Review Catch-up: Matt Gaw, Sheila Heti, Liz Jensen (and a Pile of DNFs)
Today I have a travel book about appreciating nature in any weather, a sui generis memoir drawn from a decade of diaries, and an impassioned cry for the environment in the wake of a young adult son’s death.
I’m also bidding farewell to a whole slew of review books that have been hanging around, in some cases, for literal years – I think one is from 2021, and several others from 2022. Putting a book on my “set aside” shelf can be a kiss of death … or I can go back at a better time and end up loving it. It’s hard to predict which will occur. On these, alas, I have had to admit defeat and will pass the books on to other homes.
In All Weathers: A Journey through Rain, Fog, Wind, Ice and Everything in Between by Matt Gaw
Gaw’s two previous nature/travel memoirs, the enjoyable The Pull of the River and Under the Stars, involve gentle rambles through British landscapes, along with commentary on history, nature and science. The remit is much the same here. The book is split into four long sections: “Rain,” “Fog,” “Ice and Snow,” and “Wind.” The adventures always start from and end up at the author’s home in Suffolk, but he ranges as far as the Peak District, Cumbria and the Isle of Skye. Wild swimming is one way in which he experiences places. He notices a lot and describes it all in lovely and relatable prose.
I was tickled by the definitions of, and statistics about, a “white Christmas”: in the UK, it counts if there’s even a single snowflake falling, whereas in the US there has to be 2.5 cm or more of standing snow. (Scotland is most likely to experience white Christmases; it has had 37 since 1960 vs. 26 in northern England. The English snow record is 43 cm, at Buxton and Malham Tarn in 1981 and 2009.) There’s underlying mild dread as he notes how weather patterns have changed and will likely continue changing, ever more dramatically, into his children’s future.
I find I don’t have much to say about this book because it is very nice but doesn’t do anything interesting or tackle anything that isn’t familiar from many other nature books (such as Rain by Melissa Harrison and Forecast by Joe Shute). It’s unfortunate for Gaw that his ideas often seem to have been done before – his book on night-walking, in particular, was eclipsed by several other works on that topic that came out at around the same time. I hope that the next time around he’ll get more editorial guidance to pursue original topics. It might take just a little push to get him to the next level where he could compete with top UK nature writers.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson Books for the free copy for review.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Heti put the contents of ten years of her diaries into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence (including articles), and then ruthlessly culled the results until she had a 25-chapter (no ‘X’) book. You could hardly call it a narrative, yet looking for one is so hardwired that every few sentences you are jolted out of what feels like a mini-story and into something new. Instead, you might think of it as an autobiographical mosaic. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of Heti’s oeuvre, with obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity. But there are also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Tendrils of the everyday poke out here and there as she makes a meal, catches a plane, or buys clothes. Men loom large: explicit accounts of sex with Pavel and Lars (though also Fiona); advising her friend Lemons on his love life. There are also meta musings on what she is trying to achieve with her book projects and on what literature can be.
Grammatically, the document is a lot more interesting than it could be – or than a similar experiment based on my diary would be, for instance – because Heti sometimes writes in incomplete sentences, dropping the initial pronoun; or intersperses rhetorical questions or notes to self in the imperative. So, yes, ‘I’ is a long chapter, but not only because of self-absorbed “I…” statements; there’s also plenty of “If…” and “It’s…” ‘H’ and ‘W’ are longer sections than might be expected because of the questioning mode. But it’s at the sentence level that the book makes the biggest impression: lines group together, complement or contradict each other, or flout coherence by being so merrily à propos of nothing. Here are a few passages to give a flavour:
Am I wasting my time? Am low on money. Am making noodles. Am reading Emma. Am tired and will go to sleep. Am tired today and I feel like I may be getting a cold. Ambivalence gives you something to do, something to think about.
Best not to live too emotionally in the future—it hardly ever comes to pass. Better to be on the outside, where you have always been, all your life, even in school, nothing changes. Better to look outward than inward. Blow jobs and tenderness. Books that fall in between the cracks of all aspects of the human endeavour.
It’s 2:34 every time I check the time these days. It’s 4 p.m. It’s 4:41 now. It’s a fantasy of being saved. It’s a stupid idea. It’s a yellow, cloudy sky. It’s amazing to me how life keeps going. It’s better to work, to go into the underground cave where there are books, than to fritter away time online. It’s crazy that I need all of these mental crutches in order to live. It’s fiction. It’s fine.
