Long Awaited Reads Month

So, I did this, or my own version of it. I have so much to choose from, with books that I own that I want to read. I have a shelf full of them. I need to weed it. I'm in a weeding mood. I've historically been extremely reluctant to weed my own shelves, though, so we'll see how that goes.

But the thing is, on those shelves are a number of things that I keep putting off because for whatever reason, something else always seems more pressing. January, as Long Awaited Reads Month (thanks to Ana and Iris) was the perfect time to forget more pressing and just go with what I knew I could love.

Here's how I did:

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
A Sand County Almanac and Essays from Round River by Aldo Leopold
Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill
Terrier by Tamora Peirce

That doesn't count me starting Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, which I abandoned around page 70 for the third time in my life because ffs, Walter Hartright. And I also read Susan Dennard's Truthwitch, which can't be a LAR because it was released this month, except that it kind of felt like the book I've been waiting for so I'm going to count it for a half point.

That's 4.5 books. In one month. That's amazing for me these days. It turns out reading books that fit like a comfortable pair of jeans helps me read more. And when I read more, I feel better about myself. So even though I have been as sick as possible without hospitalization this month - still coughing up goo and feeling exhausted five weeks in - I can't count this month as a total wash; I read some wonderful, wonderful books.

I'll do little mini reviews because that's as much as I'm up to at this moment, but I may have more to say about each of these books as time goes on.

Men at Arms: It's been a long time since I read a Discworld book. Too long, really. Plus it's a Night Watch novel, and I love the Night Watch. I read it in two days and it was the perfect way to start my reading year. Amazing how relevant Pratchett seems to be, no matter when he wrote the book.

A Sand County Almanac: Putting my thoughts together on this one is going to be hard. Good thing I took notes. It was brilliant, the best thing I've read this month, and that's saying something. It was also the longest awaited of the long awaited books. I think I first heard of it when I was doing my undergrad and that is longer ago than I care to admit. It's surprisingly easy to read, given how dense it gets sometimes; the Almanac section is beautiful but regrettably short, the essays from Round River are deep and thought-provoking. Another book that is startlingly, and sadly, as relevant now as it was when it was written... which was the 1940s.

Disco for the Departed: I can't believe how long it took me to get to this. I've had it home from the library at least four or five times, and never made it past the first couple of pages before it was due, entirely because of reading other things. Wonderful to be back in 1970s Laos with Dr. Siri. I'll go anywhere with Dr. Siri. One of my favourite characters of all time. Cotterill's writing remains just stellar and the characterization excellent.

Terrier: Oh Tamora Pierce. If Robin McKinley started my life-long love of fantasy, Tamora Pierce's Alanna cemented it. But I haven't read much of her since that series, and Terrier has kind of called to me, since it was published. The first time I tried to read it I stumbled on some of the formatting stuff - different fonts for different prologue journals and I didn't like the fonts, which is a stupid reason not to read a book - but once I got past that this time I was in for good. Beka Cooper is fantastic and Pierce's sense of place, and use of language (oh my stars the slang) is everything I love. This is essentially a police procedural set in a fantasy world, exactly my catnip, and all tangled up in a coming-of-age story. Will be reading Bloodhound, hopefully won't take me until next January to get to it.

I'll save ranting about how much I loved Truthwitch for later. I hope. I had meant to write up my thoughts on Almanac two weeks ago, which is not a great sign. I'll get to it! And this is technically the end of Long Awaited Reads Month for me, but... that's not going to stop me from sticking to things that will feel good to read. I need it right now, at least until my lungs stop pretending they belong to my grandfather.

The River by Helen Humphreys

One of the things I'm going to have to do if I'm going to start updating again is be a little less rigid about how I update and when and for what. I used to go at this chronologically - that is, whatever I read first, I'd write about first. And I wrote about everything I read, regardless, except for the books I didn't finish. I have about 30 books I still need to write about, going all the way back to January of this year. I say "need" - but do I need to? Perhaps, at this point in my life and writing, the more appropriate criteria is "want" - which of these books that I have read do I most want to write about right now.

And right now, I want to write about The River.

The River
by Helen Humphreys
ECW Press, 2015
224 pages

I have an odd reading relationship with the work of Canadian author Helen Humphreys, and this is yet another entry into that ongoing weirdness. (The weirdness is with me, not her books.) Previous to The River I have read The Frozen Thames and loved it, and The Lost Garden and wanted to love it but had trouble with the subject matter and the prickly main character, Gwen. Humphreys tackles subject matters and writes characters that I find uncomfortable, and yet - I keep going back. I don't usually do this with authors who write characters I find uncomfortable or books that make me sad.

I'm going to keep going back to her, too. There's no question. Even though I know what I'm getting into.

I do this for the writing. Helen Humphreys is a poet and she writes prose like a poet. This will get me every time. I like good writing. A book doesn't tend to make it with me without it, regardless of how excited I am about the characters or the plot or the concept. And apparently really beautiful writing will draw me in regardless of how unexcited I am about the characters or the plot. So despite the detachment Humphreys writes with, and the often melancholy (sometimes very melancholy, sometimes downright sad) tone, and despite characters who can be hard to love, I read Humphreys