Category Archives: essays

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Best Books I Read in 2022

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?

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The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser

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I was first alerted to Hauser’s essay “The Crane Wife” by the Longreads list of best essays in 2019 which sent me to the Paris Review where it was published. I thought it brilliant.

So I looked forward to reading this book. Hauser calls it “a work of personal nonfiction,” saying “These essays reflect my life as I remember it and the stories I’ve made of that life to understand how to keep living in it.”

In “The Crane Wife” Hauser goes to Texas to study the whooping crane shortly after calling off her engagement. Sections alternate between her engagement and her experience with the cranes. Equally important are those who study the cranes, the motley collection of volunteers who welcome her to this Earthwatch event.

She gives a poignant recounting of her deteriorating relationship, constantly setting aside her own needs as shameful. Men are entitled to have needs, but “when a woman needs, she is needy.” At the same time she is measuring the small things that fill the needs of these whooping cranes who are on the verge of extinction.

The Crane Wife is a story from Japanese folklore about a crane who fell in love with a human man. She didn’t want him to know she was a crane, so every night she plucked out all of her feathers. “Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work.”

I found the book’s cover image disconcerting: a person, presumably a woman though not obviously, whose turtleneck is pulled up to erase her face, leaving her vulnerable stomach bare. I suppose it’s meant to refer to the title essay and Hauser’s erasure of herself, but it doesn’t reflect the collection and ultimately felt demeaning.

What makes these essays so good is the way she balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes a story’s characters, sometimes both. I especially enjoyed her bookish roamings through Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s oeuvre. I also liked her travails in deciding what to say when asked to officiate at her friends’ wedding, wanting to capture the breadth and depth of the women’s relationship, while also discussing her obsession with The X Files and what she calls its MSR: Mulder-Scully Relationship.

Another reason these essays are so absorbing is her use of specific details, like shopping for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee, and incisive incidents like a bit about Christmas stockings. Mostly, though, it is her openness that makes these essays hit home, her willingness to be vulnerable.

Many of them have to do with her love life, which I would have found more interesting thirty years ago. Still, I enjoyed them and even listened to the entire collection twice. It is read by the author, whose voice has a bubble of laughter under it, even during the sad parts, keeping me a little off balance, which is not a bad thing.

Near the end of the book she returns to the idea of the stories we tell ourselves about the events of our lives, stepping back from the story to comment on her authorial choices. This is a smart book and gave me a lot to think about.

What essay or essays would you put on your best-of-this-year list?

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Author Tours

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When I went to Toronto many years ago to visit my son who had moved there, he took me on a tour of the city to show me the places in Michael Ondaatje’s masterful novel In the Skin of a Lion. I had loved the novel, along with the other Can Lit books my son had recommended (Timothy Findley, Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, David Adams Richards, Margaret Laurence, etc.) at that time not available in the U.S. Somehow, seeing the actual places mentioned in Ondaatje’s book made it come alive for me in a different way.

Perhaps you have had this experience. If you read a book set in a place you know well, you have a different relationship with the story. When I read an Anne Tyler book or one by Laura Lippman, I recognise the places in and near Baltimore that they mention, and the story becomes that much more real.

A few years ago when I was in Edinburgh, I went on an Ian Rankin tour. His books are true works of literary art, and I highly recommend them. I first found one in a Toronto bookstore; they weren’t available in the U.S. and the online bookstore thing hadn’t taken hold yet. He immediately became one of my favorite authors, and I’ve enjoyed watching his immense talent increase with every book, especially those featuring detective John Rebus.

The tour was fun, taking us to places that cropped up in his books as well as to buildings where he and fellow Edinburgh authors lived. I also made an effort to look on my own for things referenced in his books, such as the miniature coffins found on Arthur’s seat and Rebus’s favorite bar.

Recently I enjoyed a tour in Quebec City that took us to places mentioned in Louise Penny’s Bury the Dead. Seeing where the incidents in the story took place, following Inspector Gamache’s footsteps, enjoying the restaurants and bistros mentioned made the story real in an entirely different way. If nothing else, I saw how short a distance it was in some cases from one place to another, making it easier to understand how Gamache could move so quickly between them.

