the opulent ‘cottages’ was coming up for sale, he agreed to buy it sight unseen. The seller was a hoarder … of cats. Eighty of them. He had given up cleaning up after them long ago. When they went to view the house her father had already dropped $30,000 on, it was a horror. Every floor was covered inches deep in calcified feces. It took her family an entire summer to clean the place and make it even minimally habitable. Only afterwards could she appreciate the incident as an early sign of her father’s impaired decision making.
I’ve read a fair few dementia-themed memoirs now. As people live longer, this suite of conditions is only going to become more common; if it hasn’t affected one of your own loved ones, you likely have a friend or neighbor who has had it in their family. This reminded me of other clear-eyed, compassionate yet wry accounts I’ve read by daughter-caregivers Elizabeth Hay (All Things Consoled) and Maya Shanbhag Lang (What We Carry). It was just right as a pre-Father’s Day read, and a novelty for fans of Miller’s novels. (Charity shop)
Reading the Meow: Cat Books by Nadia Mikail, Derek Tangye and Doreen Tovey
Reviews of books about cats have been a standard element on my blog over the years, though not for quite a while now. The new Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, was a good excuse to revive the feature. I read all of these from the library. #ReadingtheMeow2023 #LoveYourLibrary
Alfie, who turned 15 last month, accompanies me in all things, including reading. I made him a medallion for his birthday that reads “World’s Best Cat” on one side and “World’s Most Annoying Cat” on the other.
The Cats We Meet Along the Way by Nadia Mikail (2022)
Just the one cat, actually. (Ripoff!) But Fleabag, a one-eared stray ‘the colour of gone-off curry’ who just won’t leave, is a fine companion on this end-of-the-world Malaysian road trip. Mikail’s debut teen novel, which won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2023, imagines that news has come of an asteroid that will make direct contact with Earth in one year. The clock is ticking; just nine months remain. Teenage Aisha and her boyfriend Walter have come to terms with the fact that they’ll never get to do all the things they want to, from attending university to marrying and having children.
Aisha’s father died of cancer when she was young, and her older sister June disappeared two years ago. Aisha decides that what is most important now is finding June and trying to heal their estrangement, so she and Walter set out in a campervan with his parents and her mother (and Fleabag, of course). Mikail sensitively portrays the tangle of anger, grief and fear these characters feel, and it’s interesting to encounter the food and flora of a country that will be unfamiliar to many. Even though everything feels doomed, there are hopeful tasks Aisha and her family can be part of. Teens will no doubt be smart enough to realise that we face a similar calamity in the form of climate breakdown; it’s just that the timescale is a little different. 
A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye (1962)
My second from Tangye. I’ve read from The Minack Chronicles out of order because I happened to find a free copy of Lama a few years ago and read it for Novellas in November. Tangye wasn’t a cat fan to start with, but Monty won him over. They met in the Savoy hotel when Tangye and Jeannie were newlyweds of three months, and Monty was six weeks old. He lived with them first in the London suburb of Mortlake, then on their flower farm in Cornwall. During the London years they kept long hours and often returned from gatherings at 2 a.m., to be met with Monty in the front window giving a lordly and annoyed glare.
When they moved to Minack there was a sense of giving Monty his freedom and taking joy in watching him live his best life. In between, they were evacuated to St Albans and briefly lived with Jeannie’s parents and Scottie dog, who became Monty’s nemesis. Ever after, he would attack dogs he saw on the canal path. In Cornwall, the threats to a free-roaming cat included foxes and rabbit traps, but Monty survived into his 16th year, happily tolerating a few resident birds: Hubert the gull, Charlie the chaffinch and Tim the robin.
Tangye writes warmly and humorously about Monty’s ways and his own development into a man who is at a cat’s mercy.
I had observed … that cat owners … were apt to fall into two types. Either they ignored the cat, put it out a night whatever the weather, left it to fend for itself when they went away on holidays, and treated it, in fact, as a kind of better class vermin; or else they worshipped the animal like a god. The first category appeared callous, the second devoid of sense.
He portrays life as a series of manageable incidents. This was really the perfect chronicle of life with a cat, from adoption through farewell. It’s the kind of thing I might like to write about Alfie, if only for my husband’s and my benefit, after he shuffles off this kitty coil.
Cats in Concord by Doreen Tovey (2001)
My seventh from Tovey. I can hardly believe that, having started her writing career in the 1950s, she was still publishing into the new millennium! (She lived 1918–2008.) Tovey was addicted to Siamese cats. As this volume opens, she’s so forlorn after the death of Saphra, her fourth male, that she instantly sets about finding a replacement. Although she sets strict criteria she doesn’t think can be met, Rama fits the bill and joins her and Tani, her nine-year-old female. They spar at first, but quickly settle into life together. As always, there are various mishaps involving mischievous cats and eccentric locals (I have a really low tolerance for accounts of folksy neighbours’ doings). The most persistent problem is Rama’s new habit of spraying.
