Miscellaneous #ReadIndies Reviews: Mostly Poetry + Brown, Sands
Catching up on a few final #ReadIndies contributions in early March! Short responses to some indie reading I did from my shelves over the course of last month.
Bloodaxe Books:
Parables & Faxes by Gwyneth Lewis (1995)
I was surprised to discover this was actually my fourth book by Lewis, a bilingual Welsh author: two memoirs, one of depression and one about marriage; and now two poetry collections. The table of contents suggest there are only 16 poems in the book, but most of the titles are actually headings for sections of anywhere between 6 and 16 separate poems. She ranges widely at home and abroad, as in “Welsh Espionage” and the “Illinois Idylls.” “I shall taste the tang / of travel on the atlas of my tongue,” Lewis writes, an example of her alliteration and sibilance. She’s also big on slant and internal rhymes – less so on end rhymes, though there are some. Medieval history and theology loom large, with the Annunciation featuring more than once. I couldn’t tell you now what that many of the poems are about, but Lewis’s telling is always memorable.
Sample lines:
For the one
who said yes,
how many
said no?
…
But those who said no
for ever knew
they were damned
to the daily
as they’d disallowed
reality’s madness,
its astonishment.
(from “The ‘No’ Madonnas,” part of “Parables & Faxes”)
(Secondhand purchase – Westwood Books, Sedbergh) 
&
Fields Away by Sarah Wardle (2003)
Wardle’s was a new name for me. I saw two of her collections at once and bought this one as it was signed and the themes sounded more interesting to me. It was her first book, written after inpatient treatment for schizophrenia. Many of the poems turn on the contrast between city (London Underground) and countryside (fields and hedgerows). Religion, philosophy, and Greek mythology are common points of reference. End rhymes can be overdone here, and I found a few of the poems unsubtle (“Hubris” re: colonizers and “How to Be Bad” about daily acts of selfishness vs. charity). However, there are enough lovely ones to compensate: “Flight,” “Word Tasting” (mimicking a wine tasting), “After Blake” (reworking “Jerusalem” with “And will chainsaws in modern times / roar among England’s forests green?”), “Translations” and “Word Hill.”
Favourite lines:
(oh, but the last word is cringe!)
Catkin days and hedgerow hours
fleet like shafts of chapel sun.
Childhood in a cobwebbed bower
guards a treasure chest of fun.
(from “Age of Awareness”)
(Secondhand purchase – Carlisle charity shop) 
Carcanet Press:
Tripping Over Clouds by Lucy Burnett (2019)
The title is a setup for the often surrealist approach, but where another Carcanet poet, Caroline Bird, is warm and funny with her absurdism, Burnett is just … weird. Like, I’d get two stanzas into a poem and have no idea what was going on or what she was trying to say because of the incomplete phrases and non-standard punctuation. Still, this is a long enough collection that there are a good number of standouts about nature and relationships, and alliteration and paradoxes are used to good effect. I liked the wordplay in “The flight of the guillemet” and the off-beat love poem “Beer for two in Brockler Park, Berlin.” The noteworthy Part III is composed of 34 ekphrastic poems, each responding to a different work of (usually modern) art.
Favourite lines:
This is a place of uncalled-for space
and by the grace of the big sky,
and the serrated under-silhouette of Skye,
an invitation to the sea unfolds
to come and dine with mountain.
(from “Big Sands”)
(New (bargain) purchase – Waterstones website) 
&
The Met Office Advises Caution by Rebecca Watts (2016)
The problem with buying a book mostly for the title is that often the contents don’t live up to it. (Some of my favourite ever titles – An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam – were of books I couldn’t get through). There are a lot of nature poems here, which typically would be enough to get me on board, but few of them stood out to me. Trees, bats, a dead hare on the road; maps, Oxford scenes, Christmas approaching. All nice enough; maybe it’s just that the poems don’t seem to form a cohesive whole. Easy to say why I love or hate a poet’s style; harder to explain indifference.
Sample lines:
Branches lash out; old trees lie down and don’t get up.
A wheelie bin crosses the road without looking,
lands flat on its face on the other side, spilling its knowledge.
(from the title poem)
(New (bargain) purchase – Amazon with Christmas voucher)
Faber:
Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown (2020)
The title signals right away how these linked autobiographical essays split the ‘I’ from the body – Brown resents the fact that disability limits her experience. Oxygen deprivation at their premature birth led to her twin sister’s death and left her with cerebral palsy severe enough that she generally uses a wheelchair. In Bologna for a travel fellowship, she writes, “There are so many places that I want to be, but I can’t take my body anywhere. But I must take my body everywhere.” A medieval city is particularly unfriendly to those with mobility challenges, but chronic pain and others’ misconceptions (e.g. she overheard a guy on her college campus lamenting that she’d die a virgin) follow her everywhere.
