Book Serendipity, August to October 2024
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they flit away!
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- The William Carlos Williams line “no ideas but in things” is quoted in Home Is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman and echoed with a slight adaptation in Want, the Lake by Jenny Factor.
- A woman impulsively stops into a tattoo parlour in We Are Animals by Jennifer Case and Birdeye by Judith Heneghan.
- Cleaning up a partner’s bristles from the sink in 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso and The Echoes by Evie Wyld.
- Sarah Manguso, by whom I was reading two books for a Bookmarks article, was quoted in Some of Us Just Fall by Polly Atkin.
- Someone is annoyed at their spouse making a mess cooking lemon preserves in How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli and Liars by Sarah Manguso, both of which are set in California.
- Rumpelstiltskin is referenced in one short story of a speculative collection: How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli and The Man in the Banana Trees by Marguerite Sheffer.
- A father who is hard of hearing, and an Australian woman looking for traces of her grandmother’s life in England in The House with All the Lights On by Jessica Kirkness and The Echoes by Evie Wyld.
- A character named Janie or Janey in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and The Echoes by Evie Wyld. The Pre-Raphaelite model Janey is also mentioned in The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing.
Contrasting one’s childhood love of the Little House on the Prairie books with reading them as an adult and being aware of the racial and colonial implications in Home Is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman and My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss.
- A mention of Little Women in A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne and My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss.
- A character grew up in a home hair-dressing business in A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne and Home Is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman.
- The discovery of an old pram in an outbuilding in Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell and Mina’s Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa.
- An Irish woman named Aoife in My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss and Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell.
- Cooking then throwing out entire meals in My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss and The Echoes by Evie Wyld. (Also throwing out a fresh meal in Birdeye by Judith Heneghan. Such scenes distress me!)
A new lover named Simon in one story of The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro and The Echoes by Evie Wyld.
- A character writes a recommendation letter for someone who then treats them vindictively, because they assumed the letter was negative when it wasn’t, in A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne and one story of The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro.
- After her parents’ divorce, the author never had a designated bedroom in her father’s house in Home Is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman and The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing.
Reading The Bell Jar as a teenager in Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner and My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss.
- A contentious Town Hall meeting features in A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne and Birdeye by Judith Heneghan.
- The wife is pregnant with twins in A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne and The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. (There are also twins in Birdeye by Judith Heneghan. In general, I find that they occur far more often in fiction than in real life!)
- 1930s Florida as a setting in Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
- Dorothy Wordsworth and her journals are discussed in Some of Us Just Fall by Polly Atkin and My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss.
- Wordsworth’s daffodils are mentioned in Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus and My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss.
- “F*ck off” is delivered in an exaggerated English accent in Birdeye by Judith Heneghan and The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken.
- The main character runs a country store in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro.
Reading a second novel this year in which the younger sister of a pair wants to go into STEM and joins the Mathletes in high school: first was A Reason to See You Again by Jami Attenberg; later was Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner.
- An older sister who has great trouble attending normal school and so is placed elsewhere (including a mental institution) for a total of two years in Learning to Think by Tracy King and Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner.
- The idea of trees taking revenge on people for environmental destruction in one story of The Secret Life of Insects by Bernardo Esquinca and one poem of The Holy & Broken Bliss by Alicia Ostriker.
- An illiterate character in Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell and Also Here by Brooke Randel.
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Controversy over throwing a dead body into the trash in Birdeye by Judith Heneghan and Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent.
- A publishing assistant who wears a miniskirt and Doc Martens in Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner and Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell.
- Ancestors’ experience in Auschwitz in Also Here by Brooke Randel and Transgenesis by Ava Winter.
- The protagonist finds it comforting when her boyfriend lies down with his full weight on her in Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner and The Echoes by Evie Wyld.
- A woman badgers her ex-husband about when his affair with his high school/college sweetheart started (before or after the divorce) in Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner and Liars by Sarah Manguso.
I encountered an Irish matriarch who married the ‘wrong’ brother, not Frank, in The Bee Sting by Paul Murray earlier in the year, and then in Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell.
- A boy is playing in the family car on the driveway when it rolls backwards and kills someone in A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne and Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout.
- Quantoxhead, Somerset is mentioned in On Trying to Keep Still by Jenny Diski and A House Unlocked by Penelope Lively.
- Tapeworms are mentioned in On Trying to Keep Still by Jenny Diski and one story of The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff.
- A description of horrific teeth in one story of The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff, and one story of The Long Swim by Terese Svoboda.
- A character researches potato blight, and another keeps his smoking a secret from his wife, in one story of The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff, and Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout.
A piano gets mauled out of anger in one story of Save Me, Stranger by Erika Krouse and Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent.
- Men experiencing eating disorders in Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Heartstopper Volumes 3 and 4 by Alice Oseman.
- Black people deliberately changing their vocabulary and speech register when talking to white people in James by Percival Everett and Heavy by Kiese Laymon.
- My second book of the year in which a woman from centuries ago who magically appears in the present requests to go night clubbing: first The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, then Isabella & Blodwen by Rachael Smith.
- Characters named Sadie in James by Percival Everett, The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken, and Still Life at Eighty by Abigail Thomas.
- Creepy hares in horror: A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand and What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher. There were weird rabbits in I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill, too.
- I read two scenes of a calf being born, one right after the other: in Dangerous Enough by Becky Varley-Winter, then I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill.
- I read about an animal scratch leading to infection leading to death in a future with no pharmaceuticals in Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel in the morning and then in the afternoon heard Eve Smith mention the same thing happening due to antibiotic resistance in her novel The Waiting Rooms. Forget about R.I.P.; this is the stuff that scares me…
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
On Trying to Keep Still (Post-Northumberland Holiday)
What’s the point of going on vacation? Expanding your cultural horizons, seeing new things and places, treating yourself to fun experiences you don’t have in the everyday, and relaxing could all be good answers. Relaxation isn’t our strong suit when we go away; we often return from a holiday wishing that we had a few recovery days before resuming work. Some combination of developing a bad cold in the last few days of the trip, coming back to non-stop rain, worrying about our cat’s ongoing health issues, and my husband already having a manically busy start to the term has left me feeling like staying put for the foreseeable.
Apt reading for a coffee stop on Lindisfarne.
Jenny Diski understood that. Her collection of travel pieces, On Trying to Keep Still, was the one book I read in its entirety on our trip (along with parts of novels, poetry collections and many, many short story volumes). Essays and short stories were perfect reading for a public transport trip: ideal for taking out on a train or bus and reading one or a few. I’d earmarked the Diski for 20 Books of Summer but found a better setting for it after all. A couple of pieces touch on her traumatic childhood and time spent in a mental hospital as a teenager, which I vaguely remembered from her other autobiographical work. The essay “On Anatomy,” which doesn’t really fit with the others but may have been my favourite, matter-of-factly recounts her rape at 14, and her midlife diagnosis of Freiberg’s disease. Her doctor’s dismissive response to her debilitating foot pain was her first experience of age-related discrimination.
