Books in June and Beyond
Here are some (not all!) of the books I've read in recent months. This crop is so interesting and rewarding to read. Your mileage, as the saying goes, may vary.
How High We Go in the Dark,
“But my parents are telling me stories about a simpler life
that I never knew, the kind where you could go to the beach and not worry about
the sand or the city beyond it being swallowed by the sea, one where an
earthquake never took away my father’s job and we still woke up on a tiny
street in a quiet neighbourhood in a bustling metropolis where everyone grew
old together.”
This book is set in the near future, when scientists
researching in Siberia find the body of a young girl in melting permafrost and thaw
it out, thereby unleash a virus on the world. Imagine trying to sell that novel
during the pandemic, which is what Nagamatsu did. And I’m glad!
The book ranges widely, beginning with the scientists and
their backgrounds and continuing through a century or so by earth time, and far
into the past and future. It’s not “about” a pandemic, and it’s not “about”
climate change, though it’s also about both. Climate change is the force that
set off this particular part of the story of Earth, and the virus is the way
the characters show who they are.
What I’m really trying to say is that this book is so
recognizably about people—how we treat each other, what we want for our loved
ones, how we fail our families of origin but support strangers, how we honour
our best intentions, how we bend rules when it’s someone we know, and many
other permutations of human frailty. What does it mean to be human? What do we
do with power? There’s so much in its pages. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
A couple more random quotes.
“I think about making wishes at the star festival and my
parents trying so hard to read and understand the stories I’ve written. I think
about my father telling me about opportunities in life floating in the wind
like seeds.”
“And in the operating room, as he’s slowly fading from
anesthesia, I tell him about Frodo’s final journey, leaving Middle Earth with
the elves, before I place my hand on his heart, now beating steadily for a boy
two hundred miles away, and tell him thank you.”
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, Irene SolÃ
“When he dries his cheeks I make some coffee. I make coffee to keep my hands busy and to get the warm coffee into us. Because as long as you can still swallow, everything’s okay.”
This novel-in-pieces (maybe stories, maybe sketches, maybe vignettes), translated from Catalan by Mare Faye Lethen, was fascinating to read. The narrative follows generations of one family living in the Pyrenees. The prose is lyrical and rhythmic, and almost everything in this mountainous region can and does serve as a narrator, including the clouds.
Here are a few more samples of the prose:
“I keep all my poems in my head as if inside a tidy drawer. I’m a
vase filled with water. Simple, fresh water like the springs and runnels. I lie
down and the verses just pour out. And I never write them down. That would kill
them. Because paper is sweet river water that gets lost at sea. It’s the place
where all things fail. Poetry has to be free like a nightingale. Like a
morning. Like the thing air at dusk. On its way to France. Or not. Or wherever
it wants to go. I don’t have anything to write on, anyway, and no pencil.”
“There is no grief if there is no death. There is no pain if the
pain is shared. There is no pain if the pain is a memory and knowledge and
life. There is no pain if you’re a mushroom!”
“After our arrival all was stillness and pressure, and we forced
the thin air down to bedrock, then let loose the first thunderclap.”
You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith
“This isn’t a tell-all.”
I really liked this book. I haven’t read a lot of memoirs
lately, and especially not the most popular ones in the past five years, so I
can’t compare it to something else current.
The memoirs I do read tend to be tied up to nature somehow,
from salt marshes to natural backyard gardens. But I enjoy Maggie Smith’s
poetry and I assumed this would be interesting and beautifully written, and of
course it was.
It’s also extremely rewarding to read, and to read carefully.
The structure itself is poetic, with themes and questions that recur, sometimes
to repeat insights suspected before, sometimes to share a whole new
understanding. The language is precise. And somehow lush.
It’s full of heart and honesty. One of her blurb buddies
calls it a “memoir in vignettes,” which is apt, if you need to have a mental
box to put it in. It’s prose but poetic prose. And it’s beautiful.
The story is familiar. A man and woman weave their lives
together to create a family, with two children. But somehow the woman’s work
isn’t as “real” as the man’s, and so she begins to make her work, herself, and
her love for her work smaller so it’s less threatening to the man. Which
doesn’t work. It never works, as I well know.
But the memoir itself is anything but typical. It’s nowhere
standard. One example: she’s explicit in boundaries—her children and the
stories they would tell aren’t part of this book. Parts of the way she and her
kids manage as a family, through the dragged-out legal machinations, though, is
fair game.
I’m trying so hard to not fan-girl, but honestly, I really
liked this book, even as I understand it may not speak to everyone.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, Kate Bradbury
“The things we push back and refuse to deal with, they all come to bite us in the end.”
It sounds simple enough. But nothing is simple, and the charm for me is
her honesty—even down to wondering why she cares about bees, and insects and
birds, about neighbouring yards and the choices made there, and common-enough
shrubs.
And then family stuff happens. As it does. And that, too, is threaded
with deep concern, growth, doing what you can even though it’s never enough,
and some resolution.
Entershine Bookshop staff hand-sold me this book, and I’m glad they did.
More glorious observations below:
“Despite all the lushness and the ripening apples and the huge winter
squash and the prospecting queen ants and egg-laying dragonflies, I'm worried
about my house sparrows. Despite everything I've achieved in my garden, it will
never be enough.”
“I spread compost on the soil, release plants from pots, move things
around, divide and replant, take semi-ripe (nearly ripe) cuttings, bury the
first of the autumn bulbs. Why am I doing this if I don't want to stay? Habit,
I suppose. For the house sparrows, I suppose. Feed the soil and everything will
follow, I suppose. Feed the earth, the detritivores, the centipedes and
beetles, the roots of plants that will flower and seed and fill trellis and
protect birds.”
“Of all the gardens I have loved and lost, this one holds a piece of me.
This, with my DNA from cut hair and skin from scabbed knees, dust of feathers
collected to top mud pies, buried pet rabbits. We're in the soil and the
leaves, the birds, the bees, little pieces of them and me. This garden is still
mine.”
“I close my eyes and lose myself in the hum and thrum of the wood, the hum and thrum of decades and centuries past and future. The hum and thrum that soothed people who are dead now, will soothe people yet to live. Highwaymen and time-travellers, the living and the dying, the long gone, the not yet born. Ashes and dust. All around me, little unseen insects work from one bloom to the next. I want to curl into a ball and sleep here forever.”
“Far below her now the woman sits on the lawn in her little parcel of
recovered land. Grass sways in the breeze, flowers nod to lure bees. There are
holly blue and speckled wood butterflies, a lone red admiral soaking up the
sun. Leaves hide hoppers and miners, aphids and flies. Above the pond a second
generation of common darter dragonflies dances for a mate. Life. It just needs
a chance. We just need to give it a chance.”
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I hope you're enjoying your own summer reading!