The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

Finished on: 8/10/2026

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

 

 

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Reading Wendell Berry's nonfiction these days feels like an antidote to a ubiquitous poison. Grounded, wise, and unflinchingly honest, Berry's voice is exactly what I need in this moment, even in the odd spot or two where I’m not in complete agreement with him. In the midst of our daily inundations of sales pitches, political propaganda, corporate shilling, big tech grifting, the whole loud apparatus of the capitalist system… in the middle of all that noise, hearing truth is a balm to mind and soul.

 

Given our current moment in history, it’s perhaps no surprise that I was particularly struck by how accurately Berry predicted the trajectory and ethos of the tech industry, long before the tech industry as we know it existed. I don't think Berry had "big tech" in mind at all: he was simply observing the realities and inevitable ends of America's large-scale, industrialized, exploitative economy. 

 

Yet it’s astonishing, the degree to which Berry's observations—mostly written in the 80s and mid 90s—ring true for the current rise of the Al industry. The two essays that stick out most to me in this regard are "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" and "Economy and Pleasure." In the latter essay, I found this passage especially noteworthy:

 

"Whatever 'new age' is at hand at the moment must be heralded in 'with a rush' because of the profits available to those who will rush it in. It seems that we have been reduced almost to a state of absolute economics, in which people and all other creatures and things may be considered purely as economic 'units,’ or integers of production, and in which a human being may be dealt with, as John Ruskin put it, 'merely as a covetous machine.' And the voices bitterest to hear are those saying that all this destructive work of mindless genius, money, and power is regrettable but cannot be helped."

 

That passage was written in 1988, yet I instantly felt its applicability to gen AI and its reckless development. Because while the tools may be new and “innovative,” the methods by which the tools are created and sold—the whole economic system in which they arise—remain the same: extractive, greedy, and ultimately destructive for both nature and human culture/community. 

 

Berry’s prescience about where we’re heading, and the fundamental changes we must make to course correct, make this a sobering but grounding (and, I think, ultimately hopeful) read.

 

 

 

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert

 

Finished on: 6/20/2026

Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

 

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I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Its conceit sounds so cool (and to be clear, I still think the core idea shows creativity and potential), but packaged in the form of a novel, this falls flat for me.

 

This book desperately wants to be a stage play or a musical, but it consistently fails to take advantage of the novel as a medium. All the qualities that make the novel a desirable medium for a story—room to be expansive with plot elements, room to explore interior character voice, etc.—are underutilized here. The book brushes against interesting subjects (e.g. the creative process, the cultural legacy of pioneering historical figures, etc.) but doesn’t offer especially meaningful exploration of them. The strengths of the book are the energy of the dialogue and the small, tender moments and collaborations between characters... all of which would've shown to better advantage in a script.    

 

  

Orlando

 

Finished on: 6/10/2026

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

 

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This novel preoccupies itself with the tension that exists between the public self and the interior self, between what is perceptible and everything that lies underneath perception. In that vein, it’s very much a novel about social custom: how gender identity and expression are culturally understood and enforced, and how that does and does not shape our view of ourselves. The trappings of Orlando’s life change when their gender identity does—their modes of expression and of moving through the world materially change—but their fundamental, interior understanding of themself remains constant. 

 

This is also very much a novel about art, particularly literature. The story focuses as much on Orlando’s artistic, authorial pursuits as it does Orlando’s experience of gender. From beginning to end, Orlando engages with the world through literature—struggling to express truth within the limitations of language, wanting to contribute to the “cloud of witnesses” who came before, and being disillusioned by the experience of literary fame and success. I really enjoyed Woolf’s attention to the significance of language, its simultaneous power and impotence to reflect our experience of the world.

 

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? […] What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate […]?”

 

Despite how weighty all those subjects sound, this is a funny book. The narrative tone is satirical and wry, poking fun at the social norms it describes, and even poking gentle fun at the characters for taking themselves a little too seriously. (The way the narrator occasionally jabs at a young, painfully earnest and melodramatic Orlando struck me right through the heart, because oh boy was I the same way as a teenager.) I was surprised but delighted by this comedic tone—it very effectively demonstrates the absurdities of social custom, and it also felt like the author sharing a little joke with me.

 

Woolf’s descriptive language was my favorite part of the book. The first chapter, particularly the scene of the frozen-over Thames river, is a glorious example of her skill in this. These such passages kept me most engaged throughout the novel. That said, I think the first half of Orlando is significantly stronger than the latter half. There is a focus and a momentum to the first half of Orlando’s story that gets lost by the end. Orlando’s experiences—including significantly life-altering events like marriage and childbirth—get progressively more hazy, muddy, and disorienting. Time seems to collapse on itself, and Orlando’s interior world becomes the sole locus of action as the exterior world becomes more and more unknowable. Woolf did this intentionally—the subjectivity of time is certainly an intentional theme here—but I’m not certain this choice succeeds for me. It strips a lot of power from the very thing I most enjoyed about the novel: the rich descriptive language and stage-setting. 

 

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention: Woolf’s racism and the racism of her time/culture are very much on display in this novel. Black people are dehumanized and objectified, treated as the trophies of a white ruling class. And while yes, it’s important to place the novel within its historical context, it’s equally as important to honestly acknowledge the harm of these depictions and this language. If readers choose to engage with this text, it should be an informed choice: all who enter here should be prepared to encounter these upsetting, dehumanizing depictions.

