Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Priestdaddy
by Patricia Lockwood
Riverhead Books, May 2017
336 pages

This book. Is so. Funny heartbreaking beautiful. It is about family, warts and all. It's about religion, and being female, and writing, and poetry, and memory, and growing up, and going home. It's about love, and all the good and all the pain that can bring.

Priestdaddy is technically a memoir, but if you're looking for a straightforward, average memoir, this is not that. You had better be prepared to let Lockwood take you on her journey in her way, because she's not going to conform to your expectations. The writing is spectacular, unsettling, and bursting out at the seams. She spirals into digressions with the virtuosity of a scatting jazz vocalist, like she's galloping through the English language with her hands white-knuckled on the reigns, leaving this reader breathless and slightly disoriented and utterly thrilled. Sometimes she writes like her father, the titular priest, plays guitar: with gratuitous effusion in a way that almost (but not quite) makes sense.

Lockwood's family has an astonishing number of warts. They are eccentric in a way that is so astounding, sometimes shocking, that it's almost hard to believe - Lockwood is a standard-bearer for the adage that "truth is stranger than fiction" because I'm pretty sure some of the things she writes about would be considered too outrageous to be allowed in a novel. Nothing escapes her sideways gaze; the gaze is both pointed and compassionate. Sometimes she is full of anger. But she also loves expansively, if in complicated ways.

This whole book is complicated. It's funny and erudite and full of light and sometimes she's talking about things that are crass or horrible. She writes about her childhood in ways that the memories come across as both sharp and slightly unreal, as childhood memories often do. She indulges extravagantly in hyperbole, such that sometimes you're not sure when to take her seriously, and then she will reach right into your chest cavity and grab hold of your beating heart with a furious concision and you take everything absolutely seriously and feel sick. And then in the next paragraph you will love the people in her life, because she obviously does, and she is holding them tenderly so that you do too.

I know this is not a book for everyone; if you are easily offended by coarse language or bodily functions or any whiff of blasphemy, you will probably not make it past the first chapter. Likewise if you can't handle chronological jumping, digressions, or someone poking and prodding at language just to see what she can make it do. But I loved it, and I can't stop talking about it or thinking about it, and I am delighted at the feeling that Patricia Lockwood is just getting started.

Second Nature by Michael Pollan

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
by Michael Pollan
Blackstone Audio, 2009 (book originally published in 1991)
8 discs, unabridged

This truly is an excellent book, deserving of the accolades it has received over the years (yes, I can even see how it might be considered "a new literary classic" as the blurb on Goodreads would have it.) It also fits quite nicely into my pattern of waiting until the garden is safely under snow before getting excited about gardening again, usually at the impetus of a book like this. I didn't agree with everything this book offers - I'll get to my objections in a moment - but I loved that I was challenged by it without being shamed, and that I can feel, even at the end, that though I do disagree with at least one of Pollan's fundamental points, this book is still incredibly valuable and powerful and necessary. Perhaps I feel this so strongly even because I disagree with it.

It starts out as a seemingly simple, straightforward gardening memoir, though Pollan tells us right off where we're going, and straightforward gardening memoir is not it. I think I would have enjoyed it even if it had stuck to that. What lifts it above, however, is that Pollan transitions between gardening memoir to philosophical tract to history to manifesto, in and out, often all four things in the same chapter. And while that might sound like an awful lot of weight for a single gardening book to bear, Pollan writes so well that we move seamlessly from philosophy to history to personal anecdote to ethics to practical gardening info without blinking. One rarely feels weighed down, even when Pollan is talking about something as weighty as the history of landscape design in Western culture or the culture of the rose, largely because of the author's enthusiasm for the subject and his wry sense of humour. Pollan is fascinated by each subject he turns his pen to; the reader (or listener, in my case) is drawn along for the ride.

Even though he's very United States-centric (this is fair) and this book was originally published in 1991, I think Pollan's argument that we need a new environmental ethic is a very pertinent one in this decade and particularly in this country. I agree with him that the paradigms we have operated under have failed us as we operate as stewards of this planet. He suggests the "wilderness ethic" that requires complete isolation of wild places, an entirely hands-off approach, a la Thoreau, has lead us to believe that anything that is not untouched wilderness is therefore fair game for development of whatever sort we happen to feel we need, generally things like roads and suburbs. There is no middle ground. He proposes a "garden ethic" as the middle ground, a way towards a "second nature" in which human culture and wild nature can coexist, where the dichotomy of culture vs. nature no longer applies. He argues persuasively that generally gardeners already practice this garden ethic, even if they themselves don't recognize it as such.

Each chapter in the book essentially goes to reinforce this argument in one way or another. I found that the chapter in which he discusses ecological restoration to be particularly edifying; I could clearly and absolutely see his point, and found that I agreed with him more than I thought I did.

Where he did lose me, at first, and where I still disagree with him, is in his interpretation of naturalists and the wilderness. He argues that naturalists are too romantically engaged with the idea of wilderness, are too hands-off, are too anti-culture to accept that some human activity in the wilderness can be a good thing and might be a necessary thing. We are too blindly protective of our wild spaces, even to the detriment of the wild space. (He also suggests, a couple of times, that naturalists are lazy gardeners - this point, I am afraid, at least in my own experience I must concede, though in my grandmother's case I take issue.) He rails against wilderness - non-garden green spaces - as trying to encroach on human space, in fact setting up the sort of dichotomy he speaks against: nature is constantly trying to take back her own, in an indifferent, entropic sort of way. He suggests, in one of the earliest chapters, that no wild forest could ever have taught him as much about nature as his grandfather's garden did as a child.

To this I would suggest that Pollan just didn't have the right teachers, or the right role-models, for understanding how to learn from a wilderness. Were his eyes open to the right sorts of things, a forest has an awful lot to teach, has an incredible amount of value to humans. If you can walk through the forest like I can, and my mother, and my grandmother, and the way my grandfather did, and see and identify birds, and see and identify the various plants, insects, mammal tracks, lichens - if you can do this, you are never at a loss for something to learn. Every walk is different, each minute brings something new. (This is why I cannot really go for a hike for exercise purposes; I stop every few minutes to look at something.) And there is something valuable about going into a place with the mindset that doesn't involve "how do I put my human stamp on this, how do I change it [for the better]." This is not, in contrast to Pollan's suggestions, a lazy way to view nature. In fact, I think for many, it's harder to realize the patient openness of the naturalist's perspective than it is to go in and try to "fix" things.

That said, I get what Pollan is trying to say: that most landscapes, green or wild or otherwise, bear the stamp of human interference, and we'd do better to reconcile ourselves to interfering than to locking nature away to be something we only go visit on weekends, otherwise we're going to lose it entirely. I agree with that, fundamentally. I agree that wildlife management is probably necessary both for human enjoyment and for the good of the species involved. Pollan maybe should acknowledge a little louder that we don't always get it right, with our management techniques - Asian Ladybeetles, anyone? - but on the other hand, I agree too with the premise that basically what we're doing is managing nature in order to keep the planet habitable and pleasant for ourselves. Otherwise we're going to squeeze ourselves right out of this place. And the planet will do just fine once we're gone, keeping on keeping on, in the way it does. Pollan's point of view is unabashedly anthropocentric, whereas I think mine leans a little further towards viewing the species we share the planet with as having a right to exist for their own sake and not just ours, but we share a lot of common ground. In the spirit of his garden ethic, I think there's places to meet in the middle where we can come to compromises that don't devalue either point of view.

The audio is well-produced, though the CD breaks are at weird spots; but maybe it's just me who notices when a chapter starts and then a paragraph later you have to switch the CD? At any rate, Pollan reads the book himself, and is a good reader. It's nice to hear the words spoken the way the author intended them to sound. He's got a dryly humourous, self-deprecating way of reading that I think probably plays up those aspects of the text, and it works really well. Though he's serious about what he's saying, it never devolves into pedantry or self-important schlock. I wondered a time or two if reading the book would have felt like more of a slog than listening did.

As you can tell, lots of fodder for discussion and thought here. You don't have to be a gardener to enjoy this book, but you might find yourself curious to try growing something yourself. And even if you don't think that will ever happen, I think this is a valuable piece of writing as an effort to establish new ground, new ways of thinking and talking about humans and the environment. If it is so ambitious that it sometimes misses its mark, at least it tries. A brave book, and a necessary one.

Coal Dust Kisses by Will Ferguson

Coal Dust Kisses: A Christmas Memoir
by Will Ferguson
Viking Canada, 2010
57 pages

Evidence that science doesn't know everything: Science will tell you that the Northern Lights are silent, cherry blossoms have no scent, and the likelihood of Santa Claus actually existing is low, to say the least.