Our tour guide Marie had some inside information: Penny herself had stayed in the house where Gamache stayed with his friend Emil in the story. Marie had seen inside and verified that it matched the description, just as we could verify the descriptions of other, more public places mentioned.

Marie speculated that Penny had eaten in these restaurants, ridden the funicular, visited the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. I thought: Of course she did! That’s how you research a book. All good writers do that.

When you travel, I encourage you to read novels set there and, if possible, take a tour of the places mentioned. Let me know how that changes your perception of the book.

Have you ever taken a tour of places mentioned in an author’s book? If you read a book set in a place you know well, how is the experience different?

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Best Books I Read in 2021

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2021. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
While this is a story about WWI, it is not about trenches and battles. It is a small, human story powered by big ideas, not just the romance/reality of war itself and the emergence of what we now call PTSD as a recognised illness, but also the unlikely connections that save us, the small mistakes that have large consequences, hubris, guilt, atonement. It is a brilliant evocation of this moment when everything about the world changed.

2. This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams
At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped. I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored.

3. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team. While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed— one I am familiar with.

4. The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward
I read this collection of essays and poems three times over before I allowed the library to repossess it. Subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, it provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

5. Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper, by Tim Mayo
Mayo’s most recent collection of poems helps me find a way through this difficult time. From his work as a teacher and mental health worker, he brings us encounters with the delusional and with our own pasts. Because it is sometimes hard to tell if the poem is written in the persona of a patient or a staff person, Mayo narrows the distance between the two, finding our common humanity.

6. The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny
Penny latest novel of Inspector Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines in Quebec is simply extraordinary. More than any other book I’ve read, it captures this unprecedented time, while still being an engrossing mystery.

7. North River, by Pete Hamill
James Delaney is a 47-year-old doctor practicing in Depression-era New York, living alone in a house gifted him by a grateful patient. All he has left is his work and, after the carnage of the Great War where he served as a medic, he is determined to save what lives he can and comfort the dying as best he can. Then one morning he returns from the hospital to find a baby in the entryway. I loved this novel. For once, I could simply relax into the life of single person, one who is complicated and flawed but whose basic moral code is evident.

8. The Possible Pleasures, by Lynn Valente
In these poems Valente’s language is simple, yet her images are startling and fresh. In addition, exquisite care has been taken with the ordering of the poems. It’s no surprise that the prestigious Finishing Line Press chose to publish this chapbook. It embeds simple truths in experiences we can recognise and phrases that catch us by surprise.

9. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie as a companion. The use of AFs harks back to the use of governesses, servants, and slaves to do the emotional work some parents, such as Josie’s mother, are too busy for. This theme of service and its evil twin power—the effects on both the servant and served—is one Ishiguro has explored before, notably in The Remains of the Day.

10. We Are as Gods, by Kate Daloz
The story of Vermont’s Myrtle Hill commune provides the narrative backbone of this nonfiction book. Daloz follows the group from its idealistic beginnings through the gradual disenchantment, conveying their stories realistically yet with sympathy. The book combines the focus on Myrtle Hill and its neighbors with a wide-ranging summary of the counter-culture of the period, the growth and brief life of the commune movement, and the gradual recognition among the commune members that no one is actually self-sufficient. We all, including their original Vermont neighbors, rely on our community.

What were the best books you read last year?

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The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward

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This collection of essays and poems, subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, together provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. It is divided into three parts: Legacy, Reckoning and Jubilee—past, present and future.

Ward, who collected the pieces, supplies the introduction and a piece on what she learned from DNA testing, noting how hard it is for people to discover the genealogy of the black side of their family. Two pieces look at the legacy of black writers, Rachel Ghansah comparing her grandfather’s life to James Baldwin’s and Honorèe Jeffers questioning Phillis Wheatley’s history as it is presented to us.

The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

Some pieces convey personal experiences, such as Garnette Cadogan’s essay comparing his experiences walking in his native Kingston, Jamaica with walking the streets of New Orleans and later those of New York. Never having been given “The Talk,” he had to work out for himself how to camouflage himself—preppie clothes and his college sweatshirt; never a hoodie or jeans and tee shirt—and the rules to follow to keep white people from being afraid of him or police from stopping him.