Death Does Not End at the Sea

 

Finished on: 5/7/2026

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

__________________  

 

In the titular poem of this collection, Adesina writes from the perspective of an imagined gravedigger: 

 

"Burial: byrgan from Old English meaning 'to conceal, to shelter.' / I shelter the dead. / Burial: bergan from Old Saxon meaning 'to hide, to protect.' / I protect the dead."

That’s one of the foremost preoccupations of this stunning, moving collection: protecting the memory of the dead, sheltering them inside us, and apprehending our own transience here, how we too will one day be a memory and a song. This attention to memory is both deeply personal (as seen in the poems about the loss of Adesina’s father) and also communal. It extends to figures like James Baldwin—whose ghost Adesina chases across multiple poems throughout the collection—it extends to the ancients who crafted our languages, it extends to migrants and displaced peoples throughout time, whose legacies have shaped our present lives. Adesina’s poems beautifully weave together the personal with the communal, the past and the present, grief and the joy of living. 

 

It feels right to end on this line from “Citizen”: 

 

It is not true that I praise the dead. I merely ask them to teach me their song. 

 

The Mourner's Bestiary

Finished on: 4/21/2026

 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

 

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Caffall had an uncle who kept a photo album full of friends who had died from HIV/AIDS, which he referred to as his “book of the dead.”

 

I think, ultimately, that’s what The Mourner’s Bestiary is too: Caffall’s own book of the dead, a tribute to family—father, grandparents, uncles and aunts—who died from kidney disease, a tribute and meditation on what they suffered, and a kind of reckoning with everything she herself lost to genetic kidney disease. It’s a memoir about her life with the disease, but in so many ways it feels like a tender eulogy.

 

Caffall’s prose is skillful, peppered with lovely passages, and there’s a confidence to her voice that can only come from a seasoned writer. That said, I found the conceit of the book—the way it continually pairs Caffall’s experiences with phenomena in the natural world—to be a bit forced. About halfway through the book, I found myself almost bracing for the sections that would force a metaphorical meaning from a marine biology fact, or extrapolate on a connection until it felt so stretched it could snap. I’m not conceptually opposed to this kind of structural conceit—I’ve seen this done masterfully in books like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass—but in The Mourner’s Bestiary it at times feels heavy-handed and clumsy rather than organically emerging from the events Caffall describes. I could feel Caffall pulling on the strings, so to speak, which took me out of the book sometimes. That’s why the 3.5 rating rather than a 4 or higher.

 

(Listen, I know all literature is artificial in the original sense of the word: it’s artifice, it’s craft, it’s in no way organic because it must necessarily be formed, structured, refined, etc. etc. It’s just that in my estimation, excellent writing makes you forget that reality—the artifice is so good you can mistake it for something naturally-occurring, y’know? My issue with The Mourner’s Bestiary is that I too often felt the artifice.) 

 

However, this book is definitely worth picking up if you’re interested in literary memoir, or reading firsthand accounts of life with chronic illness. Just prepare for some occasionally heavy-handed scaffolding around the lovelier parts.

Vigil

Finished on: 4/14/2026

 

Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

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I’ve been a fan of George Saunders’ work since I first read his short story collection, Tenth of December, back in 2016. (I’ve had it in my “Forever Favorites” list on various book-tracking apps ever since.) After it fundamentally changed my brain chemistry, I immediately sought out Saunders’ first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which then confirmed me as a true George Saunders fan. For the last decade, I’ve eagerly followed his career and read every book. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, deserves every accolade it has received. I won’t even start discussing the masterful craft evident in his 2020 short story “Love Letter"—which in my opinion is his best work of short fiction to date—or we’ll be here all day. I’ve always loved Saunders’ skill in balancing humor with emotional poignancy, brutality with grace, the mundane with the surreal. His writing style is rife with "wit-to-power,"  as Dwight Garner puts it, but that wit has always been grounded in real heart: in an evident love and respect for humanity, for everything we are, despite a clear-sighted understanding of our capacity for harm. I’ve always come away from a piece of George Saunders fiction with a sort of grimly hopeful awe at the human capacity to change, to shift gears, to reorient ourselves towards something better. 

 

 

So as you might expect, I went into Saunders’ newest novel, Vigil, with eager anticipation. 

 

 

To be blunt: I felt let down. 

 

 

While Vigil still has whiffs of classic Saunders—the surreal premise, the borderline slapstick humor lightening otherwise morbid scenes, the attention to interior character voice—the story feels anemic, incomplete. It flirts with hefty subjects like greed, free will, and atonement, but it says nothing substantive about them. The conclusion of the novel, in particular, feels hollow to me, a hurried and muddy ending to a book with little direction.

 

 

Vigil is the story of K.J. Boone, a wealthy 87-year-old oil tycoon dying of cancer, who, upon the night of his death, is visited by a spirit (or angel, perhaps) named Jill "Doll” Blaine. Jill is our point-of-view character, our guide through the story just as she is Boone’s guide and “comfort” as he lay dying. The reader will not be surprised to learn that Boone is less than repentant for the harm he caused in life (an antithesis to Dickens’ Scrooge), and the entire novel is Jill grappling with this. 

