Helen Macdonald is best known for her memoir H is for Hawk. [True confession: I didn’t finish it.] In 2020 she published Vesper Flights, a collection of previously written essays that I did finish. As Macdonald’s fans know, she is British, and many (though not all) of her experiences take place in England.
The book contains 41 brief essays showing some of the amazing creatures and events she has witnessed. In her introduction, she states, “These are terrible times for the environment. Now more than ever before, we need to look long and hard at how we view and interact with the natural world.” The collection, however, does not preach, but encourages the reader to pay attention. Essay titles are brief and intriguing: Ants, Eclipse, Swan Upping, Murmurations.
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This week I picked up the latest Alexander McCall Smith mystery, #22 in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, entitled The Joy and Light Bus Company. McCall Smith is a writing machine, with three ongoing series, plus stand-alone titles. (Full disclosure: This is presently the only series of his I read.) In an article he said he writes all the time, even in trains, and I believe him.
The series is set, as you doubtless know, in contemporary Botswana, with a continuing cast of characters. He gives Precious Ramotswe wisdom I wish I had. “You had to feel your way through the complexities of this life and hope, just hope, that you got it right more often than you got it wrong.” The series is full of that kind of gentleness; the mysteries are very cozy. There’s a place for that kind of reading—not everything needs to be deep or riveting or heart-wrenching. Phaedra Patrick has written a mystery that's also a romance, or perhaps a romance that's also a mystery, The Messy Lives of Book People (a title after my own heart). Forty-something Liv cleans for extra cash needed to keep her family going and her sons at the university, while her husband, Jake, tries to keep his family's printing business from going under. One of Liv's clients is a mystery writer; her novels have sustained Liv through hard times. If you've ever wanted to have a different life or to meet someone you've idolized, this is a great novel to enjoy.
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren—read it, whether or not you think you care about plants. I gulped it in 3 days. Some gorgeous prose, as well as a critique of how women in the sciences (and academe in general, I would argue) are treated.
Many of you have no doubt read Sue Monk Kidd’s fiction and nonfiction; perhaps you also found her memoir Traveling with Pomegranates, co-written with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor. Taylor later wrote a novel, The Shark Club, about a young woman who becomes fascinated with sharks after surviving an attack at age twelve. She becomes a specialist on sharks, traveling the world to study them, which complicates relationships with her family and friends. Those new discoveries begin with two hopeful books: Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and Sophie Blackall’s Things to Look Forward To: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day. Both feel like companion pieces in difficult times.
Best known as a poet, Gay turned to what he calls “essayettes,” most of them two or three short pages. Gay challenged himself to spend a year writing one delight a day, by hand; 102 of them make up this collection, published in 2019. I found them soothing to read before sleep. The titles range from “Kombucha in a Mid-century Glass” to “Babies. Seriously.” The writing reveals a sensitive man (he’s English faculty at Indiana U.) who is paying attention to life around him. He is also commenting as a black man on social injustice. The good news is he has another essay collection coming in October 2022, Inciting Joy. If you’d like to hear him read poetry with music accompaniment, he has several options on Youtube. More recently, Sophie Blackall has cataloged things to anticipate, happily. She wrote and illustrated this book during the pandemic; in her introduction she claims to always see the silver lining around dark clouds, but describes 2020 as “a son of a cumulonimbus.” Blackall is best known as an award-winning illustrator of children’s books, so this one includes a full-page illustration for each brief item. Some are done in grayscale; most are full color. Her chosen topics are both familiar (Rainbows) and quirky (Moving the Furniture Around). I noticed in particular her love of detail in illustrations. The one on Voting, for example, features a VOTE button pinned on a tweed sweater, with a zillion small vs on the fabric to indicate that it’s not a plain sweater. And the wearer has a striped scarf around her neck. The very next page, Growing Your Own Food, is illustrated with a bowl full of peas—but not so full that we can’t see the intricate pattern on the inside of the bowl. |
What I’m ReadingI began working in libraries as a seventh grader, courtesy of scoliosis. My orthopedic surgeon wrote me a pass to miss gym class, so I began working in the school library to feed my love of reading. Even after my surgery to correct the curvature, I kept getting out of gym to work in my high school library and then in my college library (for pay, at last!).
So began my eventual career as a college reference librarian—after a detour into teaching high school English. Later I worked for an educational publisher before going back to libraries.
I have a reading and writing life now. I devour both fiction and nonfiction, and will tell you about some of my favorite reads, both old friends and new discoveries.
Here's some library-themed music to get you in the mood.
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