Diski expresses how troubled she is to have become known as a travel writer – through the two books of hers I’d previously read, Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train – because, for the most part, she much prefers to stay at home and do nothing. Ironically, she ends up writing a travel feature on Lapland for the Observer, even though what she actually proposed was spending a few days in the polar dark. But the paper talked her into undertaking all sorts of uncomfortable adventures like a reindeer-drawn sleigh ride and sleeping in a tent – and this for someone who specifically hated being cold.
This is the stuff of Part Three. In Part One, she speaks at a book festival in New Zealand and resists the compulsion to skydive; in the long Part Two, she courts solitude by renting a cottage on a Somerset farm for two months. She holes up with a mini-library of silence- and seclusion-themed reads and shows her face only often enough so the owner won’t fret about her. (It took me a little while to work out that the farmer was Janet White, author of The Sheep Stell – quite a neat connection. Diski also lived with Doris Lessing as a teenager.) Here, too, Diski is delighted to eschew outings and exercise and just stay in comfort. The fact that she brought pristine Prada hiking boots tells you she’s no outdoorswoman. By the book’s end, she’s concluded it’s best to save the money and effort and just research or imagine your way to places instead. Tongue-in-cheek advice, perhaps, but the tone of cheerful indolence appealed to me. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) 
Sprinting to make buses, hours-long bone-shaking rides, heavy luggage: we were out of practice at using public transport, sure, but the rigours of this trip were a bit much for me. It can’t just be age, though at nearly 41 I do long for my own bed on any stay away from home. It’s partly a matter of accepting that chronic illness means I will have limitations. Much as we wanted to do the right thing by not driving, travelling by car is so much more practical and comfortable. Trips to the Continent may still be doable by train as European services seem reliable. But within the UK? Unless it’s a short city break, I’m not sure.
All that said, we did have a nice time. Our cottage in Berwick-upon-Tweed was spacious and we had unexpectedly glorious weather for daytrips to Bamburgh Castle, the Farne islands and Lindisfarne, Alnwick and Alnmouth, and especially the fishing town of Dunbar in Scotland. If you ever find yourself in Berwick, do walk the medieval walls (plus try a charcuterie platter at Atelier wine bar, sample the sweet or savoury offerings at Northern Soul Kitchen, and find time for a drink or two at The Curfew micro-pub). Speaking of drinks, we also enjoyed our time with friends in York, not least an afternoon at the annual beer festival.
Bookishness included a return trip to Barter Books, where my store credit got me a free book and badge; Berwick’s Berrydin Books and Slightly Foxed, as well as several charity shops; the “Books by the Sea” Little Free Library network; and the John Muir birthplace museum and trail in Dunbar. Muir was a forefather of modern environmentalism involved in the inception of the U.S. national parks system. I’ll have to seek out his memoir of childhood.
My modest book haul (compared to our previous trip to Northumberland, anyway) of 12 books is testament to great restraint; had we been traveling by car, I probably would have acquired more books at each stop. I majored on short story collections and novella-length works. And I’ve started reading several already!
Other reading experiences, on a rail replacement bus and on the nearly empty Bamburgh and Dunbar beaches:
If you had to choose, would it be far-flung adventuring or the comforts of home?
Spring Journeys with Edwin Way Teale and Edward Thomas
When I heard that Little Toller were reissuing their edition of Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring, I couldn’t resist pairing it with Edwin Way Teale’s book about the progress of the season up the United States, North with the Spring. These spring journeys, documented by authors delighting in nature’s bounty and responding with poetry, inspired mixed feelings in me: vicarious nostalgia, but also sadness for all that has been lost since they set out in the 1910s and 1950s, respectively.
It’s hard to live joyfully when evidence of the destruction of nature is overwhelming. Enjoying what still exists doesn’t seem like enough. But it’s a start. So this year I’ve been careful to note every phenological landmark: the first swift, the first hearing of a cuckoo, a rare sighting of a live hedgehog. One day in late April I stood on the towpath for hours watching a cloud of swallows and martins swooping for insects. I’ve also enjoyed watching from my office window as sparrows come and go from a nest box.
North with the Spring by Edwin Way Teale (1951)
I’ve previously reviewed Teale’s Autumn Across America and Springtime in Britain and consider him one of the classic – and most underrated – American nature writers. I was delighted to find a copy of this first seasonal volume on our trip to Northumberland a few years ago. As in the autumn book, he and his wife Nellie undertake a road trip, this time travelling from Florida up to New England, a total of 17,000 miles. Their journey lasted 130 days because instead of waiting for 21 March they started weeks before; spring comes early to the Gulf coast. Their time in Florida feels endless, constituting over a third of the book. Although it’s true that there are (were?) many peerless ecosystems there between the scrub and swamp, I grew impatient to move on to other states. The meet-up with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who took them on a picnic to ‘The Yearling country,’ was a highlight.
They travel alongside the spring warblers; past river deltas and barrier islands, by mountain meadows and forests. Other stops include Monticello and New Jersey’s pine barrens. A stopover in New York City dramatizes the difference between civilization and relative wilderness. I particularly enjoyed a pair of chapters set in Tennessee: first the wonder of Nickajack Cave, then the horror of the deforested and poisoned Ducktown Desert. Teale seems ahead of his time in decrying people’s wilful ignorance – one man they met denied the fact of migration, insisting the birds were always around – and failure to consider nature. His scenes and conversations feel fully natural; he’s as interested in people as in wildlife, and that humanism comes across in his writing.
“We longed for a thousand springs on the road instead of this one. For spring is like life. You never grasp it entire; you touch it here, there; you know it only in parts and fragments.”
(Secondhand – Barter Books, Alnwick)
In Pursuit of Spring by Edward Thomas (1914)
On Good Friday, 21 March 1913, Edward Thomas set off on his bicycle from his parents’ home in South London. He was bound southwest, toward Somerset and the height of spring. At cycling and walking pace, he would truly experience the development of the season, whereas
“Many days in London have no weather. We are aware only that it is hot or cold, dry or wet; that we are in or out of doors; that we are at ease or not.”
He prepares himself for hardship and slog:
“Spring would come, of course – nothing, I supposed, could prevent it – and I should have to make up my mind how to go westward. Whatever I did, Salisbury Plain was to be crossed”
It’s remarkable both how much and how little has changed in the intervening century and more. The place names, plant and bird species, and alternation of town and countryside are all familiar, but the difference is stark when you see Thomas’s black-and-white photographs that illustrate the text. These dirt roads are empty. You’d have to search high and low today to find the kind of unspoiled fields, rivers, churchyards, hedgerows and stone walls that he memorializes.