A poet, Brown earned minor fame for her first collection, which was about historical policies of enforced sterilization for the disabled and mentally ill in her home state of Virginia. She is also a Catholic convert. I appreciated her exploration of poetry and faith as ways of knowing: “both … a matter of attending to the world: of slowing my pace, and focusing my gaze, and quieting my impatient, indignant, protesting heart long enough for the hard shell of the ordinary to break open and reveal the stranger, subtler singing underneath.” This is part of a terrific run of three pieces, the others about sex as a disabled person and the odious conservatism of the founders of Liberty University. Also notable: “Fragments, Never Sent,” letters to her twin; and “Frankenstein Abroad,” about rereading this novel of ostracism at its 200th anniversary. (Secondhand purchase – Amazon)
New River Books:
The Hedgehog Diaries: A Story of Faith, Hope and Bristle by Sarah Sands (2023)
Reasons for reading: 1) I’d enjoyed Sands’s The Interior Silence and 2) Who can resist a book about hedgehogs? She covers a brief slice of 2021–22 when her aged father was dying in a care home. Having found an ill hedgehog in her garden and taken it to a local sanctuary, she developed an interest in the plight of hedgehogs. In surveys they’re the UK’s favourite mammal, but it’s been years since I saw one alive. Sands brings an amateur’s enthusiasm to her research into hedgehogs’ place in literature, philosophy and science. She visits rescue centres, meets activists in Oxfordshire and Shropshire who have made hedgehog welfare a local passion, and travels to Uist to see where hedgehogs were culled in 2004 to protect ground-nesting birds’ eggs. The idea is to link personal brushes with death with wider threats of extinction. Unfortunately, Sands’s lack of expertise is evident. This was well-meaning, but inconsequential and verging on twee. (Christmas gift from my wishlist) 
The 2024 Releases I’ve Read So Far
I happen to have read eight pre-release books so far, all of them for paid review; mostly for Shelf Awareness, with one for Foreword. (I also have proof copies of upcoming novels by Tania James, Margot Livesey, Sigrid Nunez and Sarah Perry on the shelf, but haven’t managed to start on them yet.) I’ve given review excerpts, links where available, and ratings below to try to pique your interest. Early in January I’ll follow up with a list of my dozen Most Anticipated titles for the coming year.
My top recommendations so far:
(in alphabetical order)
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali [Jan. 16, Alice James Books]: In this poised debut collection by a Muslim poet, spiritual enlightenment is a female, embodied experience, mediated by matriarchs. Ali’s ambivalence towards faith is clear in alliteration-laden verse that recalls Kaveh Akbar’s. Wordplay, floral metaphors, and multiple ghazals make for dazzling language. 
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley [Feb. 27, MCD]: A bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a unique structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world. Crosley’s apartment was burgled exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss. Investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her.
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj [Jan. 16, HarperVia]: Darraj’s second novel-in-stories is a sparkling composite portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. Across nine stellar linked stories, she explores the complex relationships between characters divided by—or connected despite—class, language, and traditional values. The book depicts the variety of immigrant and second-generation experience, especially women’s. 
The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton [April 9, Scribner]: Many use the words “habit” and “ritual” interchangeably, but the Harvard Business School behavioral scientist argues convincingly that they are very different. While a habit is an automatic, routine action, rituals are “emotional catalysts that energize, inspire, and elevate us.” He presents an engaging and commonsense précis of his research, making a strong case for rituals’ importance in the personal and professional spheres as people mark milestones, form relationships, or simply “savor the experiences of everyday life.”
Other 2024 releases I’ve read:
(in publication date order)
House Cat by Paul Barbera [Jan. 2, Thames & Hudson]: The Australian photographer Paul Barbera’s lavish art book showcases eye-catching architecture and the pets inhabiting these stylish spaces. Whether in a Revolutionary War-era restoration or a modernist show home, these cats preside with a befitting dignity. (Shelf Awareness review forthcoming)
The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo [Feb. 13, Henry Holt/Quercus]: Choo’s third novel is steeped in Chinese folklore, like her previous work, this time with a focus on tantalizing stories related to foxes, which were often worshiped at village shrines in China. Two tandem searches ramp up the level of suspense: in the winter of 1908 in Manchuria, in northeast China, a detective investigates a series of unexplained deaths; at the same time, a fox-woman masquerading as a servant plots vengeance against the man who murdered her child.
The Only Way Through Is Out by Suzette Mullen [Feb. 13, University of Wisconsin Press]: A candid, inspirational memoir traces the events leading to her midlife acceptance of her lesbian identity and explores the aftermath of her decision to leave her marriage and build “a life where I would choose desire over safety.” The book ends on a perfect note as Mullen attends her first Pride festival aged 56. “It’s never too late” is the triumphant final line. (Foreword review forthcoming)
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le [March 5, Knopf]: A fearless poetry debut prioritizes language and voice to explore inherited wartime trauma and expose anti-Asian racism. Each poem is titled after a rhetorical strategy or analytical mode. Anaphora is one sonic technique used to emphasize the points. Language and race are intertwined. This is a prophet’s fervent truth-telling. High-concept and unapologetic, this collection from a Dylan Thomas Prize winner pulsates. (Shelf Awareness review forthcoming) 
Currently reading:
(in release date order; all for Shelf Awareness review)
God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music by Leah Payne [Jan. 4, Oxford University Press]: “traces the history and trajectory of CCM in America and, in the process, demonstrates how the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped—and continue to shape—conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism.”
Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems, A Graywolf Anthology [Jan. 23, Graywolf Press]: “Graywolf poets have selected fifty poems by Graywolf poets, offering insightful prose reflections on their selections. What arises is a choral arrangement of voices and lineages across decades, languages, styles, and divergences, inspiring a shared vision for the future.”
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl [April 30, Random House]: “When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual gift: a one-way plane ticket, and a note reading ‘Go to Paris’. But Stella is hardly cut out for adventure … When her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes.”
Will you look out for one or more of these?
Any other 2024 reads you can recommend?
That’s it for me until later next week when I start in on my year-end round-ups (DNFs, miscellaneous superlatives, books of the year, and final statistics). Merry Christmas!
Nonfiction November Book Pairings: Hardy’s Wives, Rituals, and Romcoms
Liz is hosting this week of Nonfiction November. For this prompt, the idea is to choose a nonfiction book and pair it with a fiction title with which it has something in common.
I came up with three based on my recent reading:
Thomas Hardy’s Wives
On my pile for Novellas in November was a tiny book I’ve owned for nearly two decades but not read until now. It contains some of the backstory for an excellent historical novel I reviewed earlier in the year.