 

 

But here’s my problem: Jill grapples to no purpose. Because while the story gestures at interesting themes around human selfishness and mortality, determinism and free will, they are ultimately empty gestures that lead nowhere. Jill begins the novel believing that circumstances shape (determine) who we are, and she still believes that by its ending. The novel begins with Jill attempting to comfort one dying life, and it ends the same way. There’s no movement toward any denouement, no sense of turning or of change. The story remains one flat line from start to finish. Even Boone’s eventual death—the only scene that arguably resembles a change or turning point—is narratively de-fanged, treated as meaningless, or at best impotent. The story ends in precisely the same place it began, and I was left with the feeling that this 175-page novel had nothing much to say. 

 

 

Where George Saunders’ older work has heart and movement, Vigil is a shrug, a half-finished gesture. I’d hoped for more from a writer who’s consistently shown better skill than this.

The Brothers Karamazov

 

Finished on: 3/29/2026 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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The Brothers Karamazov can arguably be summarized in this line from W. H. Auden's poem, "September 1, 1939":

 

"We must love one another or die."

 

The Brothers Karamazov—part murder mystery, part treatise on the crisis faced by the human soul under threat from "the scandal of evil"—is fundamentally a novel about what happens when people fail to love each other. It's about brotherly love in the broad, traditionally Christian sense of that term, embodied in the three Karamazov brothers. It's through the brothers that the novel's central preoccupation becomes clear: "What does the world look like when no one is his brother's keeper?" Over the course of the novel, we see this question play out in intricate detail in both the Karamazov family and also in the larger community of Skotoprigonyevsk. We see what Sharon Cohen calls the "breakdown in communal responsibility" ("Balaam's Ass," p. 2) towards vulnerable characters like Stinking Lizaveta and Smerdyakov, and Dostoevsky takes great pains to show the ripple effects of such communal breakdowns—or breakdowns in brotherly love. Those ripples ultimately create the central conflict of the novel, which leads to the ruin of two Karamazov brothers. The reader sees again and again the moral and spiritual wounds both sustained and inflicted by characters who refuse to be responsible for one another.

 

Dostoevsky makes clear his interest in human nature, on both the individual and communal level. None of the characters in this novel feel flat—they are all utterly, deeply human, and the reader becomes privy to their hopes, their temptations, their inconstancy, their fears, etc. They are complexly textured and layered, and Dostoevsky puts them through their paces. Michael Katz points out in the afterword of this edition that in Dostoevsky's Literary Notebook, in reference to Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote, "And so I believe in Christ and confess Him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through a vast furnace of doubt." The characters in The Brothers Karamazov also pass through this furnace of doubt, and it's in the furnace that we meet them. 

 

It's the intimate, granular details of the characters and their relationships that fuel the novel's story. This makes for a slow pace as Dostoevsky establishes the intricacies of each character, and I'll admit to wondering—especially towards the middle of the novel—whether there'd be any "pay off" to all the detail, all the seemingly inconsequential conversations in parlors and village streets. I found the characters interesting, but hoped for more than a handful of interesting character sketches before the end of the novel. My attention and reading stamina occasionally flagged when I doubted the arrival of any pay off. But! The end of the novel (specifically, Book Eleven) delivers what I'd been hoping for, and in fact made me want to revisit all those small, granular moments again to better appreciate how seamlessly they built towards the denouement. Book Eleven, in my opinion, coalesces the individual character portraits into an artistic, masterful theme. The 600+ pages it took to get there felt worth it. 

 

All of which to say: I think this novel rewards the effort to read it, but go into it with the right expectations. It is slow, and meticulous, and fundamentally preoccupied with themes of depravity, redemption, and the absolute necessity of love.

 

David Copperfield

 

Finished on: 2/14/2026

 

Rating: I beg your unbelievable pardon, Mr. Dickens? (Or, I dunno, ⭐⭐ stars I guess.) 

 

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Okay, so, I guess I'll preface this with a couple of the novel's strengths: I liked the first two-thirds of this book, and found certain scenes and character arcs to be genuinely very moving. For example, Mr. Peggotty's unwavering love for his adopted niece, Emily, is a beautiful portrayal of familial bonds, and I'll commend Dickens on treating Emily's character arc with a level of compassion. It read to me like a call for readers to interrogate the internal prejudices instilled in them by their time and culture. Also, Aunt Betsey and Mr. Dick are perfect, no notes. And lastly, I'll say that Dickens occasionally delivers stunning lines, like when David refers to human lives/mortality as "motes upon the deep of Time.”

 

All that being said, as I made headway through this novel, I found myself progressively more and more impatient with Dickens' portrayal of Dora's character, and her death scene in chapter 53 made me almost certain I can never read this book again.

 

David Copperfield is a fictionalized autobiography of Dickens' life. Most of the characters were modeled on real people (e.g., look up Jane Seymour Hill, who was the model for Miss Mowcher), most of the events in the book correlate to events in Dickens' life, and David Copperfield's character himself is clearly a representation of Dickens. It seems reasonable, then, to believe that Dora is intended to represent Dickens' real wife, Catherine.