Everything he sees drives him back to poetry, with long passages quoted from authors who have fallen somewhat out of fashion, such as George Herbert and Alexander Pope. I loved the scene where he buys a book at a secondhand furniture shop (for two pence, mind you) and then ignores it to eavesdrop on fellow diners at a restaurant. He has words of high praise for W.H. Hudson:
“Were men to disappear they might be reconstructed from the Bible and the Russian novelists; … Hudson so writes of birds that if ever … they should cease to exist, and should leave us to ourselves on a benighted planet, we should have to learn from him what birds were.”
Thomas also mentions William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides this reminded me of strongly. Both are slow-paced journeys around a rural England that no longer exists. Today Thomas is better remembered as a poet; he would be one of the fallen in a First World War battle just four years after this expedition. It was great to have a chance to read his nature writing, too.
With thanks to Little Toller for the free copy for review.
We’re off to rural France on Wednesday for eight days of relaxation and nature-watching; it’s not a sight-seeing or foodie trip like our time in Paris back in December. Ironically, it seems that it may be cold and rainy for much of the holiday, having been gorgeous in both countries this past week. We will hope for some sun and warmth, but have packed plenty of books and board games (and will acquire much wine) for when the weather is to be avoided inside.
What signs of the spring have you been seeing?
Reading from the Wainwright Prize Longlists
The Wainwright Prize is one that I’ve ended up following closely almost by accident, simply because I tend to read most of the nature books released in the UK in any given year. A few months back I cheekily wrote to the prize director, proffering myself as a judge and appending a list of eligible titles I hoped were in consideration. Although they already had a full judging roster for 2021, I got a very kind reply thanking me for my recommendations and promising to bear me in mind for the future. Fifteen of my 25 suggestions made it onto the lists below.
This is the second year that there have been two awards, one for writing on UK nature and the other on global conservation themes. Tomorrow (August 4th) at 4 p.m., the longlists will be narrowed down to shortlists. I happened to have read and reviewed 12 of the nominees already, and I have a few others in progress.
UK nature writing longlist:
The Circling Sky by Neil Ansell: Hoping to reclaim an ancestral connection, Ansell visited the New Forest some 30 times between January 2019 and January 2020, observing the unfolding seasons and the many uncommon and endemic species its miles house. He weaves together his personal story, the shocking history of forced Gypsy relocation into forest compounds starting in the 1920s, and the unfairness of land ownership in Britain. The New Forest is a model of both wildlife-friendly land management and freedom of human access. (On my Best of 2021 so far list.) 
T
he Screaming Sky by Charles Foster: A Renaissance man as well versed in law and theology as he is in natural history, Foster is obsessed with swifts and ashamed of his own species: for looking down at their feet when they could be watching the skies; for the “pathological tidiness” that leaves birds and other creatures no place to live. He delivers heaps of information on the birds but refuses to stick to a just-the-facts approach. The book quotes frequently from poetry and the prose is full of sharp turns of phrase and whimsy. (Also on my Best of 2021 so far list.) 
Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour: As an aimless twentysomething, Gilmour tried to rekindle a relationship with his unreliable poet father at the same time that he and his wife were pondering starting a family of their own. Meanwhile, he was raising Benzene, a magpie that fell out of the nest and ended up in his care. The experience taught him responsibility and compassionate care for another creature. Gilmour makes elegant use of connections and metaphors. He’s so good at scenes, dialogue and emotion – a natural writer. 
Seed to Dust by Marc Hamer: Hamer paints a loving picture of his final year at the 12-acre British garden he tended for decades. In few-page essays, the book journeys through a gardener’s year. This is creative nonfiction rather than straightforward memoir. The prose is adorned with lovely metaphors. In places, the language edges towards purple and the content becomes repetitive – a danger of the diary format. However, the focus on emotions and self-perception – rare for a male nature writer – is refreshing. (Reviewed for Foreword.) 
The Stubborn Light of Things by Melissa Harrison: A collection of five and a half years’ worth of Harrison’s monthly Nature Notebook columns for The Times. Initially based in South London, Harrison moved to the Suffolk countryside in late 2017. In the grand tradition of Gilbert White, she records when she sees her firsts of a year. I appreciate how hands-on and practical Harrison is. She never misses an opportunity to tell readers about ways they can create habitat for wildlife and get involved in citizen science projects. (Reviewed for Shiny New Books.)
Birdsong in a Time of Silence by Steven Lovatt: During the UK’s first lockdown, with planes grounded and cars stationary, many remarked on the quiet. All the better to hear birds going about their usual spring activities. For Lovatt, it was the excuse he needed to return to his childhood birdwatching hobby. In between accounts of his spring walks, he tells lively stories of common birds’ anatomy, diet, lifecycle, migration routes, and vocalizations. Lovatt’s writing is introspective and poetic, delighting in metaphors for sounds.
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald: Though written for various periodicals and ranging in topic from mushroom-hunting to deer–vehicle collisions and in scope from deeply researched travel pieces to one-page reminiscences, these essays form a coherent whole. Equally reliant on argument and epiphany, the book has more to say about human–animal interactions in one of its essays than some whole volumes manage. Her final lines are always breath-taking. I’d rather read her writing on any subject than almost any other author’s. (My top nonfiction release of 2020.)
Skylarks with Rosie by Stephen Moss: Devoting a chapter each to the first 13 weeks of the initial UK lockdown, Moss traces the season’s development in Somerset alongside his family’s experiences and what was emerging on the national news. He welcomed migrating birds and marked his first sightings of butterflies and other insects. Nature came to him, too. For once, he felt that he had truly appreciated the spring, noting its every milestone and “rediscovering the joys of wildlife-watching close to home.” 
Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh: I received a proof copy from Canongate and twice tried the first few pages, but couldn’t wade through the excessive lyricism (and downright incorrect information – weaving a mystical description of a Winter Moth’s flight, she keeps referring to the creature as “she,” whereas when I showed the passage to my entomologist husband he told me that the females of that species are flightless). I’m told it develops into an eloquent memoir of growing up during the Troubles. Perhaps reminiscent of The Outrun?
Into the Tangled Bank by Lev Parikian: A delightfully Bryson-esque tour that moves ever outwards, starting with the author’s own home and garden and proceeding to take in his South London patch and his journeys around the British Isles before closing with the wonders of the night sky. By slowing down to appreciate what is all around us, he proposes, we might enthuse others to engage with nature. With the zeal of a recent convert, he guides readers through momentous sightings and everyday moments of connection. (When I reviewed this in July 2020, I correctly predicted it would make the longlist!)
English Pastoral by James Rebanks: This struck me for its bravery, good sense and humility. The topics of the degradation of land and the dangers of intensive farming are of the utmost importance. Daring to undermine his earlier work and his online persona, the author questions the mythos of modern farming, contrasting its practices with the more sustainable and wildlife-friendly ones his grandfather espoused. Old-fashioned can still be best if it means preserving soil health, river quality and the curlew population.