Many of the pieces respond to the relentless killing of black people by police and armed vigilantes, such as Claudia Rankin’s “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” Emily Raboteau describes going with her family to see the recently reopened High Bridge in New York City that connects Harlem and the Bronx. There she discovers a mural that leads her on a tour of discovery around the city to find all the murals that, combining love and activism, educate adults and children on how to protect themselves from police brutality and structural racism.

I was especially intrigued by Kevin Young’s funny and piercing “Blacker Than Thou” where he talks about white people wearing blackface or actually “passing” as black, such as Rachel Dolezal. “But if you are white but truly feel black, then why do you have to look like it?” Blackness, he says, is not about skin color but about culture. He says of black people, “Any solidarity with each other is about something shared, a secret joy, a song, not about some stereotypical qualities that may be reproducible, imitable, even marketable.”

Of Dolezal, he says, “She wears the mask not to hide but to gain authority over the very thing she claims she wants to be.” Her claim is of a piece with her other stories that paint her as a victim. And, as with blackface and other examples of passing, it says more about how those white people view blackness.

Poems by Jericho Brown, Kima Jones, Clint Smith add texture and imagery, always a more intense experience for me. And I loved seeing Natasha Tretheway’s familiar “Theories of Time and Space” opening the Jubilee section.

I learned a lot from this cornucopia of voices. I still have a lot to learn.

What have you read lately that made you cry and laugh and thunder with rage, and most of all made you think?

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Autumnal Tints, by Henry David Thoreau

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I had to laugh when I started this long essay. Thoreau begins by saying how surprised Europeans and even many Americans are when they first see the spectacular foliage of a New England autumn. Today, we in New England are besieged by RVs and SUVs with out-of-state plates clogging our roads and highways as leaf-peepers from all over chase peak foliage.

My hilarity soon turned to admiration as Thoreau takes us through the season’s offerings, from the purple grasses of late August to the scarlet oaks of late October. His lovely descriptions include what natural science information he has and sometimes lead to larger thoughts.

How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and Maple and Chestnut and Birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s thickness to the depth of the soil.

How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,–with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.

Some sections made me sad, such as the one on elm trees. I have a slight memory of great rows of elm trees from my early childhood before they were decimated by Dutch Elm Disease.

Other sections are thrilling, such as this excerpt from the section on red maples:

How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! . . . If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.

I also recognise his personal relationship with certain trees.

I notice a small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. I have observed this tree for several autumns invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens its fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season, perhaps. I should be sorry, if it were cut down.

One of my favorite maples was cut down last winter and I am missing it greatly just now. However, there are many other trees to wander among and admire, so I will go and do that now. I hope you will join me in appreciating this brilliant season and Thoreau’s appreciative essay.

What trees are you walking among?

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Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

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I have read Walden a few times since I first encountered it in high school. Back then I was charmed as so many are by the idea of going to the woods to live, and thrilled by his bits of philosophy. Despite a heavy load of schoolwork, I still spent as much time as I could outside, among the trees, so it’s no surprise that I adopted as my lifelong personal motto “To be awake is to be alive.”

Later readings brought more informed insight. I learned how close his retreat was to town, for example, and paid more attention to his many visitors. I found that he had pulled together parts of his other essays which explained the resulting crazy quilt structure. The first chapter, though, remains a bit of a slog.

On this reading what struck me most was the chapter titled “The Ponds.” It’s mostly about Walden, of course, but he also briefly describes other nearby ponds: Goose Pond, Flint’s Pond (also known as Sandy Pond), White Pond, and Fair Haven.

When I first read the book as a teenager I lived by and loved the Chesapeake Bay, so I was not terribly impressed by his pond. However, all these decades later, it turns out that I have spent a good part of my life in a small cabin by a pond in Massachusetts. Now I can appreciate his beautifully observed descriptions of the water and woods.

“Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.” Being surrounded, like my pond, by pine and oak woods and blueberry bushes makes it seem like “an amphitheater for some kind of sylvan spectacle.” I recognise his descriptions of the “blue flag (Iris versicolor)” growing along the shore and the hummingbirds in June. He speaks of the transparency of the water and of the stones along the shore, recounting stories of how they came to be formed.