Towards the end, Tani succumbs to a virus while Rama recovers … and guess what, Tovey immediately gets a replacement. In fact, the last lines of the book are “If anyone reading this book has lost a beloved cat and is grieving, I would urge them to get another. I am sure they were put into this world for our admiration—and I think that they think that way too.” I’m probably done with Tovey; Cats in the Belfry and Cats in May were terrific, but it’s been diminishing returns ever since and I’ve ended up skimming most of the last few I tried. 
I also recently enjoyed these two picture books, one about a cat’s mercurial day-and-night moods and the other about an indoor cat who doesn’t realize how good he has it. (Also pictured in the left-hand photograph above.)
20 Books of Summer, 1: Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson
So far I’m sticking to my vague plan and reading foodie lit, like it’s 2020 all over again. At the same time, I’m tackling a few books that I received as review copies last year but that have been on my set-aside pile for longer than I’d like to admit. Later in the summer I’ll branch out from the food theme, but always focusing on books I own and have been meaning to read.
Without further ado, my first of 20 Books of Summer:
Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson (2022)
“I tried to write about cooking, but I wrote a hot red epic.”
Johnson’s debut is a hybrid work, as much a feminist essay collection as it is a memoir about the role that cooking has played in her life. She chooses to interpret apron strings erotically, such that the preparation of meals is not gendered drudgery or oppression but an act of self-care and love for others.
“The kitchen is a space for theorizing!”
While completing a PhD on the reception of The Odyssey and its translation history, Johnson began to think about dishes as translations, or even performances, of a recipe. In two central chapters, “Hot Red Epic” and “Tracing the Sauce Text,” she reckons that she has cooked the same fresh Italian tomato sauce, with nearly infinite small variations, a thousand times over ten years. Where she lived, what she looked like, who she cooked for: so many external details changed, but this most improvisational of dishes stayed the same.
Just a peek at the authors cited in her bibliography – not just the expected subjects like MFK Fisher and Nigella Lawson but also Goethe, Lorde, Plath, Stein, Weil, Winnicott – gives you an idea of how wide-ranging and academically oriented the book is, delving into the psychology of cooking and eating. Oh yes, there will be Freudian sausages. There are also her own recipes, of a sort: one is a personal prose piece (“Bad News Potatoes”) and another is in poetic notation, beginning “I made Mrs Beeton’s / recipe for frying sausages”.
“The recipe is an epic without a hero.”
I particularly enjoyed the essay “Again and Again, There Is That You,” in which Johnson determinedly if chaotically cooks a three-course meal for someone who might be a lover. The mixture of genres and styles is inventive, but a bit strange; my taste would call for more autobiographical material and less theory. The most similar work I’ve read is Recipe by Lynn Z. Bloom, which likewise pulled in some seemingly off-topic strands. I’d be likely to recommend Small Fires to readers of Supper Club.
With thanks to Pushkin Press for the free copy for review.
Recent Writing for BookBrowse, Foreword, Shelf Awareness, Shiny New Books, and the TLS
I’ve compiled excerpts from some reviews I’ve contributed to other websites and publications this year. I link to the full text where available. (When writing a paid review, I seek to be balanced but positive. Ratings reflect my personal response.)
BookBrowse
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel: In Ausubel’s offbeat third novel, a widowed scientist and her two daughters embark on a rogue plan to make history by resurrecting the woolly mammoth. There is a quirky combination of cosmic and domestic concerns here. A winsome sister duo is at the heart of the unusual and timely story, with priority given to the points of view of teenagers Eve and Vera, whose banter is a highlight. Ausubel has wisely chosen not to dwell on the scientific details of de-extinction, yet that means that this becomes more like speculative fiction or a fairy tale. Ironically, the fabulist-leaning novel is best when most realist, documenting struggles with bereavement, sexism and parenting teens. 
The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore: Moore’s hard-hitting novella is based in part on the memoir Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees: A Narrative of Indian Captivity. In Moore’s version, Sarah, 25, leaves her baby behind when she flees an abusive husband, and once in Minnesota Territory marries John Brinton, who becomes a doctor on a Sioux reservation. By 1862, Sarah is friendly with the Native women. Although the Civil War is unfolding, the greater threat here is of revolt by the starving Indigenous residents. There is much of anthropological and historical interest, but Sarah’s flat storytelling, which may represent a pastiche of period style, means threatening or climactic scenes lose some of their potential gravity.
Foreword
My Mother Says by Stine Pilgaard (trans. from the Danish by Hunter Simpson): After breaking up with her zookeeper girlfriend over their age gap and their conflicting takes on motherhood, the heroine moves back in with her father, a pastor who’s obsessed with Pink Floyd, and her stepmother. Her mother visits often, nagging her to finish her thesis. The line between her conversations and internal thoughts is thin. From her mansplaining doctor, she learns that the brain’s hippocampus is named for its seahorse shape. This inspires “Monologues of a Seahorse,” interludes of stream-of-consciousness association. Experimental and whimsical, this delivers deadpan narration of everyday woes.