I Belong Here by Anita Sethi: I recently skimmed this from the library. Two things are certain: 1) BIPOC writers should appear more frequently on prize lists, so it’s wonderful that Sethi is here; 2) this book was poorly put together. It’s part memoir of an incident of racial abuse, part political manifesto, and part quite nice travelogue. The parts don’t make a whole. The contents are repetitive and generic (definitions, overstretched metaphors). Sethi had a couple of strong articles here, not a whole book. I blame her editors for not eliciting better.
The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn: I only skimmed this, too. I got the feeling her publisher was desperate to capitalize on the popularity of her first book and said “give us whatever you have,” cramming drafts of several different projects (a memoir that went deeper into the past, a ‘what happened next’ sequel to The Salt Path, and an Iceland travelogue) into one book and rushing it through to publication. Winn’s writing is still strong, though; she captures dialogue and scenes naturally, and you believe in how much the connection to the land matters to her.
Global conservation longlist:
Like last year, I’ve read much less from this longlist since I gravitate more towards nature writing and memoirs than to hard or popular science. So I have read, am reading or plan to read about half of this list, as opposed to pretty much all of the other one.
Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn: This was on my Most Anticipated list for 2021 and I treated myself to a copy while we were up in Northumberland. I’m nearly a third of the way through this fascinating, well-written tour of places where nature has spontaneously regenerated due to human neglect: depleted mining areas in Scotland, former conflict zones, Soviet collective farms turned feral, sites of nuclear disaster, and so on. I’m about to start the chapter on Chernobyl, which I expect to echo Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse.
What If We Stopped Pretending? by Jonathan Franzen: The message of this controversial 2019 New Yorker essay is simple: climate breakdown is here, so stop denying it and talking of “saving the planet”; it’s too late. Global warming is locked in; the will is not there to curb growth, overhaul economies, and ask people to relinquish developed world lifestyles. Instead, start preparing for the fallout (refugees) and saving what can be saved (particular habitats and species). Franzen is realistic about human nature and practical about what to do next.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake: Sheldrake’s enthusiasm is infectious as he researches fungal life in the tropical forests of Panama, accompanies truffle hunters in Italy, and takes part in a clinical study on the effects of LSD (derived from a fungus). More than a travel memoir, though, this is a work of proper science – over 100 pages are taken up by notes, bibliography and index. This is a perspective-altering text that reveals our unconscious species bias. I’ve recommended it widely, even to those who tend not to read nonfiction.
Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham: I have this out from the library and am two-thirds through. Wadham, a leading glaciologist, introduces readers to the science of glaciers: where they are, what lives on and under them, how they move and change, and the grave threats they face (and, therefore, so do we). The science, even dumbed down, is a little hard to follow, but I love experiencing extreme landscapes like Greenland and Antarctica with her. She neatly inserts tiny mentions of her personal life, such as her mother’s death, a miscarriage and a benign brain cyst.
The rest of the longlist is:
- A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough – I’ve never read a book by Attenborough (and tend to worry this sort of book would be ghostwritten), but wouldn’t be averse to doing so.
Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs – All about whales. Kate raved about it. I have this on hold at the library.- Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm
- Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert – I have read her before and would again.
- Riders on the Storm by Alistair McIntosh – My husband has read several of his books and rates them highly.
- The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann
- The Reindeer Chronicles by Judith D. Schwartz – I’ve been keen to read this one.
- A World on the Wing by Scott Weidensaul – My husband is reading this from the library.
My predictions/wishes for the shortlists:
It’s high time that a woman won again. And why not for both, eh? (Amy Liptrot is still the only female winner in the Prize’s seven-year history, for The Outrun in 2016.)
UK nature writing:
- The Circling Sky by Neil Ansell
- The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster
- Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour
- Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald*
- English Pastoral by James Rebanks
- I Belong Here by Anita Sethi
- The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn
Writing on global conservation:
- Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn*
- Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs
- Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
- Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
- Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham
- A World on the Wing by Scott Weidensaul
*Overall winners, if I had my way.
Have you read anything from the Wainwright Prize longlists?
Do any of these books interest you?
Review Book Catch-Up: Motherhood, Nature Essays, Pandemic, Poetry
July slipped away without me managing to review any current-month releases, as I am wont to do, so to those three I’m adding in a couple of other belated review books to make up today’s roundup. I have: a memoir-cum-sociological study of motherhood, poems of Afghan women’s experiences, a graphic novel about a fictional worst-case pandemic, seasonal nature essays from voices not often heard, and poetry about homosexual encounters.
(M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman by Pragya Agarwal
“Mothering would be my biggest gesture of defiance.”
Growing up in India, Agarwal, now a behavioural and data scientist, wished she could be a boy for her father’s sake. Being the third daughter was no place of honour in society’s eyes, but her parents ensured that she got a good education and expected her to achieve great things. Still, when she got her first period, it felt like being forced onto a fertility track she didn’t want. There was a dearth of helpful sex education, and Hinduism has prohibitions that appear to diminish women, e.g. menstruating females aren’t permitted to enter a temple.
Married and unexpectedly pregnant in 1996, Agarwal determined to raise her daughter differently. Her mother-in-law was deeply disappointed that the baby was a girl, which only increased her stubborn pride: “Giving birth to my daughter felt like first love, my only love. Not planned but wanted all along. … Me and her against the world.” No element of becoming a mother or of her later life lived up to her expectations, but each apparent failure gave a chance to explore the spectrum of women’s experiences: C-section birth, abortion, divorce, emigration, infertility treatment, and finally having further children via a surrogate.
While I enjoyed the surprising sweep of Agarwal’s life story, this is no straightforward memoir. It aims to be an exhaustive survey of women’s life choices and the cultural forces that guide or constrain them. The book is dense with history and statistics, veers between topics, and needed a better edit for vernacular English and smoothing out academic jargon. I also found that I wasn’t interested enough in the specifics of women’s lives in India.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
Forty Names by Parwana Fayyaz
“History has ungraciously failed the women of my family”
Have a look at this debut poet’s journey: Fayyaz was born in Kabul in 1990, grew up in Afghanistan and Pakistan, studied in Bangladesh and at Stanford, and is now, having completed her PhD, a research fellow at Cambridge. Many of her poems tell family stories that have taken on the air of legend due to the translated nicknames: “Patience Flower,” her grandmother, was seduced by the Khan and bore him two children; “Quietude,” her aunt, was a refugee in Iran. Her cousin, “Perfect Woman,” was due to be sent away from the family for infertility but gained revenge and independence in her own way.
Fayyaz is bold to speak out about the injustices women can suffer in Afghan culture. Domestic violence is rife; miscarriage is considered a disgrace. In “Roqeeya,” she remembers that her mother, even when busy managing a household, always took time for herself and encouraged Parwana, her eldest, to pursue an education and earn her own income. However, the poet also honours the wisdom and skills that her illiterate mother exhibited, as in the first three poems about the care she took over making dresses and dolls for her three daughters.