Scrambled eggs on toast at Yaddo. Second-guessing everything. Second, he said that no one is buying fiction. See the complexity. See the souls. See what kind of story the book can accommodate, if any. Seeing her for coffee was not so bad.
It’s surprising how much sense a text constructed so apparently haphazardly makes, perhaps because of the same subject and style throughout. Sometimes aphoristic, sometimes poetic (all that anaphora), the book is playful but overall serious about the capturing of a life on the page. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding the one-thing-after-another tedium of chronology. Remarkably, the collage approach produces a more genuine, crystalline vision of the self than precise scenes and cause-and-effect chains ever could. A work of life writing like no other, it must be read in a manner all its own that it teaches you as you go along. I admire it enormously and hope I might write something even half as daring one day.
With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the free copy for review.
Your Wild and Precious Life: On grief, hope and rebellion by Liz Jensen
Jensen’s younger son, Raphaël Coleman, was just 25 when he collapsed while filming a documentary in South Africa and died of a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Raph had been involved in Extinction Rebellion and Jensen is a founding member of Writers Rebel. They both deemed activism “the best antidote to depression.” Her son had been obsessed with wildlife from a young age and was rewilding acres of their land in France, as well as making environmentalist films (he had achieved minor fame as a child actor in Nanny McPhee) and participating in direct action, such as at the Brazilian embassy in London.
For Jensen, the challenge, especially after lockdown confined her to her Copenhagen flat, was to channel grief into further radicalism rather than retreating into herself or giving in to the lure of suicide. She tried to see personal grief as a reminder of ecogrief, and therefore as a spur. One way that she coped was turning towards the supernatural. She continued to hear and speak to Raph, in daily life as well as through a medium, and interpreted bird sightings as signs of his continued presence. An additional point of interest to me was that the author’s husband is Carsten Jensen, the writer of one of my favourite books, We, the Drowned.
This doesn’t particularly stand out among the dozens of bereavement memoirs I’ve read. (It was also remarkably similar to Alexandra Fuller’s Fi, which I’d read not long before.) Perhaps more years of reflection would have helped – Mary Karr advises seven – though I suspect Jensen felt, quite rightly, that given the current state of the environment we have no time to waste. And I have no doubt that the combination of a mother’s love and an ecological conscience will make this book meaningful to many readers.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
And the DNFs…
there are more things, Yara Rodrigues Fowler – I loved Stubborn Archivist so much that I leapt at the chance to read her follow-up, but it was just too dull and involved about Brazilian versus UK politics. Nor did the stylistic tricks feel as novel this time around. I read 66 pages. (Fleet)
The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty – Gunty dazzled critics and prize judges in the USA, winning a National Book Award. I was drawn to her debut novel for the composite picture of the residents of one Indiana apartment building and the strange connections that develop between them over one summer week, including perhaps a murder? Blandine, the central character, is a sort of modern-day mystic but hard to warm to (“She normally tries to avoid saying in which out loud, to minimize the number of people who find her insufferable”), as are all the characters. This felt like try-hard MFA writing. I read 85 pages. (Oneworld)
Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth, Claire Horn – I usually get on well with Wellcome Collection books. I think the problem here was that there was too much material that was familiar to me from having read Womb by Leah Hazard – even the SF-geared stuff about artificial wombs. I read 45 pages. (Profile Books)
Blessings, Chukwuebuka Ibeh – This debut novel has a confident voice, buttressed by determination to reveal what life is like for queer people living in countries where homosexuality is criminalized. Obiefuna is cast out for having a crush on Aboy, his father’s apprentice, even though the two young men share nothing more physical than a significant gaze into each other’s eyes. The strict boarding school his father sends him to is a place of privation, hierarchy, hazing and, I suspect, same-sex experimentation. I found the writing capable but couldn’t get past a sense of dread about what was going to happen. Meanwhile, I didn’t think the alternating chapters from Obiefuna’s mother’s perspective added anything to the narrative. I read 62 pages. (Penguin Viking)