Some Recollections by Emma Hardy
&
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry
The manuscript of Some Recollections is one of the documents Thomas Hardy found among his first wife’s things after her death in 1912. It is a brief (15,000-word) memoir of her early life from childhood up to her marriage – “My life’s romance now began.” Her middle-class family lived in Plymouth and moved to Cornwall when finances were tight. (Like the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice, you look at the house they lived in, and read about the servants they still employed, and think, “impoverished,” seriously?!) “Though trifling as they may seem to others all these memories are dear to me,” she writes. It’s true that most of these details seem inconsequential, of folk historical value but not particularly illuminating about the individual.
An exception is her account of her dealings with fortune tellers, who often went out of their way to give her good – and accurate – predictions, such as that she would marry a writer. It’s interesting to set this occult belief against the traditional Christian faith she espouses in her concluding paragraph, in which she insists an “Unseen Power of great benevolence directs my ways.” The other point of interest is her description of her first meeting with Hardy, who was sent to St. Juliot, where she was living with her parson brother-in-law and sister, as an architect’s assistant to begin repairs on the church. “I thought him much older than he was,” she wrote. As editor Robert Gittings notes, Hardy made corrections to the manuscript and in some places also changed the sense. Here Hardy gave proof of an old man’s continued vanity by adding “he being tired” after that line … but then partially rubbing it out. (Secondhand, Books for Amnesty, Reading, 2004) [64 pages]
The Chosen contrasts Emma’s idyllic mini memoir with her bitterly honest journals – Hardy read but then burned these, so Lowry had to recreate their entries based on letters and tone. But Some Recollections went on to influence his own autobiography, and to be published in a stand-alone volume by Oxford University Press. Gittings introduces the manuscript (complete with Emma’s misspellings and missing punctuation) and appends a selection of Hardy’s late poems based on his first marriage – this verse, too, is central to The Chosen.
Another recent nonfiction release on this subject matter that I learned about from a Shiny New Books review is Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Poetry by Mark Ford. I’d also like to read the forthcoming Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses by Paula Byrne (1 February 2024, William Collins).
Rituals
The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton
&
The Rituals by Rebecca Roberts
Last month I reviewed this lovely Welsh novel about a woman who is an independent celebrant, helping people celebrate landmark events in their lives or cope with devastating losses by commemorating them through secular rituals.
Coming out in April 2024, The Ritual Effect is a Harvard Business School behavioral scientist’s wide-ranging study of how rituals differ from habits in that they are emotionally charged and lift everyday life into something special. Some of his topics are rites of passage in different cultures; musicians’ and sportspeople’s pre-performance routines; and the rituals we develop around food and drink, especially at the holidays. I’m just over halfway through this for an early Shelf Awareness review and I have been finding it fascinating.
Romantic Comedy
(As also featured in my August Six Degrees post)
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman
&
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Romantic Comedy is probably still the most fun reading experience I’ve had this year. Sittenfeld’s protagonist, Sally Milz, writes TV comedy, as does Kristin Newman (That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, etc.). What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is a lighthearted record of her sexual conquests in Amsterdam, Paris, Russia, Argentina, etc. (Newman even has a passage that reminds me of Sally’s “Danny Horst Rule”: “I looked like a thirty-year-old writer. Not like a twenty-year-old model or actress or epically legged songstress, which is a category into which an alarmingly high percentage of Angelenas fall. And, because the city is so lousy with these leggy aliens, regular- to below-average-looking guys with reasonable employment levels can actually get one, another maddening aspect of being a woman in this city.”) Unfortunately, it got repetitive and raunchy. It was one of my 20 Books of Summer but I DNFed it halfway.
#1962Club: A Dozen Books I’d Read Before
I totally failed to read a new-to-me 1962 publication this year. I’m disappointed in myself as I usually manage to contribute one or two reviews to each of Karen and Simon’s year clubs, and it’s always a good excuse to read some classics.
My mistake this time was to only get one option: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, which I had my husband borrow for me from the university library. I opened it up and couldn’t make head or tail of it. I’m sure it’s very clever and meta, and I’ve enjoyed Nabokov before (Pnin, in particular), but I clearly needed to be in the right frame of mind for a challenge, and this month I was not.
Looking through the Goodreads list of the top 100 books from 1962, and spying on others’ contributions to the week, though, I can see that it was a great year for literature (aren’t they all?). Here are 12 books from 1962 that I happen to have read before, most of which I’ve reviewed here in the past few years. I’ve linked to those and/or given review excerpts where I have them, and the rest I describe to the best of my muzzy memory.
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken – The snowy scene on the cover and described in the first two paragraphs drew me in and the story, a Victorian-set fantasy with notes of Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre, soon did, too. Dickensian villains are balanced out by some equally Dickensian urchins and helpful adults, all with hearts of gold. There’s something perversely cozy about the plight of an orphan in children’s books: the characters call to the lonely child in all of us; we rejoice to see how ingenuity and luck come together to defeat wickedness. There are charming passages here in which familiar smells and favourite foods offer comfort. This would make a perfect stepping stone from Roald Dahl to one of the Victorian classics.
Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill – This was Athill’s first book, published when she was 45. An unfortunate consequence of my not having read the memoirs in the order in which they are written is that much of the content of this one seemed familiar to me. It hovers over her childhood (the subject of Yesterday Morning) and centres in on her broken engagement and abortion, two incidents revisited in Somewhere Towards the End. Although Athill’s careful prose and talent for candid self-reflection are evident here, I am not surprised that the book made no great waves in the publishing world at the time. It was just the story of a few things that happened in the life of a privileged Englishwoman. Only in her later life has Athill become known as a memoirist par excellence.