As a naturalist, he traces the pond’s rise and fall, its fluctuating temperature, and its various colors. He also worked as a surveyor and his map of Walden could still be used today. He names the kinds of fish and waterfowl, and detects traces of ancient paths “worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.” He says of being out on his boat “In such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon.”

There is something about a pond, a humble one like mine and his, that invites contemplation. Often I set my books and papers aside just to watch the way the light glints on the water or to listen to the rustle of leaves and pine boughs and the sparkling bird calls. Many evenings I have left the lamp off, preferring instead to watch the way the light fades behind the far woods, the water and sky holding the last of the light, the dark band of trees between.

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light.

He speaks of fishing during the midnight hours “from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.” And of “communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below.”

It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes and other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

In the second chapter “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” he says

For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain . . . and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.

I too have watched the way the mist drifts across the surface or sometimes rises in columns. I’ve heard a loon calling in the twilight and watched otters play by the bank.

He tells of an old man who lived by the pond before the revolution who told him that there was an iron chest at the bottom of the pond. Similarly, we have stories of the pond next to mine where somewhere near the center there is a piano resting on the bottom. We have searched for it, but never found it.

Thoreau says, “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” Just as I return again and again to my pond with its mysterious depths and sparkling surface, so too I treasure books like this where I can find something new each time I return.

How has your reading of this book changed over the years?

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“To Die One’s Own Death,” by Jacqueline Rose

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London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 22 · 19 November 2020

Written during the first wave of the pandemic with its soaring death rates made worse by the fumbling response of corrupt governments, and amid accelerating climate catastrophes, Rose’s essay, subtitled “Jacqueline Rose on Freud and his daughter”, looks at how we cope with these repeated blows. If we shut down emotionally and intellectually, “does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the broken pieces and muddled fragments that make us who we are?”

Rose takes us back to a similar moment in time: 25 January 1920 when Freud’s favourite daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, died in the last wave of the Spanish flu. A devastated Austria had lost the war; Freud himself had lost his earlier enthusiasm for his homeland’s role in the war and now supported the breakup of the Austrian Empire. With his family starving, and himself unable even to get to his dying daughter because there were no trains, Freud’s situation was eerily similar to what many experienced during our own pandemic: “the lack of state provision, the missing medical supplies, the dearth of equipment and isolation from human touch have made it feel to many for the first time that death is something of which a person – the one dying, and those closest to her or him – can be robbed.”

He turned to writing, adding the lengthy Chapter Six to Beyond the Pleasure Principle which was published later in 1920. In this chapter, he first presents the idea of a death drive in conflict with our drive for self-preservation, the life drive, deriving it from what “he had first identified in soldiers returning from battle who found themselves reliving their worst experiences in night-time and waking dreams.” He compares this repetition compulsion to his other patients and their resistance to therapy, concluding that “The urge of all organic life is to restore an earlier state of things.”

He carries this idea further to postulate an internal human need to craft our own track to the end of life, regardless of any limit for self-preservation, saying “The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” Thus, for victims of wars and pandemics and natural catastrophes, the randomness of their deaths robs them “of the essence of life.”

Rose’s essay continues, supplementing Freud’s ideas from another paper written during WWI, “The Phylogenetic Fantasy,” with current research on inherited trauma to look at how anxiety travels through generations, an anxiety that is a “response to an imperilled world, but also . . . a reaction to the tyranny of the powers that come to meet it.”

There is much more to this essay, and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for new insight into our current state of being. However, I was struck by the idea of an urge to restore an earlier state of things and its relevance to the stories we tell.

Books such as Robert McKee’s Story, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, and Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering describe a basic structure dating back to the Western world’s earliest stories. This ur-story begins with a normal world—troubled but getting by—that is disrupted in some way. Hence novelist John Gardner’s famous saying about all stories being either about going on a journey or a stranger coming to town: the two ways a world is disrupted.