The War for Gloria, Atticus Lish – Lish’s debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, was excellent, but I could never get stuck in to this follow-up, despite the appealing medical theme. When Gloria Goltz is diagnosed with ALS, her 15-year-old son Corey turns to his absent father and others for support. It was also unfortunate that Lish mentions the Ice Bucket Challenge: that was popularized in 2014, whereas the book is set in 2010. I read 75 pages. (Serpent’s Tail)
Snow Widows: Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition through the Eyes of the Women They Left Behind, Katherine MacInnes – I seriously overestimated my interest in polar exploration narratives. MacInnes seems to have done quite a good job of creating novelistic scenes through research, though. I read 35 pages. (William Collins)
The Woodcock, Richard Smyth – I feel particularly bad about this one as I’ve read and enjoyed three of Smyth’s nature books and my husband and I are friendly with him on Twitter. Initially, I got Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent, anyway) vibes from this 1920s-set novel about the upheaval a naturalist and his wife experience when an American whaler and his daughters arrive in their small coastal English town. I read 90 pages. (Fairlight Books)
Better Broken than New: A Fragmented Memoir, Lisa St Aubin de Terán – I accepted this for review because I’d often seen the author’s name on spines in secondhand bookstores but didn’t know anything about her work. The précis of her globe-trotting life is stranger than fiction: marriage to a Venezuelan freedom fighter, managing a sugar plantation in the Andes, living in an Italian palace for 20 years, founding a charity in Mozambique. The vignettes in the early part of the book (e.g., skipping school and going on daytrips by train at age eight) are entertaining, if written with blithe disregard for a reader’s need for context or perspective. But the fragmented nature means it all feels as random as life, without the necessary authorial shaping. The publisher has done her a disservice as she seeks to relaunch her career by not proofreading properly: Many small errors slipped through the net, making this look like a sloppy manuscript. The worst happen to be other authors’ names: Jane ‘Austin’, ‘Kahil’ Gibran, Virginia ‘Wolfe’. Are you kidding me?! I read 53 pages. (Amaurea Press)
Nonfiction Review Books Roundup: Hay, Hope et al., Lee, Long, McLaren, Zuckerman
I’m continuing with the Nonfiction November focus by catching up on six nonfiction review books I’ve been sent over the last half a year. We’ve got a record of elderly parents’ decline, letters and poems written about the climate crisis, a family memoir set between Taiwan and Canada, a widow’s mushroom-hunting quest, a work of ecotheology that reflects on travels in the Galápagos Islands, and a defense of an entirely secular basis for morality. You can’t say I don’t read a variety, even within nonfiction! See if one or more of these tempts you.
All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir by Elizabeth Hay
Gordon and Jean Hay stumbled into their early nineties in an Ottawa retirement home starting in 2009. Elizabeth Hay is one of four children, but caregiving fell to her for one reason and another, and it was a fraught task because of her parents’ prickly personalities: Jean was critical and thrifty to the point of absurdity, spooning thick mold off apple sauce before serving it and needling Elizabeth for dumping perfectly good chicken juice a year before; Gordon had a terrible temper and a history of corporal punishment of his children and of his students when he was a school principal. Jean’s knee surgery and subsequent infection finally put paid to their independence; her mind was never the same and she could no longer paint.
There are many harsh moments in this memoir, but almost as many wry ones, with Hay picking just the right anecdotes to illustrate her parents’ behavior and the shifting family dynamic. She never looks away, no matter how hard it all gets. Her father’s rage against the dying of the light contrasts with her mother’s fade into confusion – lightened by the surprisingly poetic turns of phrase she came out with despite her dementia and aphasia. The title phrase, for instance, was her attempt at “all things considered.” I would wholeheartedly recommend this to readers of Hay’s novels, but anyone can appreciate the picture of complicated love and grief. (See also Susan’s review.)
With thanks to MacLehose Press for the free copy for review.
Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis, edited by Anna Hope et al.
Culture Declares Emergency launched in April to bring the arts into the conversation about the climate emergency. Letters to the Earth compiles 100 short pieces by known and unknown names alike. Alongside published authors, songwriters, professors and politicians are lots of ordinary folk, including children as young as seven. The brief was broad: to write a letter in response to environmental crisis, whether to or from the Earth, to future generations (there are wrenching pieces written to children: “What can I say, now that it’s too late? … that I’m sorry, that I tried,” writes Stuart Capstick), to the government or to other species.