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – (Read in October 2011.) Quite possibly the first ‘classic’ science fiction work I’d ever read. I found Ballard’s debut dated, with passages of laughably purple prose, poor character development (Beatrice is an utter Bond Girl cliché), and slow plot advancement. It sounded like a promising environmental dystopia – perhaps a forerunner of Oryx and Crake – but beyond the plausible vision of a heated-up and waterlogged planet, the book didn’t have much to offer. The most memorable passage was when Strangman drains the water and Kerans discovers Leicester Square beneath; he walks the streets and finds them uninhabited except by sea creatures clogging the cinema entrances. That was quite a potent, striking image. But the scene that follows, involving stereotyped ‘Negro’ guards, seemed like a poor man’s Lord of the Flies rip-off.
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson – Carson’s first chapter imagines an American town where things die because nature stops working as it should. Her main target was insecticides that were known to kill birds and had presumed negative effects on human health through the food chain and environmental exposure. Although the details may feel dated, the literary style and the general cautions against submitting nature to a “chemical barrage” remain potent.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson – I loved the offbeat voice and unreliable narration, and the way that the Blackwood house is both a refuge and a prison for the sisters. “Where could we go?” Merricat asks Constance when she expresses concern that she should have given the girl a more normal life. “What place would be better for us than this? Who wants us, outside? The world is full of terrible people.” As the novel goes on, you ponder who is protecting whom, and from what. There are a lot of great scenes, all so discrete that I could see this working very well as a play with just a few backdrops to represent the house and garden. It has the kind of small cast and claustrophobic setting that would translate very well to the stage.
Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson – Moomintroll discovers a dragon small enough to be kept in a jar; laughter brings a fearful child back from literal invisibility. But what struck me more was the lessons learned by neurotic creatures. In “The Fillyjonk who believed in Disasters,” the title character fixates on her belongings, but when a gale and a tornado come and sweep it all away, she experiences relief and joy. My other favourite was “The Hemulen who loved Silence.” After years as a fairground ticket-taker, he can’t wait to retire and get away from the crowds and the noise, but once he’s obtained his precious solitude he realizes he needs others after all. In “The Fir Tree,” the Moomins, awoken midway through hibernation, get caught up in seasonal stress and experience Christmas for the first time.
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats – A perennial favourite from my childhood, with a paper-collage style that has influenced many illustrators. Just looking at the cover makes me nostalgic for the sort of wintry American mornings when I’d open an eye to a curiously bright aura from around the window, glance at the clock and realize my mom had turned off my alarm because it was a snow day and I’d have nothing ahead of me apart from sledding, playing boardgames and drinking hot cocoa with my best friend. There was no better feeling.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – (Reread in 2021.) I probably picked this up at age seven or so, as a follow-on from the Chronicles of Narnia. Interplanetary stories have never held a lot of interest for me. As a child, I was always more drawn to talking-animal stuff. Again I found the travels and settings hazy. It’s admirable of L’Engle to introduce kids to basic quantum physics, and famous quotations via Mrs. Who, but this all comes across as consciously intellectual rather than organic and compelling. Even the home and school talk feels dated. I most appreciated the thought of a normal – or even not very bright – child like Meg saving the day through bravery and love. This wasn’t for me, but I hope that for some kids, still, it will be pure magic.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing – I read this feminist classic in my early twenties, in the days when I was working at a London university library. Lessing wrote autofiction avant la lettre, and the gist of this novel is that ‘Anna’, a writer, divides her life into four notebooks of different colours: one about her African upbringing, another about her foray into communism, a third containing an autobiographical novel in progress, and the fourth a straightforward journal. The fabled golden notebook is the unified self she tries to create as her romantic life and mental health become more complicated. Julianne Pachico read this recently and found it very powerful. I think I was too young for this and so didn’t appreciate it at the time. Were I to reread it, I imagine I would get a lot more out of it.
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer – More autofiction. Like a nursery rhyme gone horribly wrong, this is the story of a woman who can’t keep it together. She’s the woman in the shoe, the wife whose pumpkin-eating husband keeps her safe in a pumpkin shell, the ladybird flying home to find her home and children in danger. Aged 31 and already on her fourth husband, the narrator, known only as Mrs. Armitage, has an indeterminate number of children. Her current husband, Jake, is a busy filmmaker whose philandering soon becomes clear, starting with the nanny. A breakdown at Harrods is the sign that Mrs. A. isn’t coping. Most chapters begin in medias res and are composed largely of dialogue, including with Jake or her therapist. The book has a dark, bitter humour and brilliantly recreates a troubled mind.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – This was required reading in high school, a novella and circadian narrative depicting life for a prisoner in a Soviet gulag. And that’s about all I can tell you about it. I remember it being just as eye-opening and depressing as you might expect, but pretty readable for a translated classic.
A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye – Tangye wasn’t a cat fan to start with, but Monty won him over. He lived with newlyweds Derek and Jeannie first in the London suburb of Mortlake, then on their flower farm in Cornwall. When they moved to Minack, there was a sense of giving Monty his freedom and taking joy in watching him live his best life. They were evacuated to St Albans and briefly lived with Jeannie’s parents and Scottie dog, who became Monty’s nemesis. Monty survived into his 16th year, happily tolerating a few resident birds. Tangye writes warmly and humorously about Monty’s ways and his own development into a man who is at a cat’s mercy. This was really the perfect chronicle of life with a cat, from adoption through farewell. Simon thought so, too.
Here’s hoping I make a better effort at the next year club!