The story then is about the attempts, usually by the main character, to restore their original normal world. But there is no going back, any more than there is for the soldiers reliving their nightmares. Instead, the main character must address not only the events around them but also their internal troubles, now no longer balanced but demanding change. By the end of the story, they are indeed changed, as Gawain returns to Arthur’s Court humbled and contrite after his encounter with the Green Knight, as Elizabeth Bennet enters her marriage realising that she must look beyond her first hasty judgments in order to discover real goodness.

The urge to restore an earlier state of things also makes me think of the nostalgia for a previous age that so many today have succumbed to. Not only do our stories tell us that such a return is impossible, but the image of that previous age is false, usually edited to be more attractive than it actually was. While often that false image has been deliberately created for political purposes, it is also true that our own minds chip away at our memories, according to recent research, subtly changing them each time we recall an incident.

We cannot go back to the time before the pandemic, and how we remember it may not even be reliable. We have been changed by this experience, in ways we may not yet recognise, and we are not yet at the end of it. Eventually, I believe, we will turn to stories to understand, help us grieve, and put the broken pieces back together.

What are you reading or listening to that is helping you better understand this extraordinary time?

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Best Books I read in 2020

Best Books I read in 2020

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2020. In general, this year I gravitated toward books that either comforted me or gave me courage. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of each book.

1. Horizon, by Barry Lopez
In this profound and generous book, Lopez looks back over some of the travels that have shaped his understanding and philosophy. We go from Oregon to Antarctica, from Nunavut to Tasmania, from Eastern Equatorial Africa to Xi’an in China. The horizon he explores is physically and metaphorically the line where our known world gives way to air, to the space we still know almost nothing about. That liminal space is where exciting things can happen. The quest for knowledge and understanding—along with compassion—are what I value most in human beings.

2. Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck
The main character of Erpenbeck’s novel is a plot of land by a lake in Brandenburg, and the homes built there, especially a fabulously detailed home built by an architect in the 1930s. The succession of people who live in this house and next door mirror the changes in East Germany during the ensuing decades. Though short, this novel is surprisingly intense. It made me think about what inheritances are passed on and what are lost, about the so-brief time that we inhabit this world that is our home, and how the earth itself, though changed, persists. Our cares and worries, even in this terrible time, will pass.

3. Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk
This unusual and fascinating novel explores the border between poetry and prose, story and fairy tale. The quirky voice of the narrator is firmly established with the first sentence and sustained throughout the book. Living alone in an isolated community in western Poland, Janina is an older woman who manages her vocation of astrology, the translations of William Blake’s poetry that she and a friend are doing, and the griefs that accumulate over the years. The story sometimes feels like a fable, sometimes a prose poem, sometimes a wrenching view of age and isolation, sometimes a paean to friendship.

4. A Woman of No Importance, by Sonia Purnell
Subtitled The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, this is a fascinating read. If you thought, as I initially did, that the subtitle is a bit hyperbolic, rest assured that it is not. Born in 1906 to a wealthy and prestigious family, Virginia Hall grew up in Baltimore but preferred adventure to marriage. During WWII, she became one of the first British spies—and the first female—in France where she organised Resistance units and provided critical intelligence to the Allies.

5. Abigail, by Magda Szabó
Originally published in 1970, it is the story of 15-year-old Gina who in 1943 is exiled from Budapest by her beloved father, sent to boarding school near Hungary’s eastern border. Headstrong, a little spoiled, Gina rebels, finding creative ways to break the rules at the strict academy. While having many characteristics of a traditional coming-of-age story, and echoes of books like Jane Eyre, Gina’s story is unusually perceptive and complex.

6. Blackberries, Blackberries, by Crystal Wilkinson
These stories feature Black women in rural Kentucky, young and old, each with her individual take on the world, her own idea of herself. In every story, Wilkinson demonstrates the writer’s mantra that the personal is universal. These may be Black women in Appalachia, but I saw myself in each of them. Reading their stories has been a gift, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

7. Gellhorn, by Caroline Moorehead
Moorehead’s biography brings the brilliant war correspondent to life, enhanced by the hundreds of letters Gellhorn wrote during her life, openly detailing personal and professional undertakings as well as her own thoughts and feelings. The biography is subtitled A Twentieth-Century Life. Indeed, although she was always out ahead of others, few things could be more emblematic of that turbulent century than the life of this remarkable woman who challenged customary women’s roles, stuck to her own moral code, and worked relentlessly at her chosen métier.