 

Before I get into the specifics on why Dora's characterization so bothers me—and why her death scene, in particular, is infuriating enough to sour the whole novel—let me quickly review a couple biographical facts:

 

• Dickens became unhappy in his marriage to Catherine, and while we don't know specifics, he indicated to friends that he didn't think Catherine had ever been his intellectual equal.
• By 1855 (five years after David Copperfield was published), Dickens actively pursued affairs with other women, and in 1857 formed a long-term extramarital affair. (Little nugget: Catherine found out about her husband's affair when he had a bracelet sent to his mistress, but it was accidentally misdelivered to the Dickens household. Can you even imagine?)
• In 1858, Dickens and Catherine were separated. Dickens retained custody of their children, and from the sounds of it, he did not encourage them to maintain contact with their mother.

 

So, given that Dickens grew to dislike his wife because he perceived her as intellectually inferior, and given how he would go on to treat her, I find it extremely grating that Dora's character is portrayed in the following ways:

 

• She is stupid, and regularly refers to herself as such.
• She is relentlessly infantilized in every possible way (she literally asks David to think of her as his "child-wife"), is constantly referred to as childish/childlike, and her behavior is consistent with the behavior of a five-year-old.
• She is incompetent at everything except looking pretty and being cheerful. Readers are shown far too many scenes of her being unable to perform basic life skills, like addition/subtraction, grocery shopping, basic house cleaning and organization, etc., and all the while the reader is encouraged to sympathize with David's character because of how selflessly and earnestly he loves his "little child-wife," despite all these manifest flaws. 

 

But most egregiously of all, during Dora's death scene in chapter 53, she explicitly says to her husband David: "If I had been more fit to be married, I might have made you more so, too. Besides, you are very clever, and I never was." Then, mere paragraphs later, Dora says it's "better" that she's dying, actually, because, "After more years [of marriage], you never could have loved your child-wife better than you do; and, after more years, she would have so tried and disappointed you, that you might not have been able to love her half so well! I know I was too young and foolish. It is much better as it is."

 

Yes, Dickens made the fictional counterpart of his wife explicitly say to his own fictional counterpart that their disappointing marriage was her fault because she was too stupid and frivolous, and that it's better that she dies young. (I beg your unbelievable pardon, Mr. Dickens?) Meanwhile, in the early stages of their courtship/marriage, David's character is portrayed as so innocently, selflessly, and devotedly in love with Dora that he's naive to his wife's unsuitability for him; by the time he does clue into her unsuitability as a life partner, he's portrayed as a self-denying martyr who puts her happiness before his. It's artless, transparently self-flattering, and frankly obnoxious to read. Nothing yanks me out of a story faster than seeing the author so obviously tugging on the puppet strings.

 

I'd already known, years before reading this book, that Dickens had cheated on his wife and that the marriage ended unhappily. That in itself didn't deter me from reading more Dickens. Marriages end all the time, I didn't know any specifics, and I don't expect moral purity from the writers I read. But it's one thing to know the fact, and it's quite another to read hundreds of pages of intentional, egregious, and very public character assassination of his own wife. And it's impossible to ignore its presence in the story, because Dickens' disdain for his real wife hamstrung his ability to write a convincing character. 

 

It’s a profound failure of imagination (the writer’s very stock and trade) on Dickens’ part that he could not conceive of Dora having an interior life of more substance than simply being a mindless imbecile “child-wife," and it's this lack of imagination that was the final nail in the coffin of my patience. I have no grace left to give this book.

 

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

Finished on: 12/31/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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I enjoyed the hell out of this book. Incredibly well-researched and thorough, my attention was hooked immediately and easily sustained for 300+ pages. Winkler tackles perhaps one of the thorniest debates in literary history with deft intelligence and a dash of snark. This book is a fascinating dive into the history of “the authorship question,” following various historical threads that have formed the knots of scholarly debate, and laying it all out for readers to evaluate themselves. When I wasn't reading this book, I was thinking about it—to the point that I'm the owner of a new hyperfixation, because this book will be sending me down the rabbit hole of scholarship on this subject (I have already purchased one of the books cited in Winkler's text). The book strikes the perfect balance of giving readers plenty to sink their teeth into without completely overwhelming us in minutia. The structure, pacing, and organization of information are all fantastic.

The only reason this book isn't a five-star read for me? The final chapter is weak—probably the weakest of the whole book. I did not at all expect Winkler to provide answers to "the authorship question," or to share whichever candidate she most favors as the author (if any), but I did expect a little more reflection in the concluding chapter, some broader synthesis and consideration of the body of research Winkler conducted. What, now, is the significance of all this research for her? What's the impact? Has any of it changed her own relationship to Shakespeare, or to higher education and the academy, or to her confidence in how we preserve (and ignore, and shape, and rewrite) history? She touches on the latter two points through the book, but I suppose I expected more thorough reflection on them in the conclusion. Instead, we're given a rather odd anecdote of an interview that Winkler clearly found frustrating, and I'm left to wonder why it was included. Why was that the final scene of the book? Why did one scholar's (apparent) apathy on the authorship question merit the concluding scene of the book? I'm not sure the anecdote did merit the spot, which made the conclusion feel a bit hollow to me. Disappointing after such a wonderfully meaty book.