September Releases by Chloe Lane, Ben Lerner, Navied Mahdavian & More
September and October are bounteous months in the publishing world. I’ll have a bunch of books to plug in both, mostly because I’ve upped my reviewing quota for Shelf Awareness. There’s real variety here, from contemporary novellas and heavily autobiographical poetry to nature essays and a graphic memoir.
Arms & Legs by Chloe Lane
I reviewed Lane’s debut novel, The Swimmers, a black comedy about a family preparing for an assisted suicide, this time last year. It seems there’s an autobiographical setup to the author’s follow-up, which focuses on a couple from New Zealand now living in Florida with their young son. Narrator Georgie teaches writing at a local college and is having an affair with Jason, an Alabama-accented librarian she met through taking Finn to the Music & Movement class. She joins in a volunteer-led controlled burn in the forest, and curiosity quickly turns to horror when she discovers the decaying body of a missing student.
There’s a strong physicality to this short novel: fire, bodies and Florida’s dangerous fauna (“To choose to live in a place surrounded by these creatures, these threats, it made me feel like I was living a bold life”). Georgie has to decide whether setting fire to her marriage with Dan is what she really wants. A Barry Hannah short story she reads describes adultery as just a matter of arms and legs, a phrase that’s repeated several times.
Georgie is cynical and detached from her self-destructive choices, coming out with incisive one-liners (“My life isn’t a Muriel Spark novel, there’s no way to flash forward and find out if I make it out of the housefire alive” and “He rested the spade on his shoulder as if he were a Viking taking a drinks break in the middle of a battle”). Lane burrows into instinct and motivation, also giving a glimpse of the challenges of new motherhood. Apart from a wicked dinner party scene, though, the book as a whole was underwhelming: the body holds no mystery, and adultery is an old, old story.
With thanks to Gallic Books for the proof copy for review.
The Lights by Ben Lerner
I’d read fiction and nonfiction from Lerner but had no idea of what to expect from his poetry. Almost every other poem is a prose piece, many of these being absurdist monologues that move via word association between topics seemingly chosen at random: psychoanalysis, birdsong, his brother’s colorblindness; proverbs, the Holocaust; art conservation, his partner’s upcoming C-section, an IRS Schedule C tax form, and so on.
The vocabulary and pronouncements can be a little pretentious. The conversational nature and randomness of the subjects contribute to the same autofiction feel you get from his novels. For instance, he probes parenting styles: his parents’ dilemma between understanding his fears and encouraging him in drama and sport; then his daughters’ playful adoption of his childhood nickname of Benner for him.
A few highlights: the enjambment in “Index of Themes”; the commentary on pandemic strictures and contrast between ancient poetry and modern technology in “The Stone.” I wouldn’t seek out more poetry by Lerner, but this was interesting to try. (Read via Edelweiss)
Sample lines:
“When you die in the patent office / there’s a pun on expiration”
“the goal is to be on both sides of the poem, / shuttling between the you and I. … Form / is always the answer to the riddle it poses”
“It’s raining now / it isn’t, or it’s raining in the near / future perfect when the poem is finished / or continuous, will have been completed”
This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian
Mahdavian has also published comics in the New Yorker. His debut graphic novel is a memoir of the three years (2016–19) he and his wife lived in remote Idaho. Of Iranian heritage, the author had lived in Miami and then the Bay Area, so was pretty unprepared for living off-grid. His wife, Emelie (who is white), is a documentary filmmaker. They had a box house brought in on a trailer. After Trump’s surprise win, it was a challenging time to be a Brown man in the rural USA. “You’re not a Muslim, are you?” was the kind of question he got on their trips into town. Neighbors were outwardly friendly – bringing them firewood and elk kebabs, helping when their car wouldn’t start or they ran off the road in icy conditions, teaching them the local bald eagles’ habits – yet thought nothing of making racist and homophobic slurs.
I appreciated the self-deprecating depictions of learning DIY from YouTube videos and feeling like a wimp in comparison to his new friends who hunt and have gun collections – one funny spread has him imagining himself as a baby in a onesie sitting across from a manly neighbor. “I am shedding my city madness,” Mahdavian boasts as they plant an abundant garden and start learning about trees and birds. The references to Persian myth and melodrama are intriguing, though sometimes seem à propos of nothing, as do the asides on science and nature. I preferred when the focus was on the couple’s struggles with infertility and reopening the town movie theater – a flop because people only want John Wayne flicks.
This was enjoyable reading, but the simple black-and-white style is unlikely to draw in readers new to graphic storytelling, and I wondered if the overall premise – ‘we expected to find closed-minded racists and we did’ – was enough to hang a memoir on. (Read via Edelweiss)
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
Enright’s astute eighth novel traces the family legacies of talent and trauma through the generations descended from a famous Irish poet. Cycles of abandonment and abuse characterize the McDaraghs. Enright convincingly pinpoints the narcissism and codependency behind their love-hate relationships. (It was an honor to also interview Anne Enright. You can see our Q&A here.)
When My Ghost Sings by Tara Sidhoo Fraser
This lyrical debut memoir is an experimental, literary recounting of the experience of undergoing a stroke and relearning daily skills while supporting a gender-transitioning partner. Fraser splits herself into two: the “I” moving through life, and “Ghost,” her memory repository. But “I can’t rely only on Ghost’s mental postcards,” Fraser thinks, and sets out to retrieve evidence of who she was and is.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
(Already featured in my Best of 2023 so far post.) 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.
Zoo World: Essays by Mary Quade
A collection of 15 thoughtful nature/travel essays that explore the interconnectedness of life and conservation strategies, and exemplify compassion for people and, particularly, animals. The book makes a round-trip journey, beginning at Quade’s Ohio farm and venturing further afield in the Americas and to Southeast Asia before returning home.