In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation by Isabel Zapata (trans. from the Spanish by Robin Myers): A Mexican poet probes the enduring mysteries of pregnancy and birth in a memoir in fragments that travels from fertility treatment through to the early weeks of pandemic-time motherhood. The clinical language of a gynecological history—late menstruation, polycystic ovary syndrome, eighteen years on the pill, and infertility—and the embryo transfer process contrasts with Zapata’s mystical thinking. The microessays integrate family stories, history, and artistic explorations. This resolute account of a personal metamorphosis alchemizes tender experiences into enchanting vignettes.
Shelf Awareness
Fiction
Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt: This engrossing debut novel explores the options for women in the mid-19th century while bringing a historical tragedy to life. Metaphorical conflagrations blaze in the background in the days leading up to the great Nantucket fire of 1846: each of three female protagonists (a whaling captain’s wife, a museum curator, and a pregnant Black entrepreneur) holds a burning secret and longs for a more expansive, authentic life. The action spans two tense weeks, one week before the fire through eight days after. The women’s lives collide in two climactic scenes. Gerstenblatt’s eye for detail results in sultry historical fiction for Sue Monk Kidd’s readers.
Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling: Sterling’s brilliantly unsettling debut novel is set in mid-21st-century, post-oil North America. Prioritizing perspectives from two all-female communities, it contrasts the heights of opulence and technology with the basic instinct for survival. How the strands connect is a mystery sustained through much of the book. Characters go by multiple names and harbor ulterior motives; scenes echo each other as disparate subplots meet in unexpected ways. The background is all too plausible. Sterling also takes to its logical extreme the state of being constantly online. Compelling dystopian cli-fi with three-dimensional characters—perfect for fans of Station Eleven and To Paradise.
Dear Chrysanthemums by Fiona Sze-Lorrain: In this elegant collection of 11 linked short stories by a poet and translator, China’s mid-20th-century political upheaval casts a long shadow. Music and food, not to mention love, bring meaning to those displaced in the aftermath of dissent. The stories—set in China, Singapore, Paris, and New York—span seven decades but always take place in a year ending in a six, a sacred number in Chinese divination. A highlight is “News from Saigon,” in which a prostitute meets Marguerite Duras in a Paris café. The connections are subtle, with the final story pulling together many strands. Ideal for readers of Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
Nonfiction
Stranded by Maddalena Bearzi: Bearzi developed a deep love for marine fauna during childhood summers in Sardinia and cofounded the Ocean Conservation Society in the 1990s. Temporarily confined to land by Covid-19 lockdowns, she adopts a different tactic for exploring animal behavior: “an urban safari in my backyard and neighborhood.” These nature essays exemplify evenhandedness, curiosity, and close observation. From wasps to night-blooming flowers, her interest is wide-ranging. Gardening is a relaxing pastime and a connection to her mother while they are separated. As a behavioral ecologist, she views even her dog as a subject of study. A passionate primer to appreciating everyday nature.
Poetry
Lo by Melissa Crowe: This incandescent autobiographical collection travels from girlhood to marriage and motherhood in post-pandemic USA. Crowe delves into sexual abuse and growing up in rural poverty. Yet the collection is so carefully balanced in tone that it never feels bleak. The emotional range is enhanced by alliteration and botanical imagery. 
Dislocations by Karen Enns: The fourth collection by Canadian poet Enns skillfully evokes a rural upbringing and revels in the beauty of nature and music. One of its aphorisms could encapsulate the entire collection: “The ratio of love to grief / we understood as music.” Updating the pastoral tradition, the bittersweet verse also takes solace in the past.
Shiny New Books
A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland & A Fortunate Man by John Berger: The similarities go much further than the title and subject matter: these two biographical works, both illustrated with black-and-white photographs, are set in the same English valley and the female subject of Morland’s is the next-but-one successor of the doctor who stars in Berger’s.
Berger (1926–2017), an art critic and Booker Prize-winning novelist, spent six weeks shadowing the doctor, to whom he gives the pseudonym John Sassall, with Swiss documentary photographer Jean Mohr, his frequent collaborator. Sassall’s dedication was legendary: he attended every birth in this community, and nearly every death. Sassall’s middle-class origins set him apart from his patients. There’s something condescending about how Berger depicts the locals as simple peasants. Mohr’s photos include soft-focus close-ups on faces exhibiting a sequence of emotions, a technique that feels outdated in the age of video. Along with recording the day-to-day details of medical complaints and interventions, Berger waxes philosophical on topics such as infirmity and vocation. A Fortunate Man is a curious book, part intellectual enquiry and part hagiography.
With its layers of local history and its braided biographical strands, A Fortunate Woman takes up many of the same heavy questions but feels more subtle and timely. It also soon delivers a jolting surprise: the doctor Berger called John Sassall was likely bipolar and, soon after the death of his beloved wife Betty, committed suicide in 1982. His story still haunts this community, where many of the older patients remember going to him for treatment. Like Berger, Morland keenly follows a range of cases. As the book progresses, we see this beautiful valley cycle through the seasons, with certain of Richard Baker’s landscape shots deliberately recreating Mohr’s scene setting. The timing of Morland’s book means that it morphs from a portrait of the quotidian for a doctor and a community to, two-thirds through, an incidental record of the challenges of medical practice during COVID-19.