There are certainly relatable emotions here, especially the feeling of helplessness. “We take the train, go vegan, refuse plastic, buy less and less. But that is tiny. We are tiny,” novelist Jo Baker writes. I loved retired bishop Richard Holloway’s wry letter calling the author of Genesis to account for unhelpful language of dominion, Rob Cowen’s poem to a starling, and Anna Hope’s essay about parenting in a time of uncertainty. Unfortunately, much of the rest is twee or haranguing, e.g. “Forest fires are scorching INNOCENT wildlife. Plastic is strangling INNOCENT turtles and dolphins,” a 12-year-old writes. This was put together in a matter of months, and it shows. There is not enough tonal variety, a lot of overwriting has crept through, and errors, especially in the kids’ work, remain uncorrected. Perhaps six to 10 pieces stood out to me overall. I’d recommend the Extinction Rebellion handbook instead.
With thanks to Alison Menzies / William Collins for the free copy for review.
Two Trees Make a Forest: On Memory, Migration and Taiwan by Jessica J. Lee
I loved Turning, Lee’s 2017 memoir about swimming in one of Berlin’s lakes per week for a year, so I jumped at the chance to read her follow-up, which delves into her maternal line’s history in Taiwan. She travels to Taipei for three months to brush up on her Chinese, write and hike. Interspersed with the lush descriptions of her walks are reflections on Taiwan’s history and on the hidden aspects of her grandfather Gong’s past that only came to light after Lee’s grandmother, Po, died and she and her mother discovered an autobiographical letter he’d written before he drifted into dementia. Nature, language, history and memory flow together in a delicate blend of genres – “I moved from the human timescale of my family’s story through green and unfurling dendrological time,” she writes.
This has got to be one of the most striking title and cover combinations of the year. Along with Chinese characters, the book includes some looping text and Nico Taylor’s maps and illustrations of Taiwanese flora and fauna. While you will likely get more out of this if you have a particular interest in Asian history, languages and culture, it’s impressive how Lee brings the different strands of her story together to form a hybrid nature memoir that I hope will be recognized by next year’s Wainwright Prize and Young Writer of the Year Award shortlists. She’d also be a perfect New Networks for Nature speaker.
With thanks to Virago for the free copy for review.
The Way through the Woods: Of Mushrooms and Mourning by Long Lit Woon
[Trans. from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland]
I couldn’t resist the sound of a bereavement memoir crossed with a mushroom hunting guide. When Long met her husband, Eiolf Olsen, she was an 18-year-old Malaysian exchange student in Stavanger, Norway. Meeting Eiolf changed the whole course of her life, keeping her in Europe for good; decades later, her life changed forever once again when Eiolf dropped dead at work one morning. “If anyone had told me that mushrooms would be my lifeline, the thing that would help me back onto my feet and quite literally back onto life’s track, I would have rolled my eyes. What had mushrooms to do with mourning?” she writes.
The answer to that rhetorical question is nothing much, at least not inherently, so this ends up becoming a book of two parts, with the bereavement strand (printed in green and in a different font – green is for grief? I suppose) engaging me much more than the mushroom-hunting one, which takes her to Central Park and the annual Telluride, Colorado mushroom festival as well as to Norway’s woods again and again – “In Norway, outdoor life is tantamount to a religion.” But the quest for wonder and for meaning is a universal one. In addition, if you’re a mushroom fan you’ll find gathering advice, tasting notes, and even recipes. I fancy trying the “mushroom bacon” made out of oven-dried shiitakes.
With thanks to Scribe for the free copy for review.
God Unbound: Theology in the Wild by Brian McLaren
McLaren was commissioned to launch a series that was part travel guide, part spiritual memoir and part theological reflection. Specifically, he was asked to write about the Galápagos Islands because he’d been before and they were important to him. He joins a six-day eco-cruise that tours around the island chain off Ecuador, with little to do except observe the birds, tortoises and iguanas, and swim with fish and sea turtles. For him this is a peaceful, even sacred place that reminds him of the beauty that still exists in the world despite so much human desecration. Although he avoids using his phone except to quickly check in with his wife, modernity encroaches unhelpfully through a potential disaster with his laptop.