That being said: don't let a weak final chapter deter you from picking up this book. It's absolutely worth the read.

Orbital

Finished on: 12/18/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

______________________

 

Samantha Harvey said in an interview that she wanted to write a "space pastoral," and Orbital is the fruit of that effort. I think Harvey not only succeeded in her goal, but also wrote a moving love letter to Earth and to humanity. 

 

The experience I had reading this novel was sort of like standing before a painting—maybe Pollock's Shimmering Substance, or van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône—and falling into its colors, its shadings, its intimations of movement across the canvas. This novel revels in descriptive imagery, in capturing the light and colors and textures of a rotating Earth as seen from 250 miles above it. As part of her research, Harvey watched hours of NASA footage from the International Space Station, which is evident in how well she evokes the astronauts' view through the space station's windows. 

 

And while Orbital beautifully describes planetary movements and the shimmering spread of galaxies, I found myself most engaged by its tender attention to the human beings aboard the space station. The readers become privy to the ordinary habits, conversations, and inner thoughts of these six astronauts, and these passages were my favorites of the book. I love that Harvey honors the everyday human concerns—how do you sleep in space? eat? pee? work your muscles?—that shape daily experience (and thus our lives). I love how the astronaut's everyday concerns effortlessly flow into meditations on the nature of time, human ambition, and our place in the universe. 

 

Readers get to see the astronaut's complex feelings about being in space, how they both long for and dread returning home, how their vantage point from space has re-contextualized their understanding of their own lives on Earth. For instance, we see the Japanese astronaut, Chie, receive news that her mother passed away while Chie is in orbit. We see her struggle with grief that feels displaced—literally at a remove from its rightful place, there, down on Earth—and yet her attempts to situate her grief, to make sense of it, are so easily recognizable to any of us. The environment in which it occurs may feel alien, but that ancient human impulse is intimately familiar. The novel consistently threads this needle with other characters, too, and it's a joy to read. 

 

This is not a story-driven novel, nor is it even an especially character-driven novel (despite how good the character vignettes are): it's a novel about place. It's a novel about human belonging to Earth, and our simultaneous yearning to pass beyond Earth's boundaries. Its sustained attention to imagery asks us to do what great paintings also ask us to do: fall into the colors and lighting and textures and see where we land.

 

It feels appropriate to end on these passages from the novel: 

 

"When he's seen through a telescopic lens the flowlines made by ships pulling at the ocean, or the ancient shorelines of Bolivia's bright orange Laguna Colorada, or the red sulphur-stained tip of an erupting volcano, or the wind-cut folds of rock in the Kavir Desert, each sight has come to him as a winching open of the heart, a crack at a time. He'd not known how capacious it was, the heart. Nor how in love he could be with a ball of rock; it keeps him awake at night, the vitality of this love.

 

[...] So many astronauts and cosmonauts have passed through here, this orbiting laboratory, this science experiment in the carefully controlled nurturing of peace. It's going to end. And it will end through the restless spirit of endeavour that made it possible in the first place. Striking out, further and deeper. The moon, the moon. Mars, the moon. Further yet. A human being was not made to stand still."

Something in the Woods Loves You

Finished on: 12/10/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐  

 

                                         

 

On finishing this book, I initially wanted to rate it somewhere around 2 or 2.5 stars. After reflecting on it a bit longer, I've decided to bump it up to 3 stars for a couple reasons: I respect the ambition behind this book, and I admire Jarod Anderson's honesty and vulnerability in discussing a difficult subject. As a fellow sufferer of lifelong depression, I can imagine the courage it took to publicly share his experiences.  

 

So while the content of the book—its subjects and themes—has merit, its execution and presentation aren't doing it any favors.

 

Firstly, this book is marketed as literary memoir when, in fact, it reads much more like self-help. While there are certainly elements of memoir present—Anderson uses his lived experience as a prism through which to explore healing from depression—I'd argue the book devotes most of its pages to describing and extrapolating on therapeutic coping/healing tools. This makes it feel like reading self-help, which is exacerbated by some of Anderson's stylistic choices, such as directly addressing the reader and adopting a conspicuously motivational tone through much of the prose. 

 

I want to emphasize: there is nothing wrong with writing or reading self-help. But when a book presents as literary memoir (which is how the dust jacket and all the marketing materials describe it), and a reader expects literary memoir, it's jarring to pick up the book and find self-help instead. 

 

That’s not to say there’s no literary craft here. I underlined a handful of passages for their loveliness; some chapters make strong use of metaphor to explore their chosen subjects (“Morels,” “White Trillium,” and “Fieldmouse” stand out to me in this regard). Anderson's writing is strongest when he's sketching the outlines of metaphor and allowing the readers to fill in the rest. 

 

That being said, the structure and style of this book often undermine its strengths. The chapters are structured like blog posts rather than chapters in a narrative. Had I read these chapters in the form of blog posts, I'd likely be far less critical of the writing, because the aims of a blog post are different from the aims of literary narrative. Blog posts can afford to be more loosely structured, they are meant to be informal, and as such they are typically less concerned with concision of language. But chapters in a literary memoir? Cohesive narrative that relies on imagery and metaphor to drive meaning? That must be concerned with linguistic concision, it must strive for precision in imagery—and too many of these chapters fail to do that. They are too unfocused, too repetitive, and far too wordy.