The Goodbye World Poem by Brian Turner
The lovely laments in Brian Turner’s fourth collection (a sequel to The Wild Delight of Wild Things) dwell in the aftermath of the loss of his wife and others, and cultivate compensatory appreciation for the natural world. Turner’s poetry is gilded with alliteration and maritime metaphors The long title piece, which closes the collection, repeats many phrases from earlier poems—a pleasing way of drawing the book’s themes together. (My review of the third volume in this loose trilogy is forthcoming.)
And a bonus review book, relevant for its title:
September and the Night by Maica Rafecas
[Translated from the Catalan by Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall]
A new Logistics Centre is to cut through Anaïs’s family vineyards as part of a compulsory land purchase. While her father, Magí, and brother, Jan, are resigned to the loss, this single mother decides to resist, tying herself to a stone shed on the premises that will be right in the path of the bulldozers. This causes others to question her mental health, with social worker Elisa tasked with investigating the case. Key evidence of her irrational behaviour turns out to have perfectly good explanations.
Certain chapters alternate Jan’s and Anaïs’s perspectives, recreate her confusion in a psychiatric hospital, or have every sentence beginning with “There” or “And” – effective anaphora. Although I didn’t think Jan’s several romantic options added to the plot, this debut novella from a Spanish author was a pleasant surprise. It’s based on a true story, though takes place in fictional locations, and bears a gentle message of cultural preservation.
With thanks to Fum d’Estampa Press for the free copy for review.
August Releases: Bright Fear, Uprooting, The Farmer’s Wife, Windswept
This month I have three memoirs by women, all based on a connection to land – whether gardening, farming or crofting – and a sophomore poetry collection that engages with themes of pandemic anxiety as well as crossing cultural and gender boundaries.
My August highlight:
Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan
Chan’s Flèche was my favourite poetry collection of 2019. Their follow-up returns to many of the same foundational subjects: race, family, language and sexuality. But this time, the pandemic is a lens through which all is filtered. This is particularly evident in Part I, “Grief Lessons.” “London, 2020” and “Hong Kong, 2003,” on facing pages, contrast Covid-19 with SARS, the major threat when they were a teenager. People have always made assumptions about them based on their appearance or speech. At a time when Asian heritage merited extra suspicion, English was both a means of frank expression and a source of ambivalence:
“At times, English feels like the best kind of evening light. On other days, English becomes something harder, like a white shield.” (from “In the Beginning Was the Word”)
“my Chinese / face struck like the glow of a torch on a white question: / why is your English so good, the compliment uncertain / of itself.” (from “Sestina”)
At the centre of the book, “Ars Poetica,” a multi-part collage incorporating lines from other poets, forms a kind of autobiography in verse. Chan also questions the lines between genres, wondering whether to label their work poetry, nonfiction or fiction (“The novel feels like a springer spaniel running off-/leash the poem a warm basket it returns to always”).
The poems’ structure varies, with paragraphs and stanzas of different lengths and placement on the page (including, in one instance, a goblet shape). The enjambment, as you can see in lines I’ve quoted above and below, is noteworthy. Part III, “Field Notes on a Family,” reflects on the pressures of being an only child whose mother would prefer to pretend lives alone rather than with a female partner. The book ends with hope that Chan might be able to be open about their identity. The title references the paradoxical nature of the sublime, beautifully captured via the alliteration that closes “Circles”: “a commotion of coots convincing / me to withstand the quotidian tug-/of-war between terror and love.”
Although Flèche still has the edge for me, this is another excellent work I would recommend even to those wary of poetry.
Some more favourite lines, from “Ars Poetica”:
“What my mother taught me was how
to revere the light language emitted.”
“Home, my therapist suggests, is where
you don’t have to explain yourself.”
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review.
Three land-based memoirs:
(All: )
Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Country Garden by Marchelle Farrell
This Nan Shepherd Prize-winning memoir shares Chan’s attention to pandemic-era restrictions and how they prompt ruminations about identity and belonging. Farrell is from Trinidad but came to the UK as a student and has stayed, working as a psychiatrist and then becoming a wife and mother. Just before Covid hit, she moved to the outskirts of Bath and started rejuvenating her home’s large and neglected garden. Under thematic headings that also correspond to the four seasons, chapters are named after different plants she discovered or deliberately cultivated. The peace she finds in her garden helps her to preserve her mental health even though, with the deaths of George Floyd and so many other Black people, she is always painfully aware of her fragile status as a woman of colour, and sometimes feels trapped in the confining routines of homeschooling. I enjoyed the exploration of postcolonial family history and the descriptions of landscapes large and small but often found Farrell’s metaphors and psychological connections obvious or strained.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days by Helen Rebanks
I fancied a sideways look at James Rebanks (The Shepherd’s Life and Wainwright Prize winner English Pastoral) and his regenerative farming project in the Lake District. (My husband spotted their dale from a mountaintop on holiday earlier in the month.) Helen Rebanks is a third-generation farmer’s wife and food and family are the most important things to her. One gets the sense that she has felt looked down on for only ever wanting to be a wife and mother. Her memoir, its recollections structured to metaphorically fall into a typical day, is primarily a defence of the life she has chosen, and secondarily a recipe-stuffed manifesto for eating simple, quality home cooking. (She paints processed food as the enemy.)
Growing up, Rebanks started cooking for her family early on, and got a job in a café as a teenager; her mother ran their farm home as a B&B but was forgetful to the point of being neglectful. She met James at 17 and accompanied him to Oxford, where they must have been the only student couple cooking and eating proper food. This period, when she was working an office job, baking cakes for a café, and mourning the devastating foot-and-mouth disease epidemic from a distance, is most memorable. Stories from travels, her wedding, and the births of her four children are pleasant enough, yet there’s nothing to make these experiences, or the telling of them, stand out. I wouldn’t make any of the dishes; most you could find a recipe for anywhere. Eleanor Crow’s black-and-white illustrations are lovely, though.