I was surprised to see that McLaren leaves the Galápagos at the midpoint – whatever could fill the rest of the book, I wondered? He starts by reassessing Darwin, so often painted as a villain by Evangelical Christianity but actually a model of close, loving attention to nature. He also recalls how some of his most intense spiritual experiences have arisen from time in nature. McLaren’s books have been pivotal to my spiritual journey as we’ve both gradually become more liberal and environmentalist. His definition of God might horrify traditionalists, but holds appeal for me: “a centering singularity whose gravity holds me in insistent orbit, pulling me deeper into mystery, pondering who I am and what my life means.” This is an unusual but gently entrancing book full of photos and quotes from other thinkers including John Muir, Pope Francis and Richard Rohr. It’s an ideal introduction to ecotheology.
With thanks to Canterbury Press for the free copy for review.
What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life by Phil Zuckerman
From one end of the spectrum (progressive Christianity) to the other (atheism). Here’s a different perspective from a sociology professor at California’s Pitzer College. Zuckerman’s central argument is that humanism and free choice can fuel ethical behavior; since there’s no proof of God’s existence and theists have such a wide range of beliefs, it’s absurd to slap a “because God says so” label on our subjective judgments. Morals maintain the small communities our primate ancestors evolved into, with specific views (such as on homosexuality) a result of our socialization. Alas, the in-group/out-group thinking from our evolutionary heritage is what can lead to genocide. Instead of thinking in terms of ‘evil’, though, Zuckerman prefers Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen’s term, “empathy erosion.”
To tackle violent crime, Zuckerman contends, we need a more equal society, with the Scandinavian countries a model of how to achieve that through higher taxes, social services and the rehabilitation of prisoners. He uses a lot of relatable examples from history and from his own experience, as well as theoretical situations, to think through practical morality. I found his indictment of American Christianity accurate – how does it make sense for people who say they follow the way of Jesus to fight against equality, tolerance and scientific advances and instead advocate guns, the death penalty and Trump? Well, indeed.
It might seem odd for me to recommend this alongside the McLaren, but there is much to be gained from both viewpoints. Zuckerman’s work overlaps a fair bit with another I’ve read on the topic, Richard Holloway’s Godless Morality – even a bishop agrees we needn’t take our societal ethics straight from the Bible! I can’t go along fully with Zuckerman because I think progressive religion has been and can continue to be a force for good, but I would agree that atheists can be just as moral as people of faith – and often more so.
With thanks to Counterpoint Press for sending a proof copy for review.
Would you be interested in reading one or more of these?
New Networks for Nature 2019
This past weekend was my fifth time attending Nature Matters, the annual New Networks for Nature conference. I’ve written about it on the blog a few times before: last year’s 10th anniversary meeting in Stamford, plus once when there was a particular focus on nature poetry and another time when it was held in Cambridge. This year the theme was “Time for Nature” and the conference was held at the very posh St Peter’s School in York, which dates back to 627 and resembles an Oxford college. We have close friends in York, but our timing was off in that they were in Italy this week. However, they sent us a key to their house and let us stay there while they were away, which saved us having to book an Airbnb or guest house.
York street scene. Photo by Chris Foster.
What makes Nature Matters so special is its interdisciplinary nature: visual artists, poets, musicians, writers, activists, academics and conservationists alike attend and speak. So although the event might seem geared more towards my ecologist husband, there’s always plenty to interest me, too. In particular, I enjoyed the panel discussions on nature in children’s books and new directions for nature writing. This year the organizers were determined to make the speakers’ roster more diverse, so some panels were three-quarters or wholly female, and four people of color appeared on the stage. (That might not seem like a great record, but in a field so dominated by white males it’s at least a start.)
The Friday was a particularly brilliant day, the best day of sessions I can remember in any year. After a presentation by wildlife photographer and painter Robert Fuller, the first session was “Nature in Deep Time,” featuring three archaeologists from northern universities who talked about cave art, woodcraft, and evidence of rapid climate change. “Taking a long view, we get a very different perspective,” Professor Terry O’Connor of the University of York observed. The topic felt timely and tied in with a number of books that have come out this year, including Time Song by Julia Blackburn, Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie and Underland by Robert Macfarlane.