 

It’s that repetition and wordiness that bothered me the most as I read through the book, because it feels like a symptom of the author’s distrust of his readers. Anderson is not confident that readers can parse his metaphors and imagery, so he follows them up with bald explication of their meaning. There's no room given for us to simply sit with the metaphor, to let it play in our imaginations and inform how we interpret the text. Instead, the author insists on explicitly stating what is already clearly communicated via imagery/metaphor, and it gets old fast. It's the irritation of hearing a hammer repeatedly bash the same nailhead. "Enough," I kept thinking, "I get it. I promise I get it. Can we move on now?" 

 

The central concepts of the book are also on repeat, continually repackaged and re-delivered to the reader. While I get that Anderson is trying to create touchstones that connect the chapters, the repetition becomes tedious. It feels like another form of authorial distrust: the reader can’t be trusted to remember and link themes/concepts between chapters, so those concepts must all be repeated ad nauseam. 

 

Ultimately, despite meditating on meaningful subjects, Anderson does not make the best use of his chosen genre, which creates a frustrating reading experience. If this book had been more memoir than self-help, and had the prose valued concision and trusted its readers, I would’ve enjoyed it more.

 

For anyone interested in reading literary memoir centered on the author's relationship to their environment, and which makes the most of the genre's strengths, I'd recommend:

 

• The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry by Joe Wilkins
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard 
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green
• Literally any of the nonfiction written by Barry Lopez or Wendell Berry, you can't go wrong

 
 (P.S. It's not the same without you, Starr, but I'm ready to carry on this little project of ours. Miss you, and thinking of you every time I finish a great book.)
 

I am sad to say that this blog has come to its end. It will stay as it is—I will leave the posts up for the sake of posterity—but it will not be updated any longer. I simply don't have the heart to continue it. My dear friend, and co-founder of this blog, Aurora, died on December 12, 2011. This is a blog we created, maintained, and loved together. Without her, it can't be the same, and frankly, I can hardly bear to look at it, let alone write for it.

So this is it. To the (entirely theoretical) readers who might stumble upon this blog by accident or boredom or serendipity, I hope you enjoy what's here.

Blood Red Road by Moira Young

There are several things that pop in my mind when I think dystopia. First thing of course, is government control. Second thing that runs through my head is a list of dystopian novels: 1984, Brave New World, Little Brother, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale etc. etc.

You may have noticed my version of dystopias most always involve government control and the fight to overturn it. That's because I like a good intellectual fight of average man versus the greater powers! Yet, there is the other side of dystopias. The Mad Max's' of dystopias. The Cormac McCarthy dystopia.

This is one of those. Blood Red Road has a wonderful post apocalyptic setting. Even better, you don't know why there was a grand destruction of civilization! You just know that the technologically advanced are referred to as Wreckers. Which seems to rather point to who is at fault.

Saba lives with her twin brother Lugh, little sister Emmi, and her Pa on the edge of a dried up lake. They've always lived there. Interaction with other humans is limited to a handful of people. Pa says that the world outside is a bad place, and it's better to avoid it. Then the worst happens and Saba is thrown into the unknown in order to try and save her brother.


“Lugh goes first always first an I follow on behind. An that's fine. That's right. That's how it's meant to be.” 


I think this is a great read for people who enjoyed the main character Katniss from The Hunger Games. Saba is irascible and almost heartless at times. Almost. Which leaves plenty of room for character development. Which is always nice to have! Flat characteristics are totally for male protagonists. 


I  picked this up because someone recommended it if you had a fondness for The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. I can see why that may be. There's overwhelming odds, fantasy, and a fight for the right and good!


Fans of YA fantasy, dystopians, or just good characters should pick this up and give it a read. 

The Wolves of Mercy Falls

I read The Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy over the summer holiday in a last desperate grab of pointless fiction before the school term started. They are, if you must know, shamelessly genre typed into paranormal romance.  The paranormal factor here being Werewolves.

Alas, I did know this before I read them. The genre paranormal romance has always been sketchy, but it hasn't always rang bells of warning. Thanks to Twilight,  I now associate the genre with bad writing and corny characters. Which isn't true of EVERY book to the genre...These weren't absolutely dreadful. I read all THREE books. (They're decently short lengthed.)

General Overview: These are books set in Mercy Falls; a gloomy town in the north where it's super cold and there's a dark wood. There are also Werewolves. The general populous only knows that there is  a wolf problem and every few years there is an attack.

The main character, Grace, was attacked when she was younger, but still loves the wolves. One especial wolf that she looks forward to seeing every winter....

The wolves are changed by the weather, not the full moon. Prompting a strangely irritating avoidance of cooler temperatures throughout the book.




Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Enough depth of character and plot to keep you reading til the end. Though, there is definitely some creepiness there that borders bestiality/stalking. Is an okay read if you enjoy emo-ness, near bestiality, or stalking.

Linger

Was a better read than Shiver and the best book of the three. There's several point of views, and those point of views are from significantly different characters.  I'd recommend this to someone if they asked me  for a good fluff read about werewolves.

Forever

This one boils down to the author saying, "....Oh look I'm going to try and scientifically explain werewolves!! I FAILED!!! Do readers want resolution?! TOO BAD, LOSERZZZZZ!!!!"