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review.
Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands by Annie Worsley
I’d come across Worsley in the Wildlife Trusts’ Seasons anthologies. For a decade she has lived on Red River Croft, in a little-known pocket of northwest Scotland. In word pictures as much as in the colour photographs that illustrate this volume, she depicts it as a wild land shaped mostly by natural forces – also, sometimes, manmade. From one September to the next, she documents wildlife spectacles and the influence of weather patterns. Chronic illness sometimes limited her daily walks to the fence at the cliff-top. (But what a view from there!) There is more here about local history and ecology than any but the keenest Scotland-phile may be interested to read. Worsley also touches on her upbringing in polluted Lancashire, and her former academic career and fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Her descriptions are full of colours and alliteration, though perhaps a little wordy: “Pale-gold autumnal days are spliced by fickle and feisty bouts of turbulent weather. … Sunrises and sunsets may pour with cinnabar and henna; dawn and dusk can ripple with crimson and purple.” The kind of writing I could appreciate for the length of an essay but not a whole book.
With thanks to William Collins for the free copy for review.
Would you read one or more of these?
Six Degrees of Separation: Romantic Comedy to Wild Fell
This is a fun meme I take part in every few months.
For August we begin with Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, one of my top 2023 releases so far. (See Kate’s opening post.)
#1 Sittenfeld’s protagonist, Sally Milz, writes TV comedy, as does Kristin Newman (That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, etc.), author of What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding, a lighthearted record of her travels and romantic conquests. (She even has a passage that reminds me of Sally’s Danny Horst Rule: “I looked like a thirty-year-old writer. Not like a twenty-year-old model or actress or epically legged songstress, which is a category into which an alarmingly high percentage of Angelenas fall. And, because the city is so lousy with these leggy aliens, regular- to below-average-looking guys with reasonable employment levels can actually get one, another maddening aspect of being a woman in this city.”)
#2 I didn’t realize when I picked it up in a charity shop that my copy smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. I aired it in kitty litter, then by scented candles, and it still reeks. I reckon I can tolerate the smell long enough to finish it and put it in the Little Free Library, which gets good ventilation. A novel I acquired from the free bookshop we used to have in the mall in town was the only book I can remember having to get rid of before reading because it just smelled too bad (also of cigarettes in that case): My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.
#3 So I didn’t read that, but I have read another Picoult novel, Sing You Home. The author is known for picking a central issue to address in each work, and in that one it was sexuality. Zoe, a music therapist, is married to Max but leaves him for Vanessa – and then decides to sue him for the use of the embryos they created together via IVF. It was the first book I’d read with that dynamic (a previously straight woman enters into a lesbian partnership), but by no means the last. Later came Untamed by Glennon Doyle, Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler, The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg … and one you maybe weren’t expecting: the fantastic memoir First Time Ever by Peggy Seeger. The authors vary in how they account for it. They were gay all along but didn’t realize it? Their orientation changed? Or they just happened to fall in love with someone of the same gender? Seeger doesn’t explain at all, simply records how head-over-heels she was for Ewan MacColl … and then for Irene Pyper Scott.
#4 Peggy Seeger is one of my heroes these days. I first got into her music through the lockdown livestreams put together by Folk on Foot and have since seen her live and acquired several of her albums, including a Smithsonian Folkways collection of her best-loved folk standards. One of these is, of course, “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer,” which was one of the inspirations for Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground.
#5 Unsettled Ground, an unusual story of rural poverty and illiteracy, is set in a fictional village modelled on Inkpen, where Nicola Chester lives. Her memoir On Gallows Down, which held particular local interest for me, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize last year.
#6 Also shortlisted that year was Wild Fell by Lee Schofield, about his work at RSPB Haweswater. Like Chester, he’s been mired in the struggle to balance sustainable farming with conservation at a beloved place. And like a fellow Lakeland farmer (and previous Wainwright Prize winner for English Pastoral), James Rebanks, he’s trying to be respectful of tradition while also restoring valuable habitats. My husband and I each took a library copy of Wild Fell along to Cumbria last week (about which more anon) and packed it in a backpack for an on-location photo during our wild walk at the very atmospheric Haweswater.
Where will your chain take you? Join us for #6Degrees of Separation! (Hosted on the first Saturday of each month by Kate W. of Books Are My Favourite and Best.) Next month’s starting book is Wifedom by Anna Funder.
Have you read any of my selections? Tempted by any you didn’t know before?
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?
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.
March Paperback Releases: Fledgling, Theatre of Marvels, What My Bones Know
I’m catching up on three 2022 books I was sent for review and didn’t read at their initial publication. Today I have a memoir of living between Ghana and England and hand-raising two birds, a Victorian pastiche starring a mixed-race actress in London, and an account of being diagnosed with complex PTSD and working towards healing of childhood trauma.
Fledgling by Hannah Bourne-Taylor
Nature-lover Hannah Bourne-Taylor lived in Ghana for eight years for her husband’s job. As a dependent spouse, she was not permitted to work and, in their rural setting, she felt cut off from any expatriate community. From childhood she’d been an obsessive animal rescuer – fishing ants out of swimming pools, for instance – and when she found a swift that had been displaced from its nest, her protective instincts went into overdrive. Collecting hundreds of termites, she fed the bird to a demanding schedule for two weeks before releasing it. This went as disastrously as it could, but she soon got another chance when she found a grounded bronze-winged mannikin finch fledgling after a storm. Their bond was even closer: the bird climbed her body and nested in her hair (she wrote a Guardian article about the experience), and they developed a mutual language of chirps. The care routine sounds like it was not so different from having an infant. She even calls the finch her daemon.