As in Agarwal’s book, there is a lot here about ideals of femininity and the different routes that women take – whether more or less conventional. “Reading Nadia with Eavan” was a favourite for how it brought together different aspects of Fayyaz’s experience. Nadia Anjuman, an Afghan poet, was killed by her husband in 2005; many years later, Fayyaz found herself studying Anjuman’s work at Cambridge with the late Eavan Boland. Important as its themes are, I thought the book slightly repetitive and unsubtle, and noted few lines or turns of phrase – always a must for me when assessing a poetry collection.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
Resistance by Val McDermid; illus. Kathryn Briggs
The second 2021 release I read in quick succession in which all but a small percentage of the human race (here, 2 million people) perishes in a pandemic – the other was Under the Blue. Like Aristide’s novel, this story had its origins in 2017 (in this case, on BBC Radio 4’s “Dangerous Visions”) but has, of course, taken on newfound significance in the time of Covid-19. McDermid imagines the sickness taking hold during a fictional version of Glastonbury: Solstice Festival in Northumberland. All the first patients, including a handful of rockstars, ate from Sam’s sausage sandwich van, so initially it looks like food poisoning. But vomiting and diarrhoea give way to a nasty rash, listlessness and, in many cases, death.
Zoe Beck, a Black freelance journalist who conducted interviews at Solstice, is friends with Sam and starts investigating the mutated swine disease, caused by an Erysipelas bacterium and thus nicknamed “the Sips.” She talks to the festival doctor and to a female Muslim researcher from the Life Sciences Centre in Newcastle, but her search for answers takes a backseat to survival when her husband and sons fall ill.
The drawing style and image quality – some panes are blurry, as if badly photocopied – let an otherwise reasonably gripping story down; the best spreads are collages or borrow a frame/backdrop (e.g. a medieval manuscript, NHS forms, or a 1910s title page).
SPOILER
{The ending, which has an immune remnant founding a new community, is VERY Parable of the Sower.}
With thanks to Profile Books/Wellcome Collection for the free copy for review.
Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the 21st Century, ed. Anita Roy and Pippa Marland
I hadn’t heard about this upcoming nature anthology when a surprise copy dropped through my letterbox. I’m delighted the publisher thought of me, as this ended up being just my sort of book: 12 autobiographical essays infused with musings on landscapes in Britain and elsewhere; structured by the seasons to create a gentle progression through the year, starting with the spring. Best of all, the contributors are mostly female, BIPOC (and Romany), working class and/or queer – all told, the sort of voices that are heard far too infrequently in UK nature writing. In momentous rites of passage, as in routine days, nature plays a big role.
A few of my favourite pieces were by Kaliane Bradley, about her Cambodian heritage (the Wishing Dance associated with cherry blossom, her ancestors lost to genocide, the Buddhist belief that people can be reincarnated in other species); Testament, a rapper based in Leeds, about capturing moments through photography and poetry and about the seasons feeling awry both now and in March 2008, when snow was swirling outside the bus window as he received word of his uni friend’s untimely death; and Tishani Doshi, comparing childhood summers of freedom in Wales with growing up in India and 2020’s Covid restrictions.
Most of the authors hold two places in mind at the same time: for Michael Malay, it’s Indonesia, where he grew up, and the Severn estuary, where he now lives and ponders eels’ journeys; for Zakiya McKenzie, it’s Jamaica and England; for editor Anita Roy, it’s Delhi versus the Somerset field her friend let her wander during lockdown. Trees lend an awareness of time and animals a sense of movement and individuality. Alys Fowler thinks of how the wood she secretly coppices and lays on park paths to combat the mud will long outlive her, disintegrating until it forms the very soil under future generations’ feet.
A favourite passage (from Bradley): “When nature is the cuddly bunny and the friendly old hill, it becomes too easy to dismiss it as a faithful retainer who will never retire. But nature is the panic at the end of a talon, and it’s the tree with a heart of fire where lightning has struck. It is not our friend, and we do not want to make it our enemy.”
Also featured: Bernardine Evaristo (foreword), Raine Geoghegan, Jay Griffiths, Amanda Thomson, and Luke Turner.
With thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for the free copy for review.
Records of an Incitement to Silence by Gregory Woods
Woods is an emeritus professor at Nottingham Trent University, where he was appointed the UK’s first professor of Gay & Lesbian Studies in 1998. Much of his sixth poetry collection is composed of unrhymed sonnets in two stanzas (eight lines, then six). The narrator is often a randy flâneur, wandering a city for homosexual encounters. One assumes this is Woods, except where the voice is identified otherwise, as in “[Walt] Whitman at Timber Creek” (“He gives me leave to roam / my idle way across / his prairies, peaks and canyons, my own America”) and “No Title Yet,” a long, ribald verse about a visitor to a stately home.
Other times the perspective is omniscient, painting a character study, like “Company” (“When he goes home to bed / he dare not go alone. … This need / of company defeats him.”), or of Frank O’Hara in “Up” (“‘What’s up?’ Frank answers with / his most unseemly grin, / ‘The sun, the Dow, my dick,’ / and saunters back to bed.”). Formalists are sure to enjoy Woods’ use of form, rhyme and meter. I enjoyed some of the book’s cheeky moments but had trouble connecting with its overall tone and content. That meant that it felt endless. I also found the end rhymes, when they did appear, over-the-top and silly (Demeter/teeter, etc.).
Two favourite poems: “An Immigrant” (“He turned away / to strip. His anecdotes / were innocent and his / erection smelled of soap.”) and “A Knot,” written for friends’ wedding in 2014 (“make this wedding supper all the sweeter / With choirs of LGBT cherubim”).
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
Would you be interested in reading one or more of these?
Recommended May Releases: Adichie, Pavey and Unsworth
Three very different works of women’s life writing: heartfelt remarks on bereavement, a seasonal diary of stewarding four wooded acres in Somerset, and a look back at postnatal depression.
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This slim hardback is an expanded version of an essay Adichie published in the New Yorker in the wake of her father’s death in June 2020. With her large family split across three continents and coronavirus lockdown precluding in-person get-togethers, they had a habit of frequent video calls. She had seen her father the day before on Zoom and knew he was feeling unwell and in need of rest, but the news of his death still came as a complete shock.
Adichie anticipates all the unhelpful platitudes people could and did send her way: he lived to a ripe old age (he was 88), he had a full life and was well respected (he was Nigeria’s first statistics professor), he had a mercifully swift end (kidney failure). Her logical mind knows all of these facts, and her writer’s imagination has depicted grief many times. Still, this loss blindsided her.
She’d always been a daddy’s girl, but the anecdotes she tells confirm how special he was: wise and unassuming; a liberal Catholic suspicious of materialism and with a dry humour. I marvelled at one such story: in 2015 he was kidnapped and held in the boot of a car for three days, his captors demanding a ransom from his famous daughter. What did he do? Correct their pronunciation of her name, and contradict them when they said that clearly his children didn’t love him. “Grief has, as one of its many egregious components, the onset of doubt. No, I am not imagining it. Yes, my father truly was lovely.” With her love of fashion, one way she dealt with her grief was by designing T-shirts with her father’s initials and the Igbo words for “her father’s daughter” on them.