But in each case I can assert the opposite, just as firmly and with something approaching empirical certainty. For I have heard the Northern Lights, caught the scent of cherry blossoms on the wind, and seen the evidence for Santa Claus firsthand - in the mirror, written on my very skin, a faint but undeniable smudge, Christmas, made manifest.

So begins Will Ferguson's very short and very charming little Christmas memoir. The first thing that struck me was the writing. I've never read anything by Will Ferguson before, though he comes highly recommended by many both for his nonfiction and his fiction. The reputation, if this tiny slice of holiday life is to be trusted, is well-earned. Not only does he write with clarity and gentle humour, his turn of phrase is graceful. His writing feels good to read.

(Or perhaps I am just partial to it because in this little informal piece he uses a lot of parentheses, and we all know how fond I am of parenthetical asides.)

As one might expect from a book that is a scant 57 pages long, there isn't a lot here to write about. I read this with one of my book clubs and we didn't have a lot of discussion on the book itself, though we went a lot of tangential directions from it. Ferguson is talking about Christmases he remembers, tradition, and family; he is drawing a faint arc from his great-grandfather in Cape Breton, west with his grandfather, and around the world with Ferguson himself, then back to Western Canada with his own children. There is, because this is a book about family and tradition, a slight melancholy to accompany the sweet and the gently funny. One gets the impression that Ferguson is working through something, not just writing for the benefit of the holiday reader. Or solely for the benefit of his own boys, though one gets the impression that this is a book written specifically for them and the dedication confirms it.

This is, though, a book that couldn't have been any longer. I didn't really want more. (As one of our members said, "Sometimes I wondered... what's the point of this book?") Well, it's a memoir. It's someone telling stories and making that telling look very easy, writing with an ease that if I know anything about writing is anything but easy. But any longer would have been more than necessary, would have made it less enjoyable and more work to read. Its aim isn't just to entertain, though it does that, nor is it to make the reader think, though it does that too at points. It's a sweet little record, a sharing of something special. You are being let in on the story, allowed to peek through the frosty window, just for a little moment in time.

Enjoyable, not unmissable. If you like a little amusing holiday reading that won't take long (perfect for such a busy time of year, really) go ahead and pick this up. It's liable to make you laugh out loud, and it may make you think about the traditions that surround this time of year, that seem so vital to our own holiday experiences, and how those come about and how those change over time. I will certainly be reading more of Ferguson's work; perhaps one of his travel memoirs next.

Books by Larry McMurtry

Books
by Larry McMurtry
Tantor, 2008
5 discs

I would have done better with this if I'd written the review right after finishing the book, but so it goes. The difficulty here is that I don't have a lot of strong feelings either way. I picked this up because I very much like books about books, and I got some of that. I also got a bit of other stuff, and a lot of names that didn't really mean very much to me at all.

So, Larry McMurtry: he wrote Lonesome Dove. And Terms of Endearment. And, as he might put it, a number of other novels that have translated rather well to the screen. Though, contrary to what he seems to think, I actually do think of Lonesome Dove the novel first, not the television miniseries. This might be because I am a librarian, but I also think it's because that is indeed considered in some circles one of the best Western novels written. I haven't read it. I think I might, someday.

McMurtry has also written a number of memoirs, or nonfiction books that are rather wrapped up in his interests. Books is one of them, detailing the love of his life: buying, reading, and selling rare books. It starts with his first books, a gift from a cousin, a box of 19 boys adventure books to keep him company while he was sick in bed. By the time he had blazed through those books, some of them multiple times, he had started a lifelong habit he cannot stop: reading. McMurtry is a voracious reader, and originally started buying books just so he could read them, and then sold them only so he could buy new ones to read. But eventually he became a book scout, finding rare or desirable books, buying them from willing sellers, and then selling them to willing dealers. Eventually he became a dealer himself.

There are a couple of challenges here, and interestingly, none of them really ruined the book for me, though I'll admit I didn't love it. I did find it interesting; I don't feel like I wasted my time. But it wasn't as good as I hoped, and here are a couple of reasons why. First, and perhaps the fatal flaw here, was that I did listen to this as an audiobook. And I wasn't wild about the reader. Though there was a bit of a laconic southern twang in reader William Dufris' voice that I liked given that McMurtry is a Texan, he also read the book in a self-satisfied way that may in fact be the way McMurtry intended to come across -- but I hope not, and I rather think the whole tone of the reading missed the mark. It grated, sometimes; because of the reader, the author sounded more full of himself than I think he is based on the text. Occasionally I was able to separate the text from the tone, and I think the text was more intimate and chatty and less self-congratulatory than it sounded.

Also annoying was the tendency McMurtry had to kind of jump everywhere, and often not actually delve into a thought, or, more annoying, a story that he started. There were little snippets here and there, some picked up and many more not. Statements were made and then never taken anywhere. It is a short book, so there's some excuse there; it is the author's prerogative to finish or not finish his thoughts, but too much of that leaves a reader feeling unsatisfied. Further, we were promised discussions of interesting personalities in the rare and antique books trade, and we got some of that -- but not enough. McMurtry is almost careful to avoid talking about his fellow bookmen too much. Again, though, not sure how much of that lack was felt because I was listening. This is not a book that is meant to be listened to. (Actually, at one point McMurtry mentions his dislike of audiobooks. Point to you, sir.)

Particularly because of the audio format, the name-dropping was really noticeable. Because so much of it was name-dropping without context (though not all, and the parts that weren't were thoroughly enjoyable and interesting) this became a problem. I can't remember most of the names, although again, where McMurtry put flesh on his stories I do and would remember the stories if I came across the names again.

That said, the good parts are good. McMurtry provides a peek into a world sort of similar to the one I inhabit as a librarian, and yet totally different as well. I would love, if I had another life to live, to be an antiquarian bookseller. Hell, I'd love to be a rare books librarian, but I'm not looking for another specialty right now, particularly one with extremely limited job prospects. I love rare and old books, but not enough to make it my life, and listening to McMurtry it's clear that books, rare and old, are his. It's an interesting window into a fascinating world, and the little glimpses I got made me anxious to know more, made me wish to have the patience to comb through used book stores and junk yards and garage sales for those once-in-a-lifetime finds of first editions inscribed to mothers or lovers or even just well-wishers.

I generally like books by authors about books, reading, and writing. This one was a little light on substance for me to be entirely pleased, and though I got a few things out of it, I'm afraid I had dearly hoped for more. This won't stop me from reading McMurtry -- I'd like to try his fiction, particularly Lonesome Dove -- but I may steer clear of his nonfiction, at least in audio format. I feel kind of badly about that, because I think McMurtry is likely a lovely person, or at least, this book leads me to think so. Perhaps I would have better luck with a physical book, and I will keep that in mind.

The New Noah by Gerald Durrell

The New Noah
by Gerald Durrell
Viking Press, 1964 (originally published in 1955)
223 pages

This was an odd one, in that I started reading it and thought two things: first, I've read about these trips before, and not when I was a kid, but rather more recently; and second, the last time I read these, they were written better. It was weird. And then I read the dust jacket, and realized that the advertising was all right there -- these were, indeed, retellings of previous adventures, but primarily aimed at kids. Once I had that all sorted, I could enjoy the book for what it was. Sort of.

I believe I have mentioned before a number of things I like about Gerald Durrell's writing -- his enthusiasm for nature, his desire to share the quirks and amazing things about the animals he meets, and especially his eloquence when it comes to describing settings, and his sharp and self-deprecating sense of humour. Some of that was still in evidence here, but in taking his "best" stories from the earlier books and editing them for a younger audience, we really only got the first two, with rare glimpses of the third and fourth -- he's telling animal stories, and he's shortened them, and they're considerably less incisive and/or amusing than their counterparts written for adults. They don't sparkle in the same way. The language is simpler, the stories shorter, the sense of adventure and danger and occasionally sorrow or outrage just doesn't show up. Chumly the Chimp (remember him?) makes an appearance and gets most of a chapter -- an unusual thing for any single animal in this book -- but the sadness of the story has vanished. Chumly's ignoble and tragic end isn't mentioned, isn't even alluded to. Perhaps this was considered too distressing for children to hear? Durrell uses this volume as a bit of a platform for discussing the life of an animal collector, but doesn't quite hit the same note that the previous three do: the acknowledgement that collecting fauna for zoos is as much hard work, pain, disappointment, and frustration as it is excitement and success. The book is significantly poorer for the lack of balance and depth.

It is possible that this book would be a better entree to Durrell's oeuvre. I think because I am familiar with his better stuff -- his "real" books, as it were -- this was not a terribly good choice for me.