Next up was “Now or Never – Fighting for Nature,” featuring three female activists: Ruth Peacey, a filmmaker for BBC Wildlife whose subjects have included bird persecution in the Mediterranean; Sally Goldsmith, a campaigner who deployed poems and songs against the mass street tree-cutting campaign in Sheffield and helped save some 10,000 trees; and Hatti Owens, an environmental lawyer with ClientEarth who has partnered with Extinction Rebellion. The panel chair and one of this year’s organizers, writer Amy-Jane Beer, noted that activism is no longer radical, but an obligation.
Either side of lunch, Dr. Sara Goodacre of the University of Nottingham SpiderLab demonstrated how money spiders walk on water and “sail” using two raised legs to cope with wind; and Dr. Geoff Oxford of the University of York told the successful conservation story of the tansy beetle, which has recently been celebrated with a crowdfunded wall mural on the corner of York’s Queen Street and the Tansy Beetle Bar at the Rattle Owl restaurant on Micklegate. After the day’s proceedings, we joined a general movement over to see the mural and toast the bar’s grand opening.
Tansy beetle mural. Photo by Chris Foster.
The children’s books session featured Anneliese Emmans Dean, who gave very entertaining performances of her poems on insects and birds; Gill Lewis, who writes middle grade novels that introduce children to environmental issues; and Yuval Zommer, who writes and illustrates nonfiction guides with titles like The Big Book of Bugs and The Big Book of Blooms. Panel chair Ben Hoare, another of this year’s organizers and a former editor of BBC Wildlife magazine, concluded that children’s books should be joyous and not preachy.
There was still more to come on this jam-packed Friday! “The Funny Thing about Nature…” was essentially three stand-up comedy routines by Simon Watt, creator of the Ugly Animal Appreciation Society; Helen Pilcher, who has written a speculative book about the science of de-extinction; and Hugh Warwick, an author and hedgehog enthusiast. The language got a little crass in this session, but all three speakers were genuinely funny. As Watt put it, “Sincerity should not be our only weapon” in the fight for nature; he’s trying to reach the people who aren’t “already on our side.”
After free gin and tonics provided by local producers SloeMotion, we had the absolute treat of a performance by Kitty Macfarlane, whose folk songs are inspired by the natural world. The title track of her 2018 album Namer of Clouds is about Luke Howard, who created the naming system for clouds (cumulus, stratus, and so on) in 1802. Other songs are about eels, a starling murmuration and the Sardinian tradition of weaving sea silk. She often incorporates field recordings of birdsong, and writes about her native Somerset Levels. Her voice is gorgeously clear, reminding me of Emily Smith’s. We bought her album and EP at once.
Saturday was a slightly less memorable day, with sessions on insects and the uplands, an interview with clean rivers campaigner (and former pop star) Feargal Sharkey, and the short film Raising the Hare by Bevis Bowden. Most engaging for me was a four-person discussion on new directions for nature writing, chaired by author and academic Richard Kerridge. Katharine Norbury is editing the Women on Nature anthology, which I have supported via Unbound; it’s due out next year. She went all the way back to Julian of Norwich and has included novelists, poets, gardeners and farmers – lots of women who wouldn’t have called themselves ‘nature writers’.
L to R: Kerridge, Norbury, Sethi, McKenzie and Smyth. Photo by Chris Foster.
Anita Sethi, a journalist from Manchester, speaks out about inequality of access to nature due to race, gender and class. She read part of her essay “On Class and the Countryside” from the Common People anthology edited by Kit de Waal. Zakiya McKenzie, a London-born Jamaican, was a Forest England writer in residence and founded the Green & Black project to give underprivileged children trips to the countryside. Richard Smyth, the author of A Sweet, Wild Note, spoke of the need for robust nature writing – and criticism. He stressed that it’s not good enough for nature writing to be “charming” or “lyrical”; it’s too important to be merely pleasant. I would have liked to hear him explore this more and for it to turn into more of a debate, but the discussion drifted into praise for experimental and speculative forms.
Peregrine on York Minster. Photo by Chris Foster.
Finishing off a Bettys lunch with cake and a mocha. Photo by Chris Foster.
There’s something for everyone at this conference; some of the elements that I didn’t get on with or found pretentious were others’ highlights, so it’s all a matter of taste. Spending time in York, one of my favorite cities, was an added bonus. We managed to fit in a trip to the National Railway Museum and lunch at Bettys on the Sunday before our train back.
Next year’s conference will be at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, 10–12 July. I’ve never been to Norwich so look forward to visiting it and attending the full conference once again. It’s always a fascinating, inspiring weekend with a wide range of speakers and ideas.