I’ve read many a full-length bereavement memoir, and one might think there’s nothing new to say, but Adichie writes with a novelist’s eye for telling details and individual personalities. She has rapidly become one of my favourite authors: I binged on most of her oeuvre last year and now have just one more to read, Purple Hibiscus, which will be one of my 20 Books of Summer. I love her richly evocative prose and compassionate outlook, no matter the subject. At £10, this 85-pager is pricey, but I was lucky to get it free with Waterstones loyalty points.
Favourite lines:
“In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed.”
“How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”
Deeper Into the Wood by Ruth Pavey
In 1999 Ruth Pavey bought four acres of scrubland at auction, happy to be returning to her family’s roots in the Somerset Levels and hoping to work alongside nature to restore some of her land to orchard and maintain the rest in good health. Her account of the first two decades of this ongoing project, A Wood of One’s Own, was published in 2017.
In this sequel, she gives peaceful snapshots of the wood throughout 2019, from first snowdrops to final apple pressing, but also faces up to the environmental degradation that is visible even in this pocket of the countryside. “I am sure there has been a falling off in numbers of insects, smaller birds and rabbits on my patch,” she insists. Without baseline data, it is hard to support this intuition, but she has botanical and bird surveys done, and invites an expert in to do a moth-trapping evening. The resulting species lists are included as appendices. In addition, Pavey weaves a backstory for her land. She meets a daffodil breeder, investigates the source of her groundwater, and visits the head gardener at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, where her American black walnut sapling came from. She also researches the Sugg family, associated with the land (“Sugg’s Orchard” on the deed) from the 1720s.
Pavey aims to treat this landscape holistically: using sheep to retain open areas instead of mowing the grass, and weighing up the benefits of the non-native species she has planted. She knows her efforts can only achieve so much; the pesticides standard to industrial-scale farming may still be reaching her trees on the wind, though she doesn’t apply them herself. “One sad aspect of worrying about the state of the natural world is that everything starts to look wrong,” she admits. Starting in that year’s abnormally warm January, it was easy for her to assume that the seasons can no longer be relied on.
Compared with her first memoir, this one is marked by its intellectual engagement with the principles and practicalities of rewilding. Clearly, her inner struggle is motivated less by the sense of ownership than by the call of stewardship. While this book is likely be of most interest to those with a local connection or a similar project underway, it offers a universal model of how to mitigate our environmental impact. Pavey’s black-and-white sketches of the flora and fauna on her patch, reminiscent of Quentin Blake, are a highlight.
With thanks to Duckworth for the proof copy for review. The book will be published tomorrow, the 27th of May.
After the Storm: Postnatal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood by Emma Jane Unsworth
The author’s son was born on the day Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. Six months later, she realized that she was deep into postnatal depression and finally agreed to get help. The breaking point came when, with her husband* away at a conference, she got frustrated with her son’s constant fussing and pushed him over on the bed. He was absolutely fine, but the guilty what-ifs proliferated, making this a wake-up call for her.
In this succinct, wry and hard-hitting memoir, Unsworth exposes the conspiracies of silence that lead new mothers to lie and pretend that everything is fine. Since her son’s traumatic birth (which I first read about in Dodo Ink’s Trauma anthology), she hadn’t been able to write and was losing her sense of self. To add insult to injury, her baby had teeth at 16 weeks and bit her as he breastfed. She couldn’t even admit her struggles to her fellow mum friends. But “if a woman is in pain for long enough, and denied sleep for long enough, and at the same time feels as though she has to keep going and put a ‘brave’ face on, she’s going to crack.”
The book’s titled mini-essays give snapshots into the before and after, but particularly the agonizing middle of things. I especially liked the chapter “The Weirdest Thing I’ve Ever Done in a Hotel Room,” in which she writes about borrowing her American editor’s room to pump breastmilk. Therapy, antidepressants and hiring a baby nurse helped her to ease back into her old life and regain some part of the party girl persona she once exuded – enough so that she was willing to give it all another go (her daughter was born late last year).
While Unsworth mostly writes from experience, she also incorporates recent research and makes bold statements of how cultural norms need to change. “You are not monsters,” she writes to depressed mums. “You need more support. … Motherhood is seismic. It cracks open your life, your relationship, your identity, your body. It features the loss, grief and hardship of any big life change.” I can imagine this being hugely helpful to anyone going through PND (see also my Three on a Theme post on the topic), but I’m not a mother and still found plenty to appreciate (especially “We have to smash the dichotomy of mums/non-mums … being maternal has nothing to do with actually physically being a mother”).
I’m attending a Wellcome Collection online event with Unsworth and midwife Leah Hazard (author of Hard Pushed) this evening and look forward to hearing more from both authors.
*It took me no time at all to identify him from the bare facts: Brighton + doctor + graphic novelist = Ian Williams (author of The Lady Doctor)! I had no idea. What a fun connection.
With thanks to Profile Books/Wellcome Collection for the free copy for review.
What recent releases can you recommend?
Spring Reading 2021: Birdsong, Cherry Blossom & More
It’s been a gorgeously sunny spring here – how about where you are? Although there have still been some frosty nights troubling the gardeners among us, it’s been warm in the daytime and the flowers and blossom are coming on apace.
Recently I’ve read a couple of books reflecting on the spring of 2020, specifically the opportunities it offered to reconnect with local nature at a time when we were isolated and couldn’t travel.
I’ve also been feeling nostalgic for Washington, D.C. and the Maryland suburbs, where I grew up. It’s been two years since my last trip back, but I’m holding out hope that I can make it over in June for a family wedding.
Rounding out my selection of “Spring” titles is an offbeat Japanese novella.
Looking back to the coronavirus spring:
On Thursday evening I watched “The Act of Nature Watching,” a special Earth Day Zoom talk for West Berkshire Libraries by local nature writer Nicola Chester, whose memoir is coming out in the autumn. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries, she lamented. We are hardwired to watch and love nature, she noted, yet have never been more alienated from it. Reading from her columns and anthology contributions (as well as the Lovatt, below) and giving tips on recognizing birdsong and mammal signs, she spoke of nature-watching as a form of mindfulness – an approach that chimed with the first three books I feature here.
Birdsong in a Time of Silence: An Awakening by Steven Lovatt (2021)
During the UK’s first lockdown, with planes grounded and cars stationary, many remarked on the quiet. All the better to hear birds going about their usual spring activities. For Lovatt, from Birmingham and now based in South Wales, it was the excuse he needed to return to his childhood birdwatching hobby. In between accounts of his spring walks, he tells lively stories of common birds’ anatomy, diet, lifecycle, migration routes, and vocalizations. (He even gives step-by-step instructions for sounding like a magpie.) Birdsong takes him back to childhood, but feels deeper than that: a cultural memory that enters into our poetry and will be lost forever if we allow our declining bird species to continue on the same trajectory.