Complaints aside, it's still fun to read these stories, truncated and disjointed as they are, and it's a very fast read. The stories are short and amusing even without the sparkle of wit and vivid description, and the little bits on his trips to Guiana, Argentina, and Paraguay have certainly whet my appetite for the next book in my quest to read all his autobiographical animal tales. Though it also became clear to me that I've read The Drunken Forest before -- I remember the story about Amos the Anteater well, including the bit where the gaucho's wife rides out on the back of the draft bull to pick up the aforementioned creature. And the tale about the musical capybara was one of the better and funnier tales in the book.

Only recommended if you haven't got any other Durrell to read, and absolutely need a fix. I suppose if you wanted to get a kid an early Durrell book that didn't include any unpleasant colonial English white male overtones, you might do well with this, too. The stories focus on the animals almost exclusively, so some of the parts that are not so desirable about his earlier books are absent here. However, as an adult reader, too much of the wonder and beauty and balance of his first books is absent too; I won't feel the need to read this one again.

Other Durrell books reviewed here so far:
1. The Overloaded Ark
2. Three Singles to Adventure
3. The Bafut Beagles

Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country
by Louise Erdrich
National Geographic, 2003
92 pages

Being among books is only half about actual reading, after all. The other part is talking about books with other people, a rich topic, and yet another is enjoying their presence.

Just to be clear about the labels on this post: I'm not claiming Louise Erdrich for Canada, as much as I'd love to do so. But a somewhat large chunk of the book takes place this side of the border so I've added the tag.

This was one of those serendipitous browsing things, though not in the sense of shelf grazing; more in the sense of I had looked up something in our library ebook catalogue and this popped up instead. I've always wanted to read Louise Erdrich (more so now) and I love the idea of the National Geographic Directions series, and ... well, I'm a little embarrassed to admit this: it was short. I wanted something short. Also, about books! So I downloaded this and here we are. A little ironic, as this book is at least partially about the love of books as physical objects. And rarely have I come across such a perfect defense of books as objects as the quote above. Hence, I'd love to have an actual physical copy of this.

The condensed version: as with all books in the Directions series, this is an extremely accomplished author taking a trip that investigates something dear to her heart, and then writing about it. In Erdrich's case, she's gone to do a tour of the rock paintings on the islands of Lake of the Woods, taking along her 18-month-old daughter, and then to visit the historic island home of Ernest Oberholtzer and his immense collection of rare books. Throughout the book we get discussions of books and their very personal appeal and importance to Erdrich, briefer discussions of islands and their importance, and lots of discussion of the meaning of the rock paintings and Ojibwe culture and especially the language, and occasional digressions into mothering.

I really loved this book. It's an important book, because of the notes on Ojibwe culture and language and because of the recognition that, in many ways, we're lucky either still exists -- she never harps on the role governments and the Catholic church (particularly the Canadian government) have played in the damage, but she doesn't shrink from pointing it out where necessary either. It's also a beautiful book, where it meditates on books and writing and language and the importance of all of these things, particularly to the author. And Louise Erdrich? Knows how to write.

The chapter on the language, Ojibwemowin, is intense, and it is beautiful, and fascinating. Six thousand different tenses of single verb are possible. Imagine the books you could write in that language. Imagine the poems! English is a fine language, never going to knock it except maybe an affectionate jab here and there. But imagine how much more precise, how much more vivid, a language like Ojibwemowin must be.

I also particularly enjoyed her description of Oberholtzer's island ("Ober's island") and its cabins and quirks of architecture, its library, the people and the food while she is staying there. Erdrich has an incredible grasp on descriptive language, and it shows to its best advantage here. I could visualize everything. And yet she is never purple in her prose, just perfectly eloquent. Makes for an absolutely delightful travel read.

More favourite bits:

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif -- books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantity and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench.

I want that house. I am working towards it. Yes, I work at a library. This is not enough.

Regarding summer trips, and don't I recognize this too:

Used to be, I'd pack six preteen girls, two dogs (large Aussies), and myself in along with a week of food, clothes, games, and drawing materials, for a trip to a whole other island in Lake Superior were I did research while the girls swam, screamed, ate, screamed, roasted marshmallows, screamed, read "Wonder Woman" and "Catwoman" comics, slept, screamed, and woke, screaming happily, for a week or two. I don't really know how I have accomplished anything, ever.

Lovely little book, well worth the time to find it and read it. Travel, culture, and lots of book talk. Highly recommended.

The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks

The Island of the Colorblind
by Oliver Sacks
Alfred A Knopf, 1997
298 pages

There is something about the way that Oliver Sacks writes that I find both enchanting and vaguely uncomfortable. His narrative is always intensely personal in a way that can be delightful -- accessible, charming, and incredibly smart -- but also slightly uncomfortable, because, as he admits himself, he can be querulous and anxiety-prone, and the reader can't help but pick up on that sometimes. His writing reveals a rather intimate portrait. It's not annoying, but it's the sort of thing that we're conditioned to politely look away from, I think? But Sacks always lays it all out there on the line, without drawing undue attention to his neuroses. I suspect, being a neurologist, he's more aware than most of his own tendencies.

Island of the Colorblind is a travel journal, more like Oaxaca Journal than The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which is rather the opposite of what I was expecting. Unlike Oaxaca Journal, though, the purpose of Sacks' travel in this case was based in his job as a neurologist. It's split into two parts, the first being a chronicle of his journey to the titular island, a tiny atoll called Pingelap, and the second being a chronicle of his unrelated journey to Guam. The thread holding the two together is very thin indeed, but could be identified as his interest in islands and the biological consequences of isolation. In both cases, he made his journey to investigate a neurological phenomenon present in abnormally high numbers on their respective islands: on Pingelap, achromatopia, a complete colourblindness; on Guam, lytico-bodig, a serious and extremely complicated neurodegenerative disease showing remarkable likenesses to his post-encephalitic patients back in New York. However, don't let the fact that he's there as a neurologist fool you; Oliver Sacks is in love with plants, so we get plenty of information and exposure to the botanical life on the islands as well. Overall, it's a fascinating melding of neuroscience, botany, history, and culture that makes for really interesting reading.

Interesting, but not always comfortable. The first chapter, "Island Hopping," sounds like it might be a relatively pleasant way to start the book, but it was easily the most depressing chapter. It's not Sacks' fault, as he's working with the material he's given: specifically, a rather arduous airplane journey through the Marshall Islands before they get to Pingelap, in the Carolines. These were inhabited at one point, many of them, pre-American nuclear testing. Some of the experiences Sacks has on his way to tiny Pingelap are harrowing (from a damaged plane to an enforced landing on a brutally military island) and the brief notes he makes about some of the islands are extremely unsettling. Throughout the book there are often small hints of bleakness; discussing the diet of the islanders and its reliance on Spam, melancholy notes about environmental degradation, comments on the historical treatment of the island cultures by various colonial powers.

And when I say notes, I also mean endnotes; some of the bleakest stuff has been relegated to the [wonderfully eclectic and comprehensive] endnotes. I usually prefer footnotes, but some of these are so long as to be completely unmanageable. I tended to read the full chapter, then read the notes for the chapter second; they were almost a full chapter in themselves. None of them are, by definition, integral to the narrative or the understanding of the book, but they make the reading a richer experience.

Interesting to think that this was published nearly twenty years ago now, with the trips themselves being earlier; many of the people Sacks met are likely dead or retired, and many of the environments he saw are likely changed beyond recognition; one wonders, for example, if Pingelap can survive a sea-level rise? A sobering thought amongst several sobering thoughts brought to light by this book.

Sacks is especially good when he gets talking about his passions. The entire last chapter of the book, "Rota," is basically about cycads. Along with ferns, these are a particular passion and fascination of Sacks', and in this chapter he is both whimsical and whip-smart, so incredibly learned that he talks well above this reader's head, but I didn't mind. His enthusiasm carried me along. He takes much knowledge on the reader's part for granted, without making one feel stupid if one didn't follow exactly what he was talking about. In fact, it got this reader more excited about looking things up than frustrated with my lack of knowledge. I'm more excited than ever, too, about reading Darwin, which I have been meaning to do for ages. Leading a reader to want to learn more, in a passionate and immediate way, is a special gift that some nonfiction writers have, and some don't. Sacks has it in spades.

Not just for the topics, either, but also for words themselves. Sacks has a remarkable vocabulary and he's not afraid to use it. My favourite word from the book, favourite enough that it has entered my functional vocabulary, is "horripilation" -- synonymous with, but so much more delicious and specific than, goose bumps, and obscure enough that I haven't found a spellchecker familiar with it yet.

"At one point," he added, "people wondered if the lytico might be caused by some similar kind of fish poisoning -- but we've never found any evidence of this."

Thinking of the delectable sushi I had looked forward to all day, I was conscious of a horripilation rippling up my spine. "I'll have chicken teriyaki, maybe an avocado roll -- no fish today," I said.