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller: Neffy has nothing to lose when she enrolls in a controversial vaccine trial in a familiar mid-pandemic landscape. The novel is presented as her journal. The bulk takes place in two weeks she spends on a locked unit with four fellow test subjects. In the meantime, she is introduced to an experimental technology for reliving memories. The characterisation of the four other cast members is somewhat thin, and the elements feel randomly assembled. The world-building and tech are unlikely to stand up to science fiction fans’ scrutiny, but this has just the right dose of the speculative for literary fiction readers. It also happens to fit into a recent vogue for octopus novels.
Times Literary Supplement
A late-twenties journalist sets out to survey the situation on the ground for ten British species being squeezed out by anthropogenic climate change: The mission is very similar, and both authors embody passionate dedication to conservation, but the difference in tone of these travel narratives makes them likely to appeal to separate audiences…
In Search of One Last Song by Patrick Galbraith & Forget Me Not by Sophie Pavelle:
Galbraith’s is an elegiac tour through imperilled countryside and urban edgelands. Each chapter resembles an in-depth magazine article: a carefully crafted profile of a beloved bird species, with a focus on the specific threats it faces. Galbraith recognises the nuances of land use. However, shooting plays an outsized role. (Curious for his bio not to disclose that he is editor of the Shooting Times.) The title’s reference is to literal birdsong, but the book also celebrates birds’ cultural importance through their place in Britain’s folk music and poetry. He is clearly enamoured of countryside ways, but too often slips into laddishness, with no opportunity missed to mention him or another man having a “piss” outside. Readers could also be forgiven for concluding that “Ilka” (no surname, affiliation or job title), who briefs him on her research into kittiwake populations in Orkney, is the only female working in nature conservation in the entire country; with few exceptions, women only have bit parts: the farm wife making the tea, the receptionist on the phone line, and so on.
Pavelle’s book is a tonic in more ways than one. Employed by Beaver Trust, she is enthusiastic and self-deprecating. Her nature quest has a broader scope, including insects like the marsh fritillary and marine species such as seagrass and the Atlantic salmon. Travelling between lockdowns in 2020–1, Pavelle took low-carbon transport wherever possible and bolsters her trip accounts with context, much of it gleaned from Zoom calls and e-mail correspondence with experts from museums and universities. Refreshingly, around half of these interviewees are women, and the animal subjects are never the obvious choices. Instead, she seeks out “underdog” species. The explanations are at a suitable level for laymen, true to her job as a science communicator. The snappy, casual prose (“the future of the bilberry bumblebee and its Aperol arse can be bright, but only if we get off our own”) could even endear her to teenage readers. As image goes, Pavelle’s cheerful naïveté holds more charm than Galbraith’s hardboiled masculinity.
Taking Flight by Lev Parikian: Parikian’s accessible account of the animal kingdom’s development of flight exhibits a layman’s enthusiasm for an everyday wonder. He explicates the range of flying strategies and the structural adaptations that made them possible. The archaeopteryx section, chronicling the transition between dinosaurs and birds, is a highlight. Though the most science-heavy of the author’s six works, this, perhaps ironically, has fewer footnotes. His usual wit is on display: he describes the feral pigeon as “the Volkswagen Golf of birds” and penguins as “piebald blubber tubes”. This makes it a pleasure to tag along on a journey through evolutionary time, one sure to engage even history- and science-phobes.
Do any of these catch your eye?
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
The question posed by Claire Dederer’s third hybrid work of memoir and cultural criticism might be stated thus: “Are we still allowed to enjoy the art made by horrible people?” You might be expecting a hard-line response – prescriptive rules for cancelling the array of sexual predators, drunks, abusers and abandoners (as well as lesser offenders) she profiles. Maybe you’ve avoided Monsters for fear of being chastened about your continuing love of Michael Jackson’s music or the Harry Potter series. I have good news: This book is as compassionate as it is incisive, and while there is plenty of outrage, there is also much nuance.
Dederer begins, in the wake of #MeToo, with film directors Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, setting herself the assignment of re-watching their masterpieces while bearing in mind their sexual crimes against underage women. In a later chapter she starts referring to this as “the stain,” a blemish we can’t ignore when we consider these artists’ work. Try as we might to recover prelapsarian innocence, it’s impossible to forget allegations of misconduct when watching The Cosby Show or listening to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Nor is it hard to find racism and anti-Semitism in the attitude of many a mid-20th-century auteur.