 PROS: The version of Forever I read had red lettering. That's pretty awesome. You CAN tell that the author tried really hard to get good characterization, and it shows.

CONS: I've read better fanfictions.

Why I will probably never own an e-reader.

(You can blame both the spiel and the double whammy!post on Aurora. She started it.)

Don't get me wrong. I can see why e-readers are popular: convenient for traveling and storing multiple (hundreds of) e-books, reduced prices on those e-books, and for those of us in the Northwest (the hippie capital of the country), it's generally a "greener" way to read -- with the added bonus of being sleek and shiny technology. I get why people buy them.

I just don't see myself ever owning one. Can't say for certain, of course, but I have a hard time imagining it. Because the thing is: I like books. I like the musk of the pages (whether old or new), and the texture against my fingers. I like the shape and heft of a book in my hand. I like to underline my favorite passages and write in the margins. There's even something strangely pleasing about certain font types, and the arrangement of words on the page -- particularly when it comes to poetry. I like to look at the covers of books. The old truism about never judging a book by its cover? I do. Always. The cover art of a book is a huge draw to me. It's one of the things I love about aimlessly perusing bookstores -- seeing all the books lined on the shelves, just waiting to be picked up, flipped through, seen and handled in a way that has no equivalent in an e-book. I also like the fact that reading a book is not reading a screen. As someone who works on a computer for eight hours a day, five days a week, I don't want to look at yet another screen to read for pleasure.

And if we want to talk about practicality for a moment, books still one-up e-readers in several ways: I don't have to worry about dropping a book too hard. It's okay if I accidentally spill a drink on it; it might be water-stained afterward, but it will probably still be legible (and even if it's not, I don't have to drop $200 to replace it). A paperback is probably not an object of interest to a thief, and again, if it does get stolen, I can re-buy it for less than $200. A book can last you a lifetime; you can pass it down from one generation to the next (I own an old, musty copy of a Hardy Boys book given to my dad when he turned 10 years old -- there's still a note from his aunt on the front flap). E-readers, like all other forms of technology, will constantly be outdated -- there will always be new versions to buy. Sleek and shiny though they are, they are costly bits of programming that are not made to last.

So, while I hope that people with e-readers enjoy them and use them, I'll stick to my paperbacks with the notes in the margins.

E-Readers are Grey

Oh, books. How can technology be causing people to abandon you? Video games have torn at your fan base, but really, they weren't reading the good ones anyway. Of course, there will be no reference to how much television has diminished the imaginative capacity of the mind. It's too obvious to be worth mentioning.

It is an unfortunate truth that technology has diminished the appreciation of literature in favor of other more controller involved hobbies, yet....Would those who have taken up games have been readers in the first place? I don't know. I have absolutely no idea, but it's a thought. Quite obviously, my stance on books is everyone should and to hell with all other forms of entertainment! Well, perhaps slightly milder.
But only just! The It Crowd and misc. cute iPod apps. have swayed me towards more electronic entertainment than I once partook in.

Which brings us to the new technology that relates to the written word. Well, not NEW, but it's so overwhelmingly in the press it's completely impossible to know that e-readers do not exist. At first, I was absolutely appalled at the idea. How dare anyone lessen the whole idea of a book! How dare they!

Yet, my boyfriend Tyler has a kindle, and reads on it when he probably wouldn't read the physical thing. He says it's more convenient to read in bed and less of a hassle to carry around.

Which is something I don't completely understand because I appreciate the presence of a book....The smell, the texture, the weight, and the way the sunshine reflects off the off white of paper and black ink. Books have made me appreciate the work that goes into fonts and the layout and structure of  a page. If you bother to read the last few pages of plot-less info in a book, you oft times can find a story about the font and who made it.

My opinion on physical books is that books are the equivalent to sunshine. I can read one in a hospital or a terrible storm while I'm stuck in my car, and there's light and happiness!

But then I think of ideas and rationalism... What is a physical book, but an idea? What does it matter what it's read? The idea of the story exists more really than the physical book does. (DOWN WITH EMPIRICISM!!)

Then,  I received one as a gift. A 114$ version of the Kindle. So now I can critique without the pang of guilt that troubles me when I haven't done the opposing!

I like my Kindle a lot. It's pretty durable, and if you buy books from Amazon you can break your Kindle and then re-download those books. Amazon has EXCELLENT customer service if your kindle has any issues. Biggest pro: You can download tons of expired copy righted books for free and read them on your impressive ink technology screen. This, will eventually save me the $114 my family spent on it.

Then you have other ways of procuring books for free (I don't give an opinion either way here), but I think everyone should familiarize themselves with the concept of intellectual property. An interesting article in the rise of e-book pirating can be found HERE.

Yet, you can't lend a physical book out to someone with notes written in them. You can't run your fingers over notes made in book eighty years ago. You can't pass an e-reader down as a beloved family heirloom. I've read several books on my Kindle that I want to show someone a line in or read a page to my family, but it's not worth flipping through a ton of pages. (Though, there's a highlighting tool that I should probably learn to use.) If I read a book on it that I really like, then I want the physical book on my shelf regardless of if it's the same idea. Tamora Pierce's Mastiff is coming out on October 25 and I've already pre-ordered. In hardback. So that way it can stand in a place of pride next to the other dozens of Pierce books I have.