It is interesting to me that overall the sections on botany and culture made far more of an impression on me than the neuroscience parts of the book did. I think the second part, set on Guam, is a stronger piece overall than the first, set on Pingelap; the first seemed a bit more rambling and less focused, and also one gets the faint impression that Sacks, while he enjoyed himself, wasn't quite as engaged. On Guam, however, he unfolds the mystery of lytico-bodig disease for the reader with careful precision, making connections and sharing his admiration for his host. And the final chapter, as mentioned above, deals with lytico-bodig not at all, but with cycads, which Sacks clearly loves and thinks are utterly worthy of everyone's attention, interest, and respect.

I don't think this is the best Sacks I've ever read, but it was thoroughly enjoyable, and I'm very glad I read it. Chewy without being intimidating, and very very readable, as Sacks always is. Recommended for popular science junkies, people with an interest in islands, armchair travelers, and anyone who is open to learning something new.

The Bafut Beagles by Gerald Durrell

The Bafut Beagles
by Gerald Durrell
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954
232 pages

I find this book a little hard to review. It is third in my quest to read all of Gerald Durrell's autobiographical animal stories, and I am glad I read it; it had moments in it I would have been sorry to miss. The man writes beautifully. He has a great turn of phrase, a beautiful knack for description, and a dry, self-skewering sense of humour. These early books of his, at least, are a rich tapestry of love of place, love of animals, and deep curiousity about the world around him.

The Bafut Beagles, though, is a product of its historical moment; published in the early 1950s, the edition I have from the library is a first printing. He spends a lot more time here documenting the people around him than in the previous two, and not always to his credit in a contemporary light. As stated before, I do think that Durrell was likely extremely progressive given his station (a well-enough-off white British male) and I do think he had a healthy dose of respect and affection for the people he met and worked with in the British Cameroons; one realizes this as one reads, and it is quite clear. One also gets vaguely uncomfortable as one identifies a very faint paternalistic colonialism and a definite streak of sexism that rears its head every once in a while. I found it particularly jarring in The Bafut Beagles, thanks largely, I think, to one rather ugly incident that Durrell relates and plays a bit for laughs (though he is laughing at himself, mostly, and his own romantic colonialism, I think). I think also it's because he did spend less time talking about the animals, which is what I read for anyways. That said, as before, I was reading it knowing that it is a snapshot of a fascinating profession in a particular time, and so I was able to enjoy the best parts of the book, and move past the parts that occasionally made me cringe.

It does make me wonder if, when I was reading some of these books for the first time (this was not one of them; of the three I've read so far, only Three Singles to Adventure was a reread) some of the historical tenor of them was present but I missed it, or whether it was removed for political correctness in later editions (I am not sure how I feel about this), or whether his underlying, and (I suspect strongly) unconscious, attitudes changed as the times did -- most of the others of his that I've read were from the late 60s and 70s.

Anyway! As always, my favourite parts of this book were to do with the animals, and particularly the parts in which he is describing a behaviour or a proclivity that a particular animal has, rather than a capture. The simple pen-and-ink illustrations that accompany the text are actually quite helpful in showing the physical characteristics of the animals Durrell describes. He is clearly fascinated -- enamoured, really -- by animals in all of their forms, from the tiniest insects to the largest predators, and it shows. I think part of the reason I didn't like this book quite as well as the first two is that there was less of the animals than there had been previously. He is at his strongest, writing-wise, when he is talking about them, too.

I won't recommend this book, even in Durrell's canon, but I'm not sad to have read it, if that makes any sense. I think it could have been skipped comfortably and I wouldn't have missed too terribly much. It's an interesting read both for the intended subject matter and as an historical exercise, but reader beware, that's all. Aside from my squirming, politically correct caveats, I just don't think it's as strong a book as the previous two in the chronology.

The next book in the chronology is The New Noah, a book I can find very little about. I'm not even sure if I can find it, period, but I'll do what I can and I'm interested to see where -- and when -- Durrell takes me this time.

Other Durrell books reviewed here so far:
1. The Overloaded Ark
2. Three Singles to Adventure

Love and Sweet Food by Austin Clarke

Are you prepared, internet? I have gone on a reading spree. This past week we went birdwatching. When we go birdwatching, we go serious and it is birds, birds, birds, from about 7:30am to whenever we fall asleep. Except when it rains. And also when we burn out, about two or three days in. And boy, did it rain on the third day in of our trip; thunder and lightning and general miserableness not at all conducive to hiking and seeing birds. And then I was sick, and we kind of slacked off for the last two days of the trip. So, serious birdwatching two days, no birdwatching one day, and semi-serious birdwatching the rest of the time. The other thing I am serious about when I am on vacation is reading. That rainy day? I read three books. In a row. And I could have kept going except it was midnight and I was thinking I might get up for a 7:30 start the next morning. (No, it did not happen.)

So, about this book, which wasn't even one of the three I read on that rainy day, but squeezed itself in anyways. The first thing I want to say is, if Austin Clarke had his own food show, I would probably get cable just to watch it. I've heard him speak a couple of times, the first being at the Eden Mills Writer's Festival when I was still an impressionable high school student. I bought his book The Question that afternoon, but I still haven't read it, embarrassingly; I just liked having it.

I recently heard him on the radio, reading from his novel More, and was reminded again of how much I enjoyed hearing him read his own work. I also recognized what has been holding me back from reading The Question: I am somewhat intimidated by his writing, by his stature as a writer, by the language he uses, and by the subjects he tackles. But then I was poking around in the food section of the library stacks at my local library and I swear that Love and Sweet Food literally leaped out at me. I love food, and I enjoy memoirs, so I thought, okay, here's an accessible way for me to get into reading Austin Clarke. I should mention, before I go much further, that this is a re-release of the book Pigtails 'n Breadfruit, originally published in 1999. It apparently didn't get very much attention, and that's unfortunate -- I hope that Love and Sweet Food, released in 2004, has been doing better, because it's a book that deserves to be read.

I really enjoyed this book, and in large part I enjoyed it because of the language. I can practically hear Clarke's voice reverberating off the pages as I read. This book is written in dialect. There are an awful lot of quotation marks in the introduction to draw our attention to the distinctly Barbadian words. If this kind of thing makes you nuts, this is probably not the book for you. It's very well done, but a lot of people would rather not wade through dialect to get at meaning, so be aware. A couple of samples from the introduction (also picked because I like his sense of humour):

My mother never had any great respect for my smallness or youth as a determiner of the amount or bigness of the tasks she gave me to do.

At this time we lived in a village named St. Matthias. We called it Sin-Matthias. It was bounded on one side by the Marine Hotel, where "tourisses," mainly from England, danced in an open-air ballroom on Old Year's Night to a big band orchestra of Barbadian "musicianeers," and at the last stroke of midnight looking up at their merriment and foreigness we did not envy them their privilege. We merely pitied their dancing.

The dialect grows stronger in the following chapters. It's a nice touch, leading to a feeling of complete immersion.

Most o' the other islands have hinterlands and jungles and bush. And in these islands they used to have a lot o' slave rebellions. Barbadians didn't have tummuch o' these uprisings, because we didn't -- and don't -- have no place for rebels to hide, save in the sea, and the sea is not a hinterland. The only thing in the way of black uprisings and nationalist rebellions that happen in Barbados was one riot, called The Riot. That was in 1938, not even during slavery. And it wasn't nothing to brag about nor write in history books. Five people get kill. Five! But hundreds get lock-up. Three get drowned in the sea, when it was rough. One or two fellers get deported to Jamaica, where they founded a whole new tribe o' rioters, called the Maroons!

So, as Barbadians, we're always a lil embarrass through lack o' forests and jungles and rebellions. Other Wessindians, like the Jamaicans and Guyanese, does sneer at we and say, "All-you don't have no hinterlands. All-you don't have no history. Nor no slave revolts. What the arse all-you have?"

It worked for me here. So the writing was awesome, and ensnared me completely. The subjects Clarke tackles around the food and the recipes include his childhood growing up in Barbados, politics, slavery, and the remarkable women of Barbados. I don't know that I would call it a memoir, exactly, despite what the cover says; it's more a series of vignettes, some to do with Clarke and some not, surrounding food. In fact, if it's anything coherent other than a food book, it's an affectionate tribute to his mother, who sounds like she was an absolutely formidable woman.

Clarke also shows, clearly and definitively, that the way to understand a culture's heart is through its collective stomach, and the food traditions in a culture can have a lot to say about the people who eat it. Each chapter starts with a story, an anecdote that is connected in some way to the dish Clarke will then introduce in the second half of the chapter, and tell us how to cook as though he were right there in the kitchen with us. Sometimes the anecdote works its way back into the recipe, other times not.

It's a fabulous way to be introduced to a culture I know very little about.