Does “genius” excuse all? Dederer asks this in relation to Picasso and Hemingway, then counteracts that with a fascinating chapter about Lolita – as far as we know, Nabokov never engaged in, or even contemplated, sex with minors, but he was able to imagine himself into the mind of Humbert Humbert, an unforgettable antihero who did. “The great writer knows that even the blackest thoughts are ordinary,” she writes. Although she doesn’t think Lolita could get published today, she affirms it as a devastating picture of stolen childhood.
“The death of the author” was a popular literary theory in the 1960s that now feels passé. As Dederer notes, in the Internet age we are bombarded with biographical information about favourite writers and musicians. “The knowledge we have about celebrities makes us feel we know them,” and their bad “behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms.” This is not logical, she emphasizes, but instinctive and personal. Some critics (i.e., white men) might be wont to dismiss such emotional responses as feminine. Super-fans are indeed more likely to be women or teenagers, and heartbreak over an idol’s misdoings is bound up with the adoration, and sense of ownership, of the work. She talks with many people who express loyalty “even after everything” – love persists despite it all.
U.S. cover
In a book largely built around biographical snapshots and philosophical questions, Dederer’s struggle to make space for herself as a female intellectual, and write a great book, is a valuable seam. I particularly appreciated her deliberations on the critic’s task. She insists that, much as we might claim authority for our views, subjectivity is unavoidable. “We are all bound by our perspectives,” she asserts; “consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist, which might disrupt the consuming of the art, and the biography of the audience member, which might shape the viewing of the art.”
While men’s sexual predation is a major focus, the book also weighs other sorts of failings: abandonment of children and alcoholism. The “Abandoning Mothers” chapter posits that in the public eye this is the worst sin that a woman can commit. Her two main examples are Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell, but there are many others she could have mentioned. Even giving more mental energy to work than to childrearing is frowned upon. Dederer wonders if she has been a monster in some ways, and confronts her own drinking problem.
A painting by Cathy Lomax of girls at a Bay City Rollers concert.
Here especially, the project reminded me most of books by Olivia Laing: the same mixture of biographical interrogation, feminist cultural criticism, and memoir as in The Trip to Echo Spring and Everybody; some subjects even overlap (Raymond Carver in the former; Ana Mendieta and Valerie Solanas in the latter – though, unfortunately, these two chapters by Dederer were the ones I thought least necessary; they could easily have been omitted without weakening the argument in any way). I also thought of how Lara Feigel’s Free Woman examines her own life through the prism of Lessing’s.
The danger of being quick to censure any misbehaving artist, Dederer suggests, is a corresponding self-righteousness that deflects from our own faults and hypocrisy. If we are the enlightened ones, we can look back at the casual racism and daily acts of violence of other centuries and say: “1. These people were simply products of their time. 2. We’re better now.” But are we? Dederer redirects all the book’s probing back at us, the audience. If we’re honest about ourselves, and the people we love, we will admit that we are all human and so capable of monstrous acts.
Dederer’s prose is forthright and droll; lucid even when tackling thorny issues. She has succeeded in writing the important book she intended to. Erudite, empathetic and engaging from start to finish, this is one of the essential reads of 2023. 
With thanks to Sceptre for the free copy for review.
Buy Monsters from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
Nature Book Catch-Up: Sally Huband, Richard Smyth & Anna Vaught
I’m catching up with a few nature- and travel-based 2023 releases that were sent to me for review. I’ve grouped them together because these British authors share some of the same interests and concerns. They celebrate beloved places that become ours through the time we spend in them and the attention we grant; they mourn the loss of biodiversity from rockpools and gardens and seabird cliffs. What kind of diminished world they’re raising their children into is a major worry for all three, and for Huband and Vaught the unease is exacerbated by chronic illness. Wild creatures, and the fellow authors who have hymned them, ease the hurt.
Sea Bean: A beachcomber’s search for a magical charm by Sally Huband
After more than a decade in her adopted home of Shetland, Sally Huband is still a newcomer. A tricky path to motherhood and ensuing chronic illness (the autoimmune disease palindromic rheumatism) limited her mobility and career. Beachcombing is at once her way of belonging to a specific place and feeling part of the wider world – what washes up on a Shetland beach might come from as far away as Atlantic Canada or the Caribbean. Sea glass, lobster pot tags, messages in bottles, driftwood … and a whole lot of plastic, of course. Early on, Huband sets her sights on a sea bean – also known as a drift-seed, from the tropics – which in centuries past was a talisman for ensuring safe childbirth. Possession of one was enough to condemn a 17th-century local woman to death for witchcraft, she learned.
Stories of motherhood, the quest to find effective treatment in a patriarchal medical system, volunteer citizen science projects (monitoring numbers of dead seabirds, returning beached cetaceans to the water, dissecting fulmar stomachs to assess their plastic content), and studying Shetland’s history and customs mingle in a fascinating way. Huband travels around the archipelago and further afield, finding a vibrant beachcombing culture on the Dutch island of Texel. As in Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn, one of my all-time favourite nonfiction books, there is delight at the randomness of what the ocean delivers.