Would any of the conference’s themes or events have interested you?
Book Serendipity, 2019 Second Half
I call it serendipitous when two or more books that I’m reading at the same time or in quick succession have something pretty bizarre in common. Because I have so many books on the go at once – usually between 10 and 20 – I guess I’m more prone to such incidents. I post these occasional reading coincidences on Twitter. What’s the weirdest one you’ve had lately? (The following are in rough chronological order.)
[Previous 2019 Book Serendipity posts from April and July.]
- Two novels in which a character attempts to glimpse famous mountains out of a train window but it’s so rainy they can barely be seen: The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma and The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann.
- Ex-husbands move from England to California and remarry younger women in The Stillness The Dancing by Wendy Perriam and Heat Wave by Penelope Lively.
References to Edgar Allan Poe in both Timbuktu by Paul Auster and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma.
- An account of Percy Shelley’s funeral pyre in both The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma and Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson.
- Mentions of barn owls being killed by eating poisoned rats in Owl Sense by Miriam Darlington and Homesick by Catrina Davies.
- Miriam Rothschild is mentioned in Irreplaceable by Julian Hoffman and An Obsession with Butterflies by Sharman Apt Russell.
- Gorse is thrown on bonfires in Homesick by Catrina Davies and The Stillness The Dancing by Wendy Perriam.
A character has a nice cup of Ovaltine in Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym and The Stillness The Dancing by Wendy Perriam.
- I started two books with “Bloom” in the title on the same day.
Two books I finished about the same time conclude by quoting or referring to the T. S. Eliot lines about coming back to the place where you started and knowing it for the first time (Owl Sense by Miriam Darlington and This Is Not a Drill, the Extinction Rebellion handbook).
- Three books in which the narrator wonders whether to tell the truth slant (quoting Emily Dickinson, consciously or not): The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and The Hiding Game by Naomi Wood.
- On the same day, I saw mentions of crullers in both On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming and The Dutch House by Ann Patchett.
- There are descriptions of starling murmurations over Brighton Pier in both Irreplaceable by Julian Hoffman and Expectation by Anna Hope. (Always brings this wonderful Bell X1 song to mind!)
- I was reading The Outermost House by Henry Beston and soon after found an excerpt from it in Irreplaceable by Julian Hoffman; later I started The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland, whose title is a deliberate tip of the hat to Beston.
At a fertility clinic, the author describes a pair of transferred embryos as “two sequins of light” (in On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming) and “two points of light” (in Expectation by Anna Hope).
- Mentions of azolla ferns in Time Song by Julia Blackburn and Bloom (aka Slime) by Ruth Kassinger.
Incorporation of a mother’s brief memoir in the author’s own memoir in On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming and All Things Consoled by Elizabeth Hay.
- Artist mothers in On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming, All Things Consoled by Elizabeth Hay, and Expectation by Anna Hope.
- Missionary fathers in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and The Wind that Lays Waste by Selva Almada.
- Twins, one who’s disabled from a birth defect and doesn’t speak much, in Golden Child by Claire Adam and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
An Irish-American family in a major East Coast city where the teenage boy does construction work during the summers in Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane and The Dutch House by Ann Patchett.
- SPOILERS: A woman with terminal cancer refuses treatment so she can die on her own terms and is carried out into her garden in Expectation by Anna Hope and A Reckoning by May Sarton.
- A 27-year-old professor has a student tearfully confide in her in Crow Lake by Mary Lawson and The Small Room by May Sarton.
- Reading The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom at the same time as The Dutch House by Ann Patchett.
“I was nineteen years old and an idiot” (City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert); “I was fifteen and generally an idiot” (The Dutch House, Ann Patchett).
- Mentions of a conjuring tricks book in Time Song by Julia Blackburn and Fifth Business by Robertson Davies.
- A teen fleeces their place of employment in Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore.
- A talking parrot with a religious owner in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.
- Pictorial book serendipity: three books I was reading, and another waiting in the wings, had a red, black and white color scheme.
Kripalu (a Massachusetts retreat center) is mentioned in Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene.
- The character of Netty Quelch in Robertson Davies’s The Manticore reminds me of Fluffy in Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House.