It's also because of Clarke's enthusiasm and excellent writing that I am now actually quite curious to try cooking with ox or pig's tails. Many of the recipes call for various ingredients ("ingreasements") that I would have a heck of a time trying to find here, and previous to reading this book I would definitely have been okay with that. But I want to try Smoked Ham Hocks with Lima Beans, Pig Tails and Rice. Or his version of Split Pea Soup. Or, especially, the Barbadian-style pork chops. I'll have to make do with what ingreasements I can get here, but I'm going to try anyways.

Highly recommended if you're interested in West Indian culture and/or food in general, or if you don't know anything about either but are curious. I suggest reading it with a rum and cola (Barbadian rum, of course) and sitting out in the hot sun, to add authenticity to the reading experience.

Three Singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell

Three Singles to Adventure is the second in my somewhat daunting attempt to read all of Gerald Durrell's autobiographical books. I've read this one before, but it was years and years ago, and it wasn't until I was most of the way through that I remembered at all. There were a couple of stories that tweaked my memory; but otherwise it was like a fresh read for me.

This book starts out promisingly, with four men in a bar in Georgetown (in what was then British Guiana, and is now simply Guyana):

"Well sir," he began, in his incredibly cultured voice, "I think you'd do well if you went to Adventure."

"Where?" asked Bob and I in unison.

"Adventure, sir," he stabbed at the map, "it's a small village just here, near the mouth of the Essequibo."

I looked at Smith.

"We're going to Adventure," I said firmly. "I must go to a place with a name like that."

Which would totally be my reaction, too. Thus begins a book that sometimes felt like it was so close to home I could have written it. Sometimes. Overall this book is just as entertaining and enlightening as The Overloaded Ark. I'm not going to go into my discussion of the discomfort-inducing colonialism that I did in my review of that book, but suffice to say that it was certainly present here too at times.

It also contains hints of the same enthusiastic description of place that I loved in The Overloaded Ark, although one does get the feeling that the jungles of Guiana weren't as eye-opening or as beloved as their African counterpart -- that, or Durrell had a stiffer word count, and I can't quite decide which. Three Singles to Adventure just didn't seem as richly descriptive as I had hoped, although what it lacks in description of place it makes up for in natural history tidbits. In particular, Durrell goes into a detailed (and humourously scathing) repudiation of the "common knowledge" about sloths, mentioning offhand how he's nearly sliced from ankle to hip by the two-toed variety somewhere inbetween discussing their virtues. Or take this passage, about the noble capybara, the largest rodent in the world:

This enormous rodent is a fat, elongated beast clad in harsh, shaggy fur of a brindled brown colour. Since its front legs are longer than its back ones, the capybara always looks as though it is on the point of sitting down. It has large feet, with broad, webbed toes, and on the front ones the nailsare short and blunt, looking curiously like miniature hooves. Its face is very aristocratic: a broad, flat head and the blunt, almost square, muzzle giving it a benign and superior expression like a meditative lion. On land the capybara moves with a peculiar shuffling gait or a ponderous, rolling gallop; but once in the water it swims and dives with astonishing ease and skill. A slow, amiable vegetarian, it lacks the personality displayed by some of its relatives but makes up for it by a placid and friendly disposition.

Can't you just picture it? Durrell introduced me (in this book, I think) to the capybara when I was a kid, and for a long time they held an almost mythic status in my mind. I couldn't quite believe there was something quite like a real capybara in the world, and for years I wasn't sure whether they were real, or if they were, whether they still existed in the wild. I know now that they do, in numbers no less, but I'm still inordinately fond of them, thanks largely to Gerald Durrell. If I ever see one in the wild, the squeeing will be heard in Antarctica.

The story that reminded me that I'd read this book before, though, was the story of the pipa toads and their "birth" in a kerosene tin halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, and the five fascinated sailors who preside, along with Durrell, over the event. I can't reproduce it here (it's a chapter long) but it encapsulates everything I love about nature, human nature, and nature interpretation -- I related so closely to it and recognized that I got into outdoor education largely because of the type of wonder and connection Durrell describes in this chapter. He captures it perfectly. And it made me a little sad that I never did have the chance to meet him, or even write to him. He was the sort of person I would really have enjoyed, even if I was too tongue-tied to speak when he was in the room. (Yes, I would have been. I don't react well to Authors; they make me nervous because I am in awe.)

The next book in the timeline is The Bafut Beagles which I know for sure I have never read. I would remember a title like that.

The Overloaded Ark by Gerald Durrell

I am managing to peel myself away from my next read for long enough to write this review. It's not that I don't want to recommend The Overloaded Ark; quite the opposite, in fact. But my next book is really, really good and very gripping, and I've been having the privilege of multiple consecutive uninterrupted hours to read it.

But enough about other books.

The Overloaded Ark is the first of a great number of autobiographical tales written by Gerald M. Durrell. Many years ago, in my pre-teens and teens, I read everything by Durrell I could get my hands on. Which I am realizing wasn't that much, looking at his bibliography. I'd never heard of The Overloaded Ark, but I was feeling nostalgic the other day, so I looked up Durrell and settled on reading all his autobiographies, in publication order.

To understand this book, I think it's really important to first put it in context. Durrell went on several "collecting" expeditions for British zoos in his life. As far as I understand, this sort of expedition just doesn't happen anymore and for very good reason. It's not considered good zoo behaviour to be sending minions out to pull live specimens out of their habitat, unless it's to establish captive breeding programs for a seriously endangered species. But back in the 1940s, when Durrell's first expedition took place, it was a commonplace activity. And as Durrell says in his prologue, part of what he is trying to do with this book is set the record straight -- collecting expeditions were neither unending drudgery nor unending danger.

The time period is part of what makes this book so fascinating, but it also causes some serious cringing on my part. There's overtones of -- and sometimes overt -- racist colonialism and even hints of sexism, all of which at the time would have been considered normal for a white, British man visiting British Cameroon at the time the book was written. Much of the time I think Durrell was ahead of his time as far as racism and environmental concerns, but sometimes he'll write something really jarring in an otherwise splendid book. So my suggestion would be to read this book, but read it with the historical context in mind. It doesn't make any of the colonial overtones right, but it is an interesting historical exercise to read this book and realize just how deeply embedded some of this objectionable stuff was in society.

Moving past the issues (which I will admit was, for me, very hard to do at first; I don't read a lot from this time period and so it was an exercise in not being massively put off), Durrell is underrated as a writer, I think. His style is poetic, often quite funny (usually at his own expense), and thoughtful. He wants his readers to fall in love with the African jungle, and with passages like the following, how could I not?

The most notable feature of the forest was the innumerable tiny streams, shallow and clear, that meanered their way in an intricate and complicated pattern across its floor. Glinting and coiling around the smooth brown boulders, sweeping in curves to form the snow-white sandbanks, busily hollowing out the earth from under the grasping tree roots, shimmering and chuckling, they went into the dark depths of the forest. They chattered and frothed importantly over diminutive waterfalls, and scooped out deep placid pools in the sandstone, where the blue and red fish, the pink crabs, and the small gaudy frogs lived.

He has a turn of phrase that is both dryly amusing and wonderfully descriptive, as when describing a bicycle trip he takes with one of his assistants sitting on the handlebars, where they "shot out onto the high road like a drunken snipe." Or that section I mentioned in my teaser, with the naked ant battle. Actually, Durrell seemed to have a number of naked encounters... another one I laughed at went as follows:

It stood quite still, regarding me thoughtfully, and the tip of its tail moved very gently among the grass stalks. I had seen domestic cats looking like this at sparrows, twitching their tails, and I did not feel very happy about it. Also, I was stark naked, and I have found that in moments of crisis to have no clothes on gives one a terribly unprotected feeling. I glared at the Serval, wishing that I had my shorts on and that I could think of some way of capturing it without the risk of being disembowled.

Because yes, Durrell goes to some enormous lengths to catch his critters. It's always top of mind -- even when staring down large cats, or faced with a Gaboon Viper (a rather deadly snake, as he might say) in his living quarters, or falling down a hillside onto the back of an enormous Monitor Lizard which has already taken a nasty strips out of a dog. What amazes me most about this book, though, is that one never ever loses sight of the fact that Durrell loves these animals. He loves the forest, he loves the flowers, the beetles, the birds, reptiles, mammals -- he loves it all. And to him, capturing and attempting to keep these animals alive is part of loving them. One doesn't have to agree with his methods, but I know that love of nature. I have it myself.

He includes a couple of notes about failure, too. He's very conscious of mentioning that though he's included the exciting bits in the book, most of his time on a collecting trip is spent in animal care. And much of that is quite boring. He also tells us where things go wrong, as with animals he simply can't figure out how to keep alive in captivity; and there's one really lovely, touching chapter about Chumly the chimpanzee. It's a very sad story, and he never lays blame or points fingers for Chumly's demise, and leaves the conclusions to the reader -- and this reader came out feeling really horrified by human stupidity and laziness.