I requested this book because Huband’s was my favourite essay in the Antlers of Water anthology. In it, she deplored the fact that women were still not allowed to participate in the Up Helly Aa fire festival in Lerwick. Good news: that is no longer the case, thanks to campaigning by Huband and others. In a late chapter, she also reports that blackface was recently banned from the festivals, and a Black Lives Matter demonstration drew 2000 people. Change does come, but slowly to a traditional island community. And sometimes it is not the right sort of change, as with an enormous wind farm, resisted vigorously by residents, that will primarily enrich a multinational company instead of serving the local people.
In many ways, this is a book about coming to terms with loss, and Huband presents the facts with sombre determination. Passages about the threats to birds and marine life had me near tears. But she writes with such poetic tenderness that the evocative specifics of island life point towards what’s true for all of us making the best of our constraints. I was lucky enough to visit several islands of Shetland in 2006; whether you have or not, this is a radiant memoir I would recommend to readers of Kathleen Jamie, Jean Sprackland and Malachy Tallack.
Some favourite lines:
No island can ever live up to the heightened expectations that we always seem to place on them; life catches up with us, sooner or later.
With each loss, emotional pain accretes for those who have paid attention.
If hope is a hierarchy of wishes then I am happy enough, each time that I beachcomb, to find fragments of the bark of paper birch
I’ve come to think of the ocean as an archive of sorts.
With thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for the proof copy for review.
The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell: Finding Wild Things with My Kids by Richard Smyth
all around us
the stuff of spells. Our parents
let us go to scamper deeper,
leap from stumps lush with moss.
Everything aloof about me
fell into the soil once charged
with younger siblings
and freedoms of a wood.
…
I give you a damp valley floor,
this feather for your pocket.
~an extract from “Arger Fen,” from Latch by Rebecca Goss
I know Richard Smyth for his writing on birds (I’ve reviewed both A Sweet, Wild Note and An Indifference of Birds) and his somewhat controversial commentary on modern nature writing. This represents a change in direction for him toward more personal reflection, and with its focus on the phenomena of childhood and parenthood it recalls Wild Child by Patrick Barkham and The Nature Seed by Lucy Jones and Kenneth Greenway. But, as I knew to expect from previous works, he has such talent for reeling in the tangential and extrapolating from the concrete to the abstract that this lively read ends up being about everything: what it is to be human on this fading planet.
And this despite the fact that four of five chapter headings suggest pandemic-specific encounters with nature. Lockdown walks with his two children, and the totems they found in different habitats – also including a chaffinch nest and an owl pellet – are indeed jumping-off points, punctuating a wide-ranging account of life with nature. Smyth surveys the gateway experiences, whether books or television shows or a school tree-planting programme or collecting, that get young people interested; and talks about the people who beckon us into greater communion – sometimes authors and celebrities; other times friends and family. He also engages with questions of how to live in awareness of climate crisis. He acknowledges that he should be vegetarian, but isn’t; who does not harbour such everyday hypocrisies?
It’s still, unfortunately, rare for men to write about parenthood (and especially pregnancy loss – I only think of Native by Patrick Laurie and William Henry Searle’s books), so it’s great to see that represented, and it’s a charming idea that we create “downfamily” because the “upfamily” doesn’t last forever. Although there’s nostalgia for his childhood here, and anxiety about his kids’ chances of seeing wildlife in abundance, Smyth doesn’t get mired in the past or in existential dread. He has a humanist belief that people are essentially good and can do positive things like build offshore wind farms, and in the meantime he will take Genevieve and Daniel into the woods to play so they will develop a sense of wonder at all that lives on. Even for someone like me who doesn’t have children, this was a captivating, thought-provoking read: We’re all invested in the future of life on this planet.
With thanks to Icon Press for the free copy for review.
These Envoys of Beauty: A Memoir by Anna Vaught
Anna Vaught is a versatile author: I have a copy of her mental health-themed novel Saving Lucia, longlisted for the inaugural Barbellion Prize, on the shelf; she’s written a spooky set of stories, Famished (see Susan’s review); and I gave some early reader feedback on the opening pages of her forthcoming work of quirky historical fiction, The Zebra and Lord Jones. She’s also publishing a book on writing, and editing a collection of pieces submitted for the first Curae Prize for writers who are also carers. I was drawn to her first nonfiction release by reviews by fellow bloggers – it’s always good when a blog tour achieves its aim!
These dozen short essays are about how nature doesn’t necessarily heal, but is a most valued companion in a life marked by chronic illness and depression. The evocative title and epigraphs are from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836). The pieces loop through Vaught’s past and present, focussing on favourite places in Wiltshire, where she lives, and at the Pembrokeshire coast. It’s the second memoir about complex PTSD that I’ve read this year (see also What My Bones Know). Both at the time and now, when flashbacks of her parents’ verbal and physical abuse haunt her, lying down in a grassy field, exploring a sea cave or sucking on a gorse flower could be a salve. “Nature offered stability and satisfying detail; pattern, form and things that made sense.”