- The artist Chardin is mentioned in How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton and Varying Degrees of Hopelessness by Lucy Ellmann.
- A Czech grand/father who works in a plant nursery in the opening story of Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever and Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter.
- The author was in Eva Le Gallienne’s NYC theatre company (Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention and various works by May Sarton, also including a biography of her).
Gillian Rose’s book Love’s Work is mentioned in both Notes Made while Falling by Jenn Ashworth and My Year Off by Robert McCrum. (I will clearly have to read the Rose!)
- Sarah Baartman (displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus”) is mentioned in Shame on Me by Tessa McWatt and Hull by Xandria Phillips.
This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
“There is no planet B. This is where we will live, or go extinct as a species.”
I’m periodically prone to melancholy musings on the impending end of the world (like here). Reading this punchy collection of 35 essays was a way of taking those feelings seriously and putting them to constructive use. You’ve likely heard of Extinction Rebellion: a peaceful environmental activism movement that began in the UK and has now spread worldwide, it demands that governments face the facts about the climate crisis and do something about it, now. Fittingly, the book is divided into two sections: “Tell the Truth” plainly sets out the basics of climate breakdown and the effects we expect to see, including the disproportionate toll it will have on the poor and marginalized, and on island nations like the Maldives; “Act Now” is a practical call to arms with pieces by politicians, economists and protest organizers.
Not surprisingly, experts are calling for radical societal change: we must move away from the car culture; we cannot continue to equate success with economic growth; we must reorganize how cities function. “We are not looking at adjustments any more. It’s a complete overhaul,” Leeds University’s Professor of Urban Futures, Paul Chatterton, writes. But what did surprise me about reading This Is Not a Drill is that it’s not depressing. It’s actually rather exciting to see how many great minds and ordinary folk are aware of the climate crisis and working to mitigate it. We might not have political will at the highest levels, but grassroots movements involving just 3% of the citizenry have been shown to effect social change. I want to be part of that 3%. After I finished reading I signed up to ER’s mailing list, and though it’s not at all in my comfort zone, I’m going to consider taking part in their next public disruption.
I came away from this book with a feeling of camaraderie: we’re all in this together, and so we can only tackle it together. Post-apocalyptic fiction envisions violent, everyone-for-themselves scenarios, but it doesn’t have to be that way. ER demonstrations are said to be characterized by energy, music, laughter and good food. One word keeps appearing throughout the essays: “love.” There is righteous anger here, yes, but that’s outweighed by love – love of our planet, our only home, and the creatures it nurtures; love of the human race, the family that encompasses us all. While the authors are not unanimously optimistic, there is a sense that there is dignity in working towards positive change, whether or not we ultimately succeed. Plus, “It might just work,” former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams concludes in his afterword.
If you feel hopeless when you think about the state of the environment, I encourage you to pick this up, even if you only skim through and read a handful of the essays. The handbook achieves a fine balance between academics and laypeople; forthright assertions and creative ideas; grief and enthusiasm. It’s also strikingly designed, with the pink cover matching the ER boat and heavy use of the sorts of recurring icons and slogans you might recognize from their banners: skulls and hourglasses share space with bees, birds, butterflies and a Tree of Life. My only real quibble is that I would have liked a short bio of each contributor, either at the close of each essay or in an appendix, because while a few of these authors are household names, many are not, and it would be useful to know their bona fides.
Don’t miss these pieces: “Climate Sorrow” by psychotherapist Susie Orbach, “A Political View” by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, “A New Economics” by Oxbridge economist Kate Raworth, and “The Civil Resistance Model” by Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion.
Some favorite lines:
“Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.” (from “Survival of the Fittest,” by American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff)
“It’s interesting and important to note that the people who are most effective are often the least attached to the effectiveness of their actions. Being detached from the outcome, and in love with the principles and the process, can help mitigate against burn-out.” (from “The Civil Resistance Model” by Roger Hallam)
“We may or may not escape a breakdown. But we can escape the toxicity of the mindset that has brought us here. And in so doing we can recover a humanity that is capable of real resilience.” (from the Afterword by Rowan Williams)
“if you are alive at this moment in history, it is because you are here to do a job. So what is your place in these times?” (from “What Is Your Place in These Times?” by Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion)
My rating:
This Is Not a Drill was published on June 13th. My thanks to Penguin Random House for the free copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 