Mentions of current events are sparse and subtle, so the spring feels timeless, as it should. I worried there might be too much overlap with A Sweet, Wild Note by Richard Smyth, but there’s room for both on your shelf. Lovatt’s writing is introspective and poetic, delighting in metaphors for sounds: “The song of a turtle dove is like the aural equivalent of a heat-haze, the gentlest corrugation of air, always just on the edge of your hearing.” 
Skylarks with Rosie: A Somerset Spring by Stephen Moss (2021)
Lovatt must have been a pupil of Moss’s on the Bath Spa University MA degree in Travel and Nature Writing. The prolific Moss’s latest also reflects on the spring of 2020, but in a more overt diary format. Devoting one chapter to each of the 13 weeks of the first lockdown, he traces the season’s development alongside his family’s experiences and the national news. With four of his children at home, along with one of their partners and a convalescing friend, it’s a pleasingly full house. There are daily cycles or walks around “the loop,” a three-mile circuit from their front door, often with Rosie the Labrador; there are also jaunts to corners of the nearby Avalon Marshes. Nature also comes to him, with songbirds in the garden hedges and various birds of prey flying over during their 11:00 coffee breaks.
His speaking engagements and trips cancelled, Moss turns to online events instead. Twitter serves as a place for sharing outrage over UK politics and world events like George Floyd’s murder, but also as a welcoming community for sharing nature sightings. As the lockdown come to a close, he realizes that this time has had unexpected benefits: “Having to press the pause button … has made me rethink my life, in a good way.” He feels that, for once, he has truly appreciated the spring, “rediscovering the joys of wildlife-watching close to home”. This made for perfect reading in Somerset last week.
Also recommended: The Consolation of Nature by Marren, McCarthy and Mynott
Remembering springs back home:
Spring in Washington by Louis J. Halle (1947)
“The discovery of spring each year, after the winter’s hibernation, is like a rediscovery of the universe … knowledge of spring gives me the freedom of the world.”
For Halle, who worked in the State Department, nature was an antidote to hours spent shuffling papers behind a desk. In this spring of 1945, there was plenty of wildfowl to see in central D.C. itself, but he also took long early morning bike rides along the Potomac or the C&O Canal, or in Rock Creek Park. From first migrant in February to last in June, he traces the spring mostly through the birds that he sees. More so than the specific observations of familiar places, though, I valued the philosophical outlook that makes Halle a forerunner of writers like Barry Lopez and Peter Matthiessen. He notes that those caught up in the rat race adapt the world to their comfort and convenience, prizing technology and manmade tidiness over natural wonders. By contrast, he feels he sees more clearly – literally as well as metaphorically – when he takes the long view of a landscape.
I marked so many passages of beautiful description. Halle had mastered the art of noticing. But he also sounds a premonitory note, one that was ahead of its time in the 1940s and needs heeding now more than ever: “When I see men able to pass by such a shining and miraculous thing as this Cape May warbler, the very distillate of life, and then marvel at the internal-combustion engine, I think we had all better make ourselves ready for another Flood.”
This was a lucky find at Hay Cinema Bookshop back in September. For me it was the ideal combination of thoughtful prose and vicarious travel, though I imagine it might not mean as much to those without a local connection. The black-and-white in-text illustrations by Francis L. Jaques are a particularly nice addition.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been? I’ve been to Washington, and guess what I’ve seen… by Russell Punter and Dan Taylor (2019)
More cherry blossoms over tourist landmarks! This is part of a children’s series inspired by the 1805 English rhyme about London; other volumes visit New York City, Paris, and Rome. In rhyming couplets, he takes us from the White House to the Lincoln Memorial via all the other key sights of the Mall and further afield: museums and monuments, the Library of Congress, the National Cathedral, Arlington Cemetery, even somewhere I’ve never been – Theodore Roosevelt Island. Realism and whimsy (a kid-sized cat) together; lots of diversity in the crowd scenes. What’s not to like? (Titled Kitty cat, kitty cat… in the USA.)
And, as a bonus, some fiction in translation:
Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (2014; 2017)
[Translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton]
Like a Murakami protagonist, Taro is a divorced man in his thirties, mildly interested in the sometimes peculiar goings-on in his vicinity. Rumor has it that his Tokyo apartment complex will be torn down soon, but for now the PR manager is happy enough here. “Avoiding bother was Taro’s governing principle.” But bother comes to find him in the form of a neighbor, Nishi, who is obsessed with a nearby house that was the backdrop for the art book Spring Garden, a collection of photographs of a married couple’s life. Her enthusiasm gradually draws Taro into the depicted existence of the TV commercial director and actress who lived there 25 years ago, as well as the young family who live there now. This Akutagawa Prize winner failed to hold my interest – like The Guest Cat, it’s oddly preoccupied with architectural detail, a Japanese fascination that doesn’t translate so well. 
Have you been reading anything particularly appropriate for spring this year?
Somerset Trip & Bookbarn Haul and Overhauls
Last week we managed a few days’ holiday in Somerset – our first trip away from home in over seven months (the last one was to Hay-on-Wye). Though only an hour and a half from where we live, it felt like a world away. We were very lucky with the weather, too. We wandered the quiet nature reserves of the Avalon Marshes, toured Glastonbury and Wells (the smallest cathedral city in the UK; alas, we missed the limited cathedral opening hours, but had a nice walk around the outside and saw a plaque marking where Elizabeth Goudge lived), and climbed Glastonbury Tor and Ebber Gorge. Not wanting to chance any pubs, we ate daytime meals outdoors at a few cafés and brought posh supermarket takeaways with us to heat up in the Airbnb kitchen for dinners.
(Photos by Chris Foster)
I read from lots of different books on the trip, but my most appropriate selection was Skylarks with Rosie, Stephen Moss’s diary of the coronavirus spring experienced in Somerset. By coincidence, my husband saw Moss (a mentor of his; we’ve met him a number of times before) filming at Ham Wall when he went back there early one morning!
On the last day, we drove back via Bookbarn International, a favourite secondhand bookshop of mine. Below is my book haul from the trip: the top five were from a Little Free Library we found in a bus shelter in the delightfully named town of Queen Camel and the bottom stack was from Bookbarn, which was looking well stocked after the lockdown. I was particularly pleased to find books by Amy Bloom, Sue Miller, and Jane Smiley, authors you don’t come across so often in the UK. Some of the LFL books have rather hideous covers, but it’s the inside that counts, yes?
Overhaul of Previous Trips’ Purchases
This was our seventh trip to Bookbarn since June 2013. I don’t seem to have any photos of that first visit, but for all the rest I have at least one book haul photo.
Simon of Stuck in a Book runs a regular blog feature he calls “The Overhaul,” where he revisits a book haul from some time ago and takes stock of what he’s read, what he still owns, etc. (here’s the most recent one). With his permission, I’m borrowing the title and format to look back at what I’ve bought at Bookbarn over the years and how much I still have left to read.