There are a lot of things about this book to recommend it, if you are aware of the time period it's written in and prepared to take that as it comes. I am going to continue with my plan to read Durrell's autobiographical works in order, but I'm also thinking I might throw his book The Stationary Ark in there as well, in which he talks about zoos and their relationship to the natural world, and his philosophy of effective and ethical zoo management. I've never read it, but heard good things.

If you're reading Durrell for the first time, I don't know that I'd start here. It's his first published novel and it's not quite as polished as some of the others, although at points it is really, blindingly beautiful. So, very recommended, with caveats.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Before I started Eat, Pray, Love I was a little worried it might be too God-y for me. I have a very complicated relationship with organized religion, and in many ways my experiences have not been terribly good. And currently, though not forever, I feel it's best to leave it at that. And so when I'm reading anything, significant amounts of God tend to turn me off. But, my mother's recommendation aside, Elizabeth Gilbert herself convinced me to give things a try, because I like the way she thinks. From her introduction:

And since this is the first time I have introduced that loaded word -- GOD -- into my book and since this is a word which will appear many times again throughout these pages, it seems only fair that I pause here for a moment to explain exactly what I mean when I say that word, just so people can decide right away how offended they need to get.

For me, just the act of pointing out that "God" is a loaded word is enough. The last part of that sentence made me laugh out loud, because she covers all of us -- those who have very specific ideas of God, and those who don't want anything to do with God, and all of us in between. From that moment on, I decided to read this book because I felt I could read it as her experience, and not feel like she was preaching at me. And it never did feel preachy. Sometimes it felt like she was gently suggesting advice -- a good friend, an older sister -- but it never, ever felt like she was trying to convert me and I got behind that 100%.

Let's get this out of the way first: the last third of the book was a bit of a letdown for me, and I've been trying to figure out why. I've come to the conclusion that it feels, overall, as though Gilbert is finally withdrawing. Throughout the first two sections, we get all her pain and all her love and all her thoughts and failures and triumphs, bared to us in almost graphic clarity. The third section seems somehow less intimate, which is interesting given that significant portions of that third section are about sex. I was going to say "which is odd" but it occurs to me that sex, physical and emotional intimacy between two people (in this case, anyway), may be one of the hardest things to write about in a clear-eyed, no-holds-barred way -- breaking that bubble of intimacy so that the world can share in it through one's writing is perhaps not something Gilbert wants to do, or can do. And that's okay. So in the third section there is more of an outsider-looking-in feeling, than the incredible closeness that one feels to Gilbert in the first two sections.

The third section didn't ruin the book for me by any means. And part of what I have enjoyed about it so much is the way it makes me think, and examine my own thoughts and assumptions as well as the assumptions of others. My mother and I were discussing this criticism from her book club when they read this book: Gilbert is too self-indulgent. Mandy also mentioned that she's read reviews calling the book narcissistic -- here's some news, critics: it's a memoir. So yes. Narcissistic, if you want to be nasty about it. I like memoirs because I enjoy getting that very personal look at the world from someone else's perspective, and I get that in spades from Eat, Pray, Love.

But self-indulgent is something slightly different, and with respect to my mother's book club, I disagree with them. I even got a little ferocious when talking about it with Mom. I know a few things about depression, and one thing I do understand is that one doesn't get over a deep depression by denying oneself healing. In Gilbert's case (which I am admittedly looking at through her writing, one side of the story and all that) I suspect anything less than what might be called "self-indulgence" would have been fatal. In fact, one of the things I was most impressed with was that she had both the clarity to understand what she needed to do to dig herself out of her hole, and the guts to actually do it. When dealing with depression, one has to be selfish. Because, as Gilbert herself says at one point, being miserable not only hurts you, it hurts and inconveniences others around you, too. But our good Protestant culture here in North America very much frowns on some types of selfishness. It takes a brave, strong, and/or desperate soul to ignore society and visit Italy for four months to do nothing but eat, talk, and nap in order to begin healing.

Gilbert has a very distinct voice, and I really, really liked it. When Mom and I were talking about self-indulgence, I realized I was beginning to defend Gilbert as I would a friend; her writing style, and the things she opens up about in her book, make her seem familiar -- someone I could call up and have a great chat with. This doesn't happen to me very often with books, and I liked it. Part of it was that I found a lot of what Gilbert had to say completely relatable. Try this:

Instead of being amused, though, I'm only anxious. Instead of watching, I'm always probing and interfering. The other day in prayer I said to God, "Look, I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?"

I know that brain-busy-anxious feeling all too well.

And on a lighter note:

Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters. "We are ROOSTERS!" they holler. "We are the only ones who are ROOSTERS!"

It almost makes me like roosters. And finally, a piece of wisdom that I think is incredibly important, coming to us from her Guru via Gilbert:

She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fin weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's now how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.

I don't think this book is for everyone, although I do wish it was. But I read it at a good time in my life to read it, a time when I am thinking about choices I have made and have yet to make, a time when I am finding myself sometimes treading water frantically just to keep my head out. It was, overall, a really interesting, beautiful, raw, and very worthwhile read for me. And I would advise trying it -- just trying it. Mom was surprised that she liked it as much as she did. My grandmother was surprised she liked it as much as she did. I was really surprised that I liked it as much as I did. But I tried it and I really enjoyed it, so I recommend trying it, and if it doesn't work the first time, wait five years and try it again. I suspect this book changes with time.

Apples to Oysters by Margaret Webb

Canadian farmers are suffering through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Shockingly, few of us know that crisis even exists. Fewer still understand how that crisis is affecting us, not just farmers, but us.

This has been one of the harder reviews I've ever written. I have a lot to say about this book. I did not love it. At times I didn't even like it. But I think it's an important book, and it was definitely good enough that when I didn't like it I still kept reading. I think every Canadian should read it, and I think every country in the world should have a Margaret Webb who visits the farmers where they are and writes about them. The basis for this book was that Margaret Webb took recommendations from chefs, friends, and locals and traveled from her home in Toronto across Canada to visit, one per province, a small farmer producing one of this country's iconic foods. It's a brilliant concept and largely well-executed.

The book's overarching themes are lofty, and she does a good job of illustrating her points. The story of Canadian farming should be inspiring and impressive. Instead, it's largely frustrating and depressing. Family farms are disappearing across Canada, farmers unable to support themselves or their families on the meager living they make running a farm. Rural communities are depopulating. City sprawl is gobbling up prime farmland. And fewer and fewer people understand where their food comes from, how it's grown, and who grows it. This country was built on the backs of families of farmers, fishermen, and ranchers, and nowadays those people are largely invisible unless it's a bad news story. Webb argues that it shouldn't be this way.

There is so unbelievably much wrong with our food systems in Canada, and Webb has done a laudable job of showing what is wrong and why. She points the finger squarely at big agribusiness, chemical companies, and often at our own government for this sorry state of affairs, and thus far I can't find any reason to argue with her on that. One of the farmers she talks to (who is able to view the situation from a position of prosperity and comfort, due to a lot of hard work, good planning, and superlative marketing) also points the finger at farmers themselves:

[Paul Stark of Henry of Pelham winery] has little patience for farmers who refuse to change their practices when the model is no longer working. "Farmers fight things like waterway management and pesticide control and traceability ... Those farmers would do themselves a big favour if they would just get on with environmental sustainability. That's just entry-level. The next step, they have to make a really good product, then explain why it's the best. ... I think you can make a pretty sexy demonstration of why we need to pay more for a food, and farmers need to show us why we should."

Aside from my discomfort with laying the problems on the backs of farmers themselves (although I think there's unfortunately something to that, too), this quote also illustrates one of the major problems I had with this book. Webb has a tendency to put this food out of people's reach. One of the problems with our food systems overall is that there are lots of Canadians who can barely afford to eat at the prices they pay for food now. Raising food prices to allow farmers to be both environmentally and fiscally sustainable within the current system would mean a large cost-of-living increase, one that Canadians already living in poverty cannot afford. Often the recipes she chooses to include are esoteric and completely out of reach -- how many of us ordinary Canadians have a local fishmonger to ask for dry scallops or farmed cod, for example? And even if we do, how many of us can afford it?

Now, I can understand that she might not address this because it's a huge issue and mostly outside the scope of the book. But by not addressing the problem of affordable healthy and ethical food, even in passing, she appears to be either oblivious or underestimating the problem; at worst, she appears uncaring or even callous.

While we're looking at things that bugged me, let's do a couple more. Webb is enthusiastic about food. She's enthusiastic about the people she meets. This is good. What caused me more than a little consternation every once in a while was her tendency to hyperbole. She is so bloody enthusiastic at times that she seemed irritatingly naive. But her worst transgressions are when she's lambasting some part of the food chain that she sees as failing farmers and/or consumers, as when she's taking on the issue of raw milk.