Vaught has a particular love for trees, flowers and moss – even just reciting their Latin names gives her a thrill, and she adds additional information about some species in footnotes. Although her childhood was painful, she retains gratitude for its wide-eyed wonder, and in the exuberance of her prose you can sense a willed childlike perspective (“But back to the list of clouds and writing about clouds!”). I found the frequent self-referential nature of the essays and direct reader address a little precious, but appreciated the thoughts about how nature holds us: “I have always felt a generosity around me, and that I was less lonely outside; at the very least, I could find something to comfort me”. She’s a bookish kindred spirit as well. I’ll be sure to try her work in other genres.
With thanks to Reflex Press for the free copy for review.
Spring Reads, Part II: Swifts, a Cuckoo, and a British Road Trip
Despite ongoing worries about biodiversity loss after last year’s drought, I had the most idyllic late spring evening yesterday. On the way home from an evening with Alice Winn hosted by Hungerford Bookshop (more on which anon), I sat at the station awaiting my train. It was 8:30 p.m. and still fully light, warm enough to be comfortable in a jacket, and a cuckoo serenaded me as I watched swifts wheeling by overhead.
For my second instalment of spring-themed reading (see Part I here), I have books about those very birds, one a nonfiction study of a species that is a welcome sign of late spring and summer in Europe, and a novel that takes up the metaphors associated with another notable species; plus a narrative of a circuitous route driven through a British spring.
Swifts and Us by Sarah Gibson (2020)
We first noticed the swifts had returned to Newbury on 29 April. Best of all, we think ‘our’ birds that nested in the space between the roof and rear gutter last year (see footage here) are back. We’ve also installed one swift and two house martin boxes along the wall from the corner, just in case. Swifts are truly amazing for the distances they travel and the almost fully aerial life they lead. They only touch down to breed and otherwise do everything else – eat, sleep, mate – on the wing. I skimmed this book over the course of two springs and learned that the screaming parties you may, if you are lucky, see tearing down your street are likely to be made up of one- or two-year-old birds. Those tending to nestlings will be quieter. (They’ll be ruthless about displacing house sparrows who try to steal their space, so we hope the questing sparrows we saw at the gutter a few weeks before didn’t get as far as nest-building.)
Beaks agape, swifts catch thousands of insects a day and keep them in a bolus in their throat to regurgitate for chicks. The sharp decline in insect numbers is a major concern, as well as the intensification of agriculture, climate change, and new houses or renovations that block up holes birds traditionally nest in. There are multiple species of swift – in southern Spain one can see five types – and in general they are considered to be of least conservation concern, but these matters are all relative in these days of climate crisis. Evolved to nest in cliffs and trees, they now live alongside humans except in rare places like Abernethy Forest near Inverness in Scotland, where they still nest in trees, in holes abandoned by woodpeckers.
Gibson surveys swifts’ distribution and evolution, key figures in how we came to understand them (Gilbert White et al.), and early landmark studies (e.g. David Lack’s in Oxford). She also takes us through a typical summer swift schedule, and interviews some people who rehabilitate and advocate for swifts. Other chapters see her travelling to Italy, Switzerland and Ireland, the furthest west that swifts breed. If you find a grounded swift, she learns from bitter experience, keep it in a box with air holes and give it water on a cotton bud, but don’t feed or throw it up in the air. To release, take it to an open space and hold it on your hand above your head. If it’s ready to fly, it will. The current push to help swifts is requiring that nest blocks or boxes be incorporated in every new home design. (I signed this petition.)
This is a great source of basic information, though some of the background may be more detailed than the average reader needs. If you’re only going to read one book about swifts, I would be more likely to recommend Charles Foster’s The Screaming Sky, a literary monograph, but do follow up with this one. And soon we’ll also have Mark Cocker’s book about swifts, One Midsummer’s Day, which I hope to get hold of. (Public library)
Favourite lines:
“It is their otherness that makes them so fascinating. They touch our lives briefly and then vanish; this is part of their magic.”
“The brevity of their summer stays enhances their hold on our hearts. The season is short, their bold, wild chases over the roofs and high-pitched screams a fleeting experience: they are a metaphor for life itself. We need to act now to ensure these birds will scythe across our skies forever; to keep them in our streets, to keep them in abundance and common. All of us can do something within the compass of our lives to help tilt the balance back in their favour. If the will to do it is there, it can be done.”
Cuckoo by Wendy Perriam (1991)
(We started hearing cuckoos locally last week!) My second by Perriam, after The Stillness The Dancing, and I’ve amassed quite a pile for afterwards. Frances Parry Jones, in her early thirties, is desperate for a baby but her husband, Charles, doesn’t seem fussed. He goes along with fertility treatment but remains aloof like the posh snob Perriam depicts him to be – the opening line is “Typical of Charles to decant his sperm sample into a Fortnum and Mason’s jar.” Their comfortable home in Richmond is cut off from the messy reality of life, as represented by Frances’s friend Viv and her brood.