8. The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This first novel from Coates is the story of Hiram Walker, a young slave in Virginia whose been assigned to be the personal servant for his half-brother: the white, legitimate son of the plantation owner. The writing, as you would expect from Coates, is gorgeous. I loved the first part of the book, but after that, the story seemed to bog down. Still, this coming-of-age story of a man’s journey to freedom is one of the best books I’ve read recently. I loved the unusual and nuanced way the story embodies the themes of family and memory.

9. Grace Notes, by Brian Doyle
These days I’m turning to books not so much for escape as for courage and comfort, and welcome anything that might help replenish my stores of both. For me, that often means returning to one of my favorite authors. In addition to writing unforgettable stories and essays, Brian Doyle, who died much too young in 2017, was a teacher, magazine editor, husband, father. In this collection of short essays, while not shying away from the darkness, Doyle reminds us of what is good in the world.

10. Anything Is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout
A book by Strout is a balm just now, when we are so traumatised by grief and fear and anger. Yes, she takes us into the terrible crimes human beings, even those in quiet Midwestern towns, visit upon one another, yet she also shows us the complicated people that we are. Without dwelling on the ugliness, Strout evokes in us the emotions of these characters, their trials, their loneliness, and sometimes their quiet redemption.

What were the best books you read last year?

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Walking, by Henry David Thoreau

walking

Thoreau first gave this talk in 1851 at the Concord Lyceum and continued to work on it afterwards. It was published in the Atlantic Monthly after he died in 1862.

My second book of poetry Terrarium is about the influence of place on our lives and personality—the place we grew up, our place in the family, perhaps the place we’ve always wanted to visit. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the categories of physical places in my life, a three-legged stool: home, society and the wild. With the pandemic, society is reduced almost completely to faces on the computer, leaving me pondering home and the wild and how we do or do not move among them.

First, let me be clear: wild is a relative term. There is no virgin wilderness here in North America, and never was except perhaps when the first people tramped across the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia. There is untended land, here in New England some of it was once farmland, laboriously carved out of the forest, abandoned when the economy collapsed leaving remnants of stone walls in the woods. There are lightly managed forests, with walking trails and sometimes efforts to remove invasive species. These suffice for my experience of the wild.

Now we have learned through new research that there is more going on in the woods than we realised, that trees communicate with each other and form their own society. Richard Powers’s bestseller The Overstory explores these ideas further through several sets of characters.

The fairy tales we hear as children are often about venturing into the wild—Into the Woods, as Stephen Sondheim put it—and discovering our own talents and values as we encounter its dangers. The journey becomes a metaphorical basis for nearly all of our stories, the hero’s journey described by Joseph Campbell.

And then there’s coming home. For many people, the immediate shock of the pandemic’s stay-home orders was to actually be at home all the time, not spending most daylight hours at work or school or the myriad activities that fill some children’s schedules, not going out in the evenings to a restaurant or concert or pub.

For all the decades I was working a day job, the thought of being at home all day seemed like nirvana. I had worked hard to make my home a place where I wanted to be, that fostered my favorite activities and soothed my soul, yet spent most of my days in offices and laboratories. When I retired a few years ago from that job to write, I feared that being home all the time would not be the paradise I’d expected. Reader, it was. And is. Though I recognise that my personality is particularly well-suited to this life.

I also walk. A lot. Aside from the obvious health benefits of exercise, recent studies have shown the positive effects—mental, physical and emotional—of spending time in nature.

So, belatedly, we come to Thoreau. Most famous for his two years in the woods by Walden Pond, he was fascinated by natural history, anticipating what we now call ecology and environmentalism.

He begins this essay:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Where he wins my heart comes a little later when he says:

I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together . . . I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street . . .

He’s not just extolling the opportunity for exercise, but having the time to “walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” Also, as a Transcendentalist, he considers what we can learn from nature, extolling even swamps and bogs as jewels.

I will leave you to enjoy the rest of this delightful and thought-provoking essay for yourselves. It’s readily available online. It’s time for me to take a walk.

Where are your favorite places to walk?