Final Word: 


I like my Kindle, but I prefer paper and glue books. I will appreciate any device that gets literature into more people's hands. Even if that device was a obnoxious man wearing spandex. You give him a book canon and he's my friend.

Yet, if the e-reader is going to put public libraries out of business then I will gladly crunch it under my foot to save ONE library.

Afterthought After the Final Word:

Speaking of book technology, everyone should check out Goodreads.com.

Tortall and Other Lands by Tamora Pierce

I've recently become a pretty large fan of short story anthologies. It's bits of awesomeness that you can enjoy in fifteen-ish minute intervals. It's great for those who don't relish long ventures into fantasy worlds and like a tiny bon bon for those of us who live on them.

Tortall and Other Lands is a collection of short stories done by one of the best young adult fantasy authors of all time, Tamora Pierce (See title!). Which was overall pretty enjoyable, but I was strongly disappointed by the lack of Keladry. If you liked Nawat and Kitten, you'll still be decently happy.

"Elder Brother" was worth the $11 I paid for it. It explains the repercussions of Numar using the word of power to turn whats-his-face into the apple tree. What happened to the tree that turned into a man? Read and find out!

To seal the deal it also had "Dragon's Tale". The story which shows into the mind of Kitten while on a tour of Carthak with Numair and Daine post Trickster's Choice.

I don't know if I would highly recommend it to those who hadn't read some of her previous Tortall books. First, I would recommend reading those. If you haven't read them you are being grievously wounded by the great stories you are missing.

Hilarity: Not My Norm, But Could Be Yours!

If you enjoy Facebook, and Classic Literature, you should read this. The layout is unique, done in the form of classic pieces of literature (Hamlet, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland) being posted about while they're happening on Facebook. Then to break up the monotony you have the authors interacting on each others pages, and when you think about James Joyce trying to interact with Charles Dickens, can you NOT read this? I thought as much.
I bought this at a Barnes and Noble tent sale for five dollars, and it was worth so much more. I read some of the books mentioned in it just so I could get the jokes. Really! (Okay, fine, it still could not compel me to read Finnegan's Wake.) Pick this up if you want a good laugh at some of your favorite authors, Sarah Schmelling has done a very good job with Classic Lit Signs On To Facebook.

More than a Picture Book

The Princess's Blankets, written by Carol Ann Duffy and illustrated by Catherine Hyde, is the only book that I've ever bought simply for the pictures. There's not much more to say. The story is a throwback to classic fairy tales. Written with an almost poetic sense of rhythm, it details the life of a princess who has been cold her entire life. Try as she (and her entire kingdom) might, she cannot be warm. Then a stranger with "hard, gray eyes like polished stones" comes to the kingdom and gives the princess rather peculiar blankets in an attempt to make her warm.

While I appreciate the story and its surprising nuances, the real pleasure of this book is in the illustrations. They are simply beautiful. This is the sort of art that you want to frame and hang in your living room. It's a book very, very worth purchasing just for the sake of taking long looks at the pictures. And that isn't something I can say about many books.

Deafening

Deafening by Frances Itani is one of the better novels I have read in a long while. Although not particularly mind-blowing, it's written with a quiet thoughtfulness and an understated loveliness that (I think) is rather rare in contemporary fiction.

Deafening--set in World War I era Canada--is the story of several people, but largely it is about Grania, a young deaf woman who loses her hearing at the age of five. The novel begins directly after her loss of hearing, and follows her through years of struggling to adapt to a now-silent world. She must learn how to communicate with those around her. She must learn how to meaningfully engage the world when she is cut off from nearly all spoken language. Itani artfully explores themes of communication, the nature of language, and mostly the nature of silence.

About halfway through the novel, Jim--Grania's (hearing) fiance--appears on the scene. This is where Itani's focus seems to shift, and the novel makes a somewhat strange digression. Shortly after their marriage, Jim enters the war as a stretcher bearer, which launches the novel into entirely different thematic territory: the war and its losses and ramifications. Some of the themes--namely those of language and silence--continue into the latter half of the novel, but for the most part its entire focus shifts. Where before we'd been following Grania and her experiences as a deaf woman, halfway through the novel we begin to follow Jim through his experiences as a stretcher bearer. And while Itani's writing is good as ever, and Jim's character is sympathetic, the novel seems to lose something. I felt as though I could've been reading any other war novel (with the notable exception that Jim is a stretcher bearer and not a soldier). The originality of the premise and the ideas implicit within it peter out as the war totally takes over the plot.

Don't get me wrong, I find "war novels" fascinating when they thoughtfully explore the phenomenon of war (see The Things They Carried, The Killer Angels, etc.), and Itani does, to some degree, pose interesting questions about the impact of war on the individual, and the way in which the individual might cope (which ties in nicely with the theme of internal silence). But, her exploration of war wasn't insightful enough to make me forget the loose, loose threads from the first half of the novel. The shift in focus is too abrupt, and I was left wanting better development of both Grania, Jim, and their relationship in general.

The characters of the novel are compelling, and the writing is lovely, which is its saving grace. It's worth reading (probably even worth rereading), but it's a bit incohesive.