Date: July 2015
Number of books bought: 8 [the Allen and Cobbett are reference books for my husband]
- Read: 7
- No longer owned: 2 (I resold the Fitzgerald and Levy)
- Remaining unread: 1 (Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz – so I took it with me on the Somerset trip and have read the first 50 pages so far.)
This is a very good showing for me! I suppose I did have nearly six years to get through them all. I’ve done less well on the other years’ hauls…
Date: July 2016
Number of books bought: 10
- Had read already: 1 (Rachman)
- Read since: 4
- No longer owned: 1 (Irving’s early work hasn’t been to my taste, so after my husband read The Water-Method Man, I donated it; its only virtue in my eyes is that the main character is called “Bogus Trumper”)
- Remaining unread: 4 (Chatwin, Coe, McCarthy, O’Hanlon)
Date: December 2016
Number of books bought: 13 (the two pictured at left were from another shop)
- Read: 6
- DNFed and gave away: 3 (Lurie, Smith, Wheen)
- Remaining unread: 4 (Barnes, Ellman biography, Godwin, Mantel)
Date: October 2017 (multiple photos in this post)
Number of books bought: 15
- Read: 5
- Skimmed: 1 (McCarthy)
- DNFed: 1 (McNeillie)
- Remaining unread: 8! (I have a bad habit of letting biographies sit around unread)
Date: February 2020
Number of books bought: 14
- Had read already: 2
- Skimmed: 2
- Started reading but set aside: 2, so…
- Remaining unread: 10!
To encourage myself to get to more of these previous acquisitions, I’ve added six of them to my bedside stack.
Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton (Blog Tour Review)
It can’t happen here. Or can it? That’s a question Rosamund Lupton asks with her novel about a siege at a progressive school in rural England. When out in public with my copy of the book, I was asked a few times what I was reading. I would explain that it was about a school shooting in Somerset, and the reply was always “In the UK?!” Guns are difficult to come by in this country thanks to firearms legislation that was passed following a couple of high-profile massacres in the 1980s and 90s. So, to an extent, you’ll have to suspend your disbelief about the perpetrators getting access to automatic weapons and bombs. And you should, because the story that unfolds is suspenseful and timely.
Cliff Heights School is in the midst of a surprise November blizzard. It’s also under attack. At 9:16 the headmaster, Matthew Marr, is shot twice. Students bundle him into the library, barricade the doors and tend to his head and foot injuries as best they can. He recognized the shooter, but the damage to his brain means he’s incapable of telling anyone who it was.
At 8:15 Rafi Bukhari, a Syrian refugee pupil, had seen an IED explode on the school grounds and alerted Marr, who promptly evacuated the junior school. But the institution is based across several buildings, with some students in the theatre for a dress rehearsal, more in the pottery hut for art class – and now a few trapped in the library.
Lupton toggles between these different locations, focusing on a handful of staff and students and the relationships between them. Hannah, who’s doing her best to help Mr. Marr, is Rafi’s girlfriend. Rafi is concerned for his little brother, Basi, who’s still traumatized after their escape from Syria. Mr. Marr sponsored the boys’ move to England. Could it be that anti-Muslim sentiment has made the Bukhari boys – and thus the school they attend – a target?
We also spend time behind the scenes with police investigators as they pursue leads and worried parents as they await news of their children. I found the book most gripping when the situation was still a complete unknown; as the options narrow down and it becomes clear who’s responsible, things feel a bit more predictable. However, there are still unexpected turns to come.
A few elements that stood out for me were the use of technology (FaceTime, WhatsApp and drones weren’t available at the time of Columbine), the Syrian boys’ history, and the student production of Macbeth, whose violence ironically comments on the school’s crisis. While not my usual fare, I found this well worth reading and will look into Lupton’s back catalogue, too.
Readalikes: Bloomland by John Englehardt and A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold
My rating: 
Three Hours will be published by Penguin Viking on the 9th. My thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
My pal Annabel has also reviewed the book today.
Penguin Influencers Event & 2020 Releases to Look Out For
Just a quick one to report on an event I attended in London last night – thanks to Annabel for asking if she could invite me along. This Penguin Influencers evening was held at sofa.com, a furniture showroom nestled beneath a railway arch near Southwark station. It was a slightly odd venue, but at least there were lots of comfy places to sit. Displays of proof copies were arranged on coffee tables so we could go around and fill our free Tana French tote bags with what caught our eye. There were a few dozen of us there: just one bloke; and mostly women younger than me.
It was good to meet some bloggers I recognized from Twitter and Facebook groups, including Rachel Gilbey (one of whose blog tours I’ve participated in) and Linda Hill (one of whose blog competitions I’ve won); I also spotted a couple more familiar faces, even though I didn’t get to say hello: Ova from Excuse My Reading and Umut from Umut Reviews. It was especially nice to see Beth Bonini, the Bookstagram queen, again. She used to live near me, though we didn’t realize that until just as she was moving from Newbury to London; she gave me her gorgeous bookcase.
As to the book acquisitions…
The Wych Elm by Tana French is now out in paperback. I’ve not read anything by French, but have meant to for a long time because many trusted bloggers think she’s terrific, even if (like me) they don’t ordinarily read crime. This just exceeds 500 pages, so I think I’ll make it my doorstopper for next month, and it will also tie in with the R.I.P. challenge.
I’d already read Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout on my Kindle via a NetGalley download, but it’s great to now own one of my favorite releases of the year in print. (I found it difficult to go back through the e-book when writing my review because it didn’t have a proper table of contents and I’d forgotten all the chapter/story titles as I went along.)
Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton is coming out on January 9th. It’s a tense school shooting novel set in Somerset, and the publicist told us that if we don’t agree with her in all those clichés – ‘I couldn’t put it down; I stayed up all night reading it’ – we can sue her!
Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano is coming out on February 27th. Edward is the only survivor after a plane bound from New York City to Los Angeles crashes in Colorado. The novel is about how he rebuilds his life afterwards; the publicist warned us to bring tissues.
Keeper by Jessica Moor is Penguin’s lead debut title of 2020, coming out on March 19th. When a young woman is found dead at a popular suicide site, the police dismiss it as an open-and-shut case of suicide. But the others at the women’s shelter where Katie Straw worked aren’t convinced. We meet five very different women from the refuge and hear their stories, in the process learning about some of the major threats that face women today. There are already words of praise in from Val McDermid and Jeanette Winterson.
It probably won’t be until later in December that I start reading 2020 titles and reporting back on what I’ve read, plus listing the other releases I’m most looking forward to.
Though I might have hoped for a few more free books to make the cost of my train ticket into London feel worthwhile, I enjoyed connecting with fellow bloggers, hearing about some 2020 releases, and briefly fooling myself that I’m an influencer in the book world. At the very least, I’m now on a Penguin mailing list so might be invited to some future events or sent some proofs.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 