The whole issue is a bit of a sore point with me, because our local Ontarian raw milk crusader, Michael Schmidt, has been painted as a victim by the media. Webb follows this trend, suggesting that the government and medical establishment had an "hysterical" reaction, that they suggested that raw milk is some "virulent, plague-infested stew." Really? They did?

Raw milk can indeed be perfectly safe. However, as Webb herself says, raw milk can also contain any number of vicious pathogens like tuberculosis, listeria, and E. coli. Therefore, there is a law that all milk sold to consumers in Canada must be pasteurized. When Mr. Schmidt broke that law, the establishment reacted to what they saw as a threat to food safety. Regulators don't think the risk posed by raw milk is acceptable; for them to allow the sale of raw milk in Ontario under our current regulations and testing apparatus would be irresponsible. Why that makes the establishment "hysterical," I don't know. And that kind of hyperbole is present throughout the book.

She also has some factual errors: "little penguins" are not present in Quebec, though Webb blithely tells us that they are on page 230. I think she must be referring to the penguin cousins by convergent evolution in the auk family; perhaps puffins, murres or dovekies. Or maybe she is translating from a French term for the mystery bird? Perhaps a small detail, but again, it irritates me.

But enough about what I didn't like. I think I am particularly hard on this book because I think the concept is so great, and because it's a subject dear to my heart; but also because there are many, many things to like about this book too, and it makes the not-so-good things more painful. She describes the farmers and their farms in loving detail, takes us through why their food tastes better, and gives us recipes. She gets the reader excited about food, and farming.

I particularly, and predictably, enjoyed the chapters where she looks at farmers who are doing well the best. I loved the chapter about apples in British Columbia, because it is such a good news story. The chapter on flax in Saskatchewan is fascinating, and despite the melancholy and horror found in the Manitoba chapter on hog farming, I learned a lot and again thought it was really interesting and even a little hopeful. Plus I love pigs. But perhaps the best chapter in the book was the one on scallop farming in Nova Scotia.

This is not a good news story, yet. Scallop farming is not done, according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Nova Scotia, and yet Webb was able to find one scallop farmer who is doing it, and doing a good job of it. He's not really making money yet and he's been at it for many, many years -- but he's dedicated and determined to make it work (like every other farmer she interviews). What makes this chapter better than the rest is that she makes a concerted effort to see things from the conventional side, as well. With scallops, that means spending a day on a dragger, a ship that scrapes a giant net across the bottom of the Bay of Fundy and scoops up everything in its way. Webb's description of these conventional scallop fishermen is staggering and vivid, and extremely sympathetic to the fishermen. This understanding of what the conventional guys are going through, rather than lumping them in with the problem, is rare throughout the book and it added a beautiful depth and urgency to this chapter. She doesn't just tell us that scallop farming is the better way to go -- she shows us. And she leaves us to draw our own conclusions as to why scallop farming hasn't caught on in Canada's fishery.

Webb is really good at showing us the heart of Canadian food. As advertised, it makes me want to hug a farmer. It also makes me want to be a farmer, but I think we all know I'm really not cut out for it. I like sleeping in and having vacations. So instead I have my little vegetable garden and I'll make a much more concerted effort to find ethical, local producers for things I can't grow here myself. This book made me ill, made me happy, frustrated me and occasionally infuriated me. But most of all it made me think, and for that I'll be recommending it to everyone I know.

A Place Between the Tides by Harry Thurston

I first read this book a couple years ago now. It was another one of those somewhat serendipitous Christmas finds; I saw it at the local bookstore and I decided my grandmother would like it. She loved it, and leant it back to me. I devoured it, despite starting a new job and all of the stress and craziness that accompanies that. We had great conversations about this book, Grandma and I.

I bought my own copy recently, wanting to recapture the same awe and warmth I had felt for Thurston and his salt marsh. It didn't work entirely, but it worked enough that it remains one of my favourite books about nature. I love Nova Scotia and I intend to visit there again soon, but last time I read this I was feeling particularly rootless and dissatisfied with Ontario; this book made me desperately long to pick up and move East. It still did a little bit, but I didn't have that desperate longing that followed me into my dreams the last time I read it. That's not the book's fault, that's just me being in a different place.

Part of this book's charm for me, I am realizing, is the format. I really like the [seemingly] straightforward chronological setup in a nonfiction book. It's an easy way to set up a narrative even where there might otherwise not be one. It worked for me in An Ecology of Enchantment and it works for me here.

A Place Between the Tides is contains years of observation all packed into one "year"; that is, each chapter contains years' worth of observations taken in that month as opposed to a face-value day-by-day chronology. This can be a little jarring. For example, when we first meet the foxes the main vixen is Black Socks; but other chapters discuss White Face, Black Socks' mother, and the fluid continuity of the narrative is marred. At other times it works really well. Because let's face it -- a year's worth of observations on a salt marsh might be interesting, but there may be only three or four really tale-worthy events in any given year.

Not that Thurston tells us only of the big things -- the beaching of a minke whale, or the first glimpses of a litter of foxes, or the hurricanes or the peregrine falcon. He spends a gratifying amount of time on the little things, too, the "ordinary" ecology of a salt marsh, talking about the marsh grasses or the processes that bring nutrients into the marsh or carry them out again. Because of my own personal inclinations, I think he's at his best when offering cool tidbits of information about the marsh or its inhabitants, as here when describing the physical adaptations of the northern gannet to spectacular aerial dives into the ocean:

It has no nostrils, and its upper and lower bill fit tightly together to prevent ingestion of water on hitting the waves. Most important, it has a system of air-cells between the skin of its neck and shoulders and the muscles beneath. Upon diving the gannet inflates these cells to cushion its body and head from the tremendous force of impact.

That kind of stuff fascinates me, and it clearly fascinates and delights Thurston too. Bits like this are woven throughout the entire book, intertwined with poetic descriptions so vivid that I am sure I can see every blade of Spartina sp. grass, every cloud, every minnow. Anyone who has ever encountered a spring evening frog chorus or a June bug will recognize this:

This is the night music of spring, and an anthem to evolution. We listen a long while, until the night chill descends. As we make our way back to the house, June bugs splutter out of the grass, crashing blindly into the clapboard.

There were a few things I noticed more this time around that did have an impact on my enthusiasm for the book. Occasionally the poetic is a little overdone and it slides from vivid and refreshing to excessively wordy and a little purple. What's worse, to my mind, is Thurston's habit of falling into the same trap that many naturalists and environmentalists do. I know why he does it, and I do it myself although I am very deliberately trying to stop. Take this passage:

Because I do not have the ear of an expert birder, I must see the birds to know which ones have survived the contemporary threats of pesticides and deforestation and the age-old perils of migration to return to the north woods. (Warbler populations have declined by as much as 20 percent in recent decades.) For the most part, it is the male birds that sing, feathered Carusos belting out their love songs to attract a mate.

Way to ambush me there, Mr. Thurston. It's a little like watching a Sir David Attenborough nature documentary (you know, "Look at these cute, helpless little baby animals, whose parents work tremendously hard to care for them, and are the pinnacle of evolution to fit this niche... ... EATEN!")

I know why it's done. People need to be aware of human impact, aware of the challenges, and aware of frankly terrifyingly precipitous declines in biodiversity. (Wait, did I just do it there?) But as I grow older and hopefully wiser, I have to wonder, what do we naturalists accomplish by doom and gloom? Wouldn't we be better to use our opportunities, such as this wonderful book, to open others' eyes and show them how remarkable all of nature is? I think the doom leads to disillusionment and helplessness, when it doesn't piss people off; none of these feelings are conducive to creating motivation or passion.

That said, I don't think Thurston ever chastises. He keeps it to facts. Some of the facts are sad. Many of them are not. I don't think the occasional doom and gloom seemed as prominent last time I read it, and I wonder if I'm perhaps a little oversensitive to it now.

Overall, this is a wonderful book about the rhythms of nature, about history and homecomings, about a very special place, and about one man's deep and abiding love for the world around him. Despite the occasional shortcomings, I highly recommend it for nonfiction and science junkies like myself, or people interested in reading about interesting places and the creatures (human and not) who inhabit them. I have Thurston's book Island of the Blessed, about an Egyptian oasis, tucked in the queue.

My Natural History by Liz Primeau

My notes about this book are all over the place, I think because I took them as I was reading. I didn't want to forget anything. I've started doing that with many books I read -- something will occur to me that I want to write about on the blog here, and so I'll write it down. It's good I do, too, because I do forget.