Frances soon learns why Charles is unenthusiastic about having children: he already has one, a sullen teenager named Magda who lived with her mother in Hungary but has just arrived in London, “a greedy little cuckoo, commandeering the nest.” Though tempted to accept Magda as a replacement child, Frances just can’t manage it. However, they do find common ground through their japes with Ned, a free spirit Frances meets during her brief time as a taxi driver, and Frances starts to imagine how her life could be different. The portraits and sex scenes alike were a little grotesque here. I had to skim a lot to get through it. Here’s hoping for a better experience with the next one. (Secondhand copy passed on by Liz – thank you!)
Springtime in Britain by Edwin Way Teale (1970)
I discovered Teale a few years ago through the exceptional Autumn Across America, the first volume of a quartet illuminating the nature of the four seasons in the USA; he won a Pulitzer for the final book. Here he applied the same pattern across the pond, taking an 11,000-mile road trip around Britain with his wife Nellie. It’s a delight to see the country through his eyes, particularly places I know well (Devon, the New Forest, Wiltshire/Berkshire) or have visited recently (Northumberland). They find the early spring alarmingly cold and wet, but before long are rewarded with swathes of daffodils and bluebells. Several stake-outs finally result in hearing a nightingale. For the most part, the bird life is completely new to them, but he remarks on what North American species the European birds remind him of. “We felt we would travel to Britain just to hear the song thrush and the blackbird,” he maintains.
Nellie develops pneumonia and has to convalesce in Kent, but otherwise personal matters hardly come into the narrative. Teale is well versed in English nature writing and often references classics by the likes of John Clare and Gilbert White that inspired destinations. (They spend an excessive number of days on their pilgrimage to White’s Selborne.) He also reports on perceived threats of the time, such as small animals getting stuck in littered milk bottles. While it was, inevitably, a little distressing to think of the abundance and diversity he was still experiencing in the late 1960s that has since been lost to development, I mostly found this a pleasant meander. Some things never change: the magic of prehistoric sites; the grossness of some cities (“we forgot the misadventure of Slough”). (Secondhand)
What signs of late spring are you seeing?
Daphne du Maurier Reading Week: Rebecca Reread & Forster Biography
It’s been a couple of years since I took part in HeavenAli’s annual Daphne du Maurier Reading Week (the last time was with a review of My Cousin Rachel; this year, links are being hosted by Liz here).
My last-minute and meagre contribution comprises an attempted reread (which ended up being a skim) of Rebecca for book club last month, and a partial, ongoing read of Margaret Forster’s cracking biography of DDM.
Rebecca (1938)
I must have first read this in my early twenties, and remembered it as spooky and atmospheric. I had completely forgotten that the action opens not at Manderley (despite the exceptionally famous first line, which forms part of a prologue-like first chapter depicting the place empty without its master and mistress to tend to it) but in Monte Carlo, where the unnamed narrator meets Maxim de Winter while she’s a lady’s companion to bossy Mrs. Van Hopper. This section functions to introduce Max and his tragic history via hearsay, but I found the first 60 pages so slow that I had trouble maintaining momentum thereafter, especially through the low-action and slightly repetitive scenes as the diffident second Mrs de Winter explores the house and tries to avoid Mrs Danvers, so I ended up skimming most of it.
However, it was satisfying to rediscover the Jane Eyre parallels and there are deliciously chilling scenes, like with Mrs Danvers at the window and the way she then sabotages her young mistress at the costume ball. This was one of four rereads for book club already this year, which has the benefit of reducing pressure and sometimes increasing the comfort-read factor. We have two Rebeccas in my book club, so it seemed an appropriate choice. Others found the book as gripping as ever, with one member reading it in a day thanks to long hospital waits. Would you believe, I hadn’t at all remembered the truth of what happened to Rebecca! So there was that surprise awaiting me. In our discussion we remarked that though this has the trappings of a romance novel or mystery (e.g. see my dreadful paperback cover above!), it also has enduring literary weight – it won the National Book Award, for instance.
Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster (1993)
I read my first work by Forster, My Life in Houses, last year, and adored it, so the fact that she was the author was all the more reason to read this when I found a copy in a library secondhand book sale. I started it immediately after our meeting about Rebecca, but I find biographies so dense and daunting that I’m still only a third of the way into it even though I’ve been liberally skimming.
So far I have noted: du Maurier’s artistic pedigree, including her grandfather’s authorship of Trilby and her parents meeting through stage acting; her frank engagement in sexual activity, and presumed bisexuality (so far only evident through a requited crush on a teacher at her French finishing school, though perhaps there will be more to come); her first publications of short stories (“inspired by her three favourite short story writers, Maugham, Mansfield and Maupassant”) and the early novels, including one from a male point of view; her close relationship with her father and the crushing blow of his death; her determination to escape London for Cornwall; and her marriage to a soldier and ambivalent motherhood.
The last chapter I got to was all about the success of Rebecca. Though the critical reaction was generally favourable, reviewers also deemed it melodramatic … fair?
#DDMReadingWeek
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 