There is something very insular about this narrative, such that I had trouble gauging the passage of time. Raising the two birds, adopting street dogs, going on a pangolin patrol with a conservation charity – was this a matter of a couple of months, or were events separated by years? Ghana is an intriguing setting, yet because there is no attempt to integrate, she can only give a white outsider’s perspective on the culture, and indigenous people barely feature. I was sympathetic to the author’s feelings of loneliness and being trapped between countries, not belonging in either, but she overstates the lessons of compassion and freedom the finch taught. The writing, while informed and passionate about nature, needs a good polish (many misplaced modifiers, wrong prepositions, errors in epigraph quotes, homonym slips – “sight” instead of “site”; “balled” in place of “bawled”; “base” where it should be “bass,” twice – and so on). Still, it’s a promising debut from a valuable nature advocate, and I share her annual delight in welcoming England’s swifts, as in the scenes that open and close the book.
With thanks to Aurum for the free copy for review. Fledgling came out in paperback on 9 March.
Theatre of Marvels by Lianne Dillsworth
Lianne Dillsworth is a Black British author with MAs in creative writing and Victorian studies, interests she combines in this debut novel set in Victorian London. Zillah’s mother, a slave from Barbados, was forced to abandon her seven-year-old daughter. Zillah is mixed-race and grew up in St Giles slum. Too light-skinned to convince as a “savage” when she headlines Crillick’s Variety Theatre show as “Amazonia,” she has to coat herself with greasepaint and soot. As mistress to a viscount, she has access to a life of luxury, but instead chooses to try to free her fellow Black performers, including the “Leopard Lady,” who is exhibited for her skin condition and confined in conditions little better than slavery.
Through secondary characters, we glimpse other options for people of colour: one, Lucien Winters, is a shopkeeper (reminding me of the title character of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, a historical figure) but intends to move to Sierra Leone via a colonisation project; another passes as white to have a higher position in the theatre world. It felt odd, though, how different heritages were conflated, such that Zillah, of Caribbean descent, learns a few words of “Zulu” to speak to the Leopard Lady, and Lucien explains Africanness to her as if it is one culture. Perhaps this was an attempt to demonstrate solidarity among oppressed peoples.
There are rivalries with fellow actresses, and well-meaning Quakers who work toward a better society. Much of the characterisation is tissue-thin, however, and a few turns of phrase felt not of the time period (describing someone as being in a “pissy mood”; “If he was in this much of a funk there’d be no getting through to him. I might as well go to bed before he killed my mood completely.”). All told, this never lived up to its first paragraph –
Go to the theatre much? No, nor me. At least not before I became an actress. I know what you’re thinking. Actress, eh? But you can keep your dirty-minded thoughts to yourself. I trod the boards and no more. Doesn’t mean I don’t have a story or two to tell, mind. Would you be kind enough to indulge me if I talked about the old days? Hard as it was back then, I can’t say that if I had my time again I’d change it.
– which promised a much more original voice than we ever get from Zillah. It’s only worth writing in the first person if the narration is remarkable in some way, so this could easily have been in third person limited instead. This was a nicely undemanding selection to start on the ferry ride back from Spain last year, but took much effort to finish because of the 400+ page count and despite the jejune prose (some have labelled this YA for that reason). Fans of Stacey Halls may enjoy it. It’s certainly what I’d call an easy read.
Hutchinson Heinemann sent a proof copy. Theatre of Marvels came out in paperback on 2 March.
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo
It’s okay to have some things you never get over.
Radio producer Stephanie Foo was diagnosed with complex PTSD at age 30. Although she briefly delves into the parental abuse that accounts for her trauma, this is – thankfully – mostly about the four years she spent trying to get better. The Malaysian Chinese Foo family moved to San Francisco when she was two years old. Her mother nagged and beat her, and both parents made credible threats to kill her and/or themselves, such as by driving off the road. It’s hard to read this material, but by proportion it doesn’t take up much of the book. Foo’s mother left when she was 13; she later gave her father an ultimatum one day (while wielding an axe!) that also saw him move out. This left her, then a high school student, living alone and in squalor. Unsurprisingly, she engaged in disordered eating and self-harm.
A love of journalism kept Foo from committing suicide, got her into college and landed her podcast roles followed by her dream job with public radio programme This American Life in New York City. However, she struggled with a horrible, exacting boss and, when her therapist issued the diagnosis, she left to commit to the healing process, aided by her new partner, Joey. C-PTSD was named in the 1990s but is not recognised in the DSM; The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is its alternative bible. Repeated childhood trauma, as opposed to a single event, rewires the brain to identify threats that might not seem rational, leading to self-destructive behaviour and difficulty maintaining healthy relationships.
All that Foo discovers in her research into C-PTSD feels damning, but she focuses on what she can control: sleep, diet, exercise, yoga, meditation, acupuncture, and seeing various therapists. She tries everything from hallucinogenic mushrooms and a gratitude journal to EMDR (like hypnosis but based on eye movement). Working with a therapist from the Center for Child Trauma and Resilience helped her to address the root cause rather than the symptoms. There came a point where I would have been okay with a condensed version of events instead of a blow-by-blow of every therapy attempted, but Foo writes with bravery and clarity, adroitly recreating scenes and dialogue and displaying impressive memory and self-knowledge. The detail and overall optimism should make this helpful to many.
With thanks to Allen & Unwin for the free copy for review. What My Bones Know came out in paperback on 3 March.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 