This is a memoir, the life story of a gardener. Liz Primeau is something of a "name" in Canadian gardening, not least as the founding editor of Canadian Gardening magazine, not to mention hosting a tv show and writing several gardening books (today I ordered her Front Yard Gardens: Growing More than Grass from the library.) What I had somehow missed is that she grew up first in Winnipeg, and then in Paisley, Ontario, not far from my summer stomping grounds at Grandma and Grandpa's farm. This added a special dimension for me, because I know the area, and I first fell in love with gardening thanks to Grandma's wonderful perennials and vegetables.

The book is a collection of thoughts on gardening, many intensely personal, and an examination of the role gardening and her own gardens have played in her life, from her father's vegetable garden in Winnipeg to her own mature garden in Mississauga. She also explores garden lore and is particularly interested in garden history, although to be honest I don't think she's at her strongest when discussing these. She's at her best when discussing her own gardens, her gardening philosophy, the people around her, and her gardening influences.

One of my favourite parts in the book was when she was discussing her early disdain for old standards, like spirea and bleeding heart, before she wised up and realized that they're old standards for a reason -- they're relatively easy to care for, don't suffer from many of the problems of new varieties or exotics, and so forth. I thought, at one point, "Oh yes! Me too! But I'm also beyond that," thinking of my peonies and petunias last year. And then I realized that I'm planning to rid the front garden of the spirea and have no fondness for bleeding heart whatsoever (they're both boring!) Hmm.

I fully respect her and and her experience, and agree with her statement that gardening is a therapeutic endeavour. I can see myself in her experience quite often. I agree with her assessment that gardening "trends" are ridiculous, given that it takes at least a couple of years for any garden to start coming into its own. I love her discussions on biodiversity and the efforts she has made to make sure her garden is a healthy ecosystem. I am completely with her on the front yard garden lines: they're a great idea, much better than expanses of monoculture grass.

There are some things that I completely disagree with her about, too. In particular, I adore cats but they have no place outdoors, in my backyard, or in anyone else's back yard. Outdoor cats are viciously destructive to the native fauna (birds, mice, small rodents, insects, whatever) even if you think they're not, even if you think you're watching them closely. Besides, it's not a good environment for the cat either -- there are cars, raccoons, dogs, skunks, nasty humans. I could go on at length about it but that's not really the point of this blog.

But I can respect her opinions even if I disagree. The fact that I didn't throw down the book in disgust during her rhapsody to the neighbourhood cats, and even found it amusing at points, speaks to the fact that overall I really enjoyed the book. I don't think the prose is spectacular; it's very chatty, but that makes it very engaging. It's a pleasant read and a balm for someone like me, stuck in the early March sunshine and desperate to get out the trowel and the seeds.

Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks

Before we went to Cuba, I had been intending to read Oliver Sacks' Oaxaca Journal. I had it sitting on my desk for an unreasonably long amount of time. I brought it with me with the vague idea that I might read it, and it turned out to be an excellent choice. It's not very long and it is, like anything I have ever read by Sacks, a very engaging read. The man is brilliant at both observation and at making his observations accessible to the masses in writing.

On the third page, this stuck out for me, as I was enjoying the rarefied atmosphere of an all-inclusive, five-star resort:

How crucial it is to see other cultures, to see how special, how local they are, how un-universal one's own is.

We stayed at a resort, but the last time I was in Cuba I didn't. And this time we did get out to see a [surprisingly] large portion of the countryside for a day. I always have this uncomfortable feeling about traveling as a tourist anywhere. Especially Cuba, because I frankly adore the ideal of the place (there is food, shelter, education and medical care for every single Cuban, and what a necessary thing) but I also recognize that there are significant major problems with the way the system actually works. I dislike what the American government has done to Cuba, but I'm not sure that as a Canadian tourist I'm all that much better, coming to gawk at the wonderful old buildings and romanticize Castro's Revolution. I don't know how to feel about a place where everyone has the basics for a good life but they don't have the freedom to travel the way I do, or read the way I do, or express their own views the way I do. I don't know the answers, and it does trouble me. Especially because I do love Cuba so much, and the time I spent there this time didn't lessen that (I have an acute case of wanting to be in Cuba all the time now). It adds tension to what would otherwise be a really lovely, relaxing vacation. But I'm glad I have that tension.

All of that said, Cuban culture is completely, completely different from Canadian culture and there's a lot to be said for it, and how is it my place to condemn a way of life that I have very limited understanding of? And that is what the quote above reminded me to be aware of, that obnoxious colonial tendency to try to evaluate and "fix" cultures that are different from our own.

Mexico has different problems, the main being the massive amounts of poverty and governmental corruption. Sacks doesn't dwell on this but he does give it a mention. And it's nice to see the same sort of ambiguity I have about traveling to places as a relatively wealthy tourist, just expressed from a different angle and much more eloquently than I could. It was somewhat comforting to read, not because it resolved any of my thoughts but because it did clarify them somewhat, and made me relax a little knowing that I'm not alone.

All right, that's probably enough angst. On to the book itself:

The things Sacks has to say about Oaxaca are fascinating, and now I would very much like to go to that area myself (tourist-guilt aside). We get glimpses of his travel companions, and the novelty of traveling with a group of naturalists. Make no mistake -- it's a novelty. I really enjoy it, myself. There is something great about being able to shout excitement about a bird to a bus full of people and have them scramble all over eachother to get to the windows to see for themselves. In any other case, your fellow passengers would stare at their books or their shoes in embarrassment for you and hope for your sake that you keep quiet next time. But Sacks captures the thrilled naturalist-tourists quite well.

The journal is, as I suppose I should have expected, even more personal than his memoir. There were points where I was occasionally even a little uncomfortable with how personal it was, because I don't like to pry into other living people's thoughts (despite what some of my readers might think). It's not that he says anything specifically -- it's just that put all together, and probably because I have also recently read Uncle Tungsten, one gets a much fuller picture of Sacks than I was expecting, and sometimes it make me wonder if he realized quite how much of himself he was exposing.

Overall, a highly recommended book, for anyone at all because it's so quick and easy to read. But especially for anyone who is traveling to Mexico or Latin America, or anyone interested in ferns, nature or culture. I'm curious now to see about some of the others in the National Geographic's literary writers on travel series, of which Oaxaca Journal is part.

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

In some ways I don't feel fit to review this book. I could never do it justice, which I suppose says something in itself. It is enormous, in some ways as large as the entire history of chemistry itself. It is also a portrait of one man's very difficult, lonely, eccentric and also wonderful childhood, and in places is almost frighteningly intimate. It's a bit of a paradox, because in some ways it seems so huge, and in others it seems so inadequately small, and the reader gradually becomes aware of just what could have been written, and how large that is. I think that's a fitting feeling for a memoir to have.

It's not that the book aspires to be grand, or that it is pretentious in any way. It's tremendously humble. It's also somewhat painfully incomplete without its Afterword, and I think the Acknowledgements finish the book better than the last chapter did. The "ending" is as abrupt as a surprise brick wall.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood is a thick, chewy book that despite its thickness and its chewiness is an infinitely easy read. The writing is eminently accessible. It offers only glimpses into what must have been a truly remarkable family, and reads like a tribute to many of the Sacks and the Landaus as much as a memoir. The book itself is somewhat fragmentary, sewn together with a long and meandering thread of the history of chemistry and sometimes, but mostly not, seems like more of a history of chemistry itself than an autobiographical piece by a neurologist. But it was a history of chemistry that was accessible enough that I began to remember how fascinating I used to find chemistry myself, before school killed it for me. It makes me sad that the home chemistry lab is basically a relic of the past. I think it's probably wrong that I secretly think the kid who recently blew off his fingers trying to make a rocket in his garage is awesome. Most parents wouldn't let their kids anywhere near anything that might possibly be a little bit dangerous -- Sacks, on the other hand, had uranium compounds in his lab as a boy of twelve.

There are parts of this book that are heartbreaking. Sacks touches on -- though never dwells on -- the abuse he suffered at a residential school during WWII, and the abuse and bullying that apparently literally drove his older brother mad. Though understated, the reader gets the deep sense of how dreadfully lonely Sacks must have been at points in his childhood, battered by circumstances beyond his control. But for Sacks, as a boy, there were also supportive, caring, highly intelligent adults and siblings. And there was chemistry. There was the history of chemistry and the giants of discovery (an entire chapter is devoted to Humphrey Davy, for example, who I had only vaguely heard of before), and there are also the actual elements and experiments and apparatuses themselves, each described in enthusiastic, awe-filled detail. The book reads like a love letter to chemistry.

The fact that I did enjoy it as much as I did is a testament to Oliver Sacks as a talented and very human writer. I haven't decided which of Oaxaca Journals, The Island of the Colorblind, An Anthropologist on Mars, or Musicophilia I should read next. Or any of his others. Probably the first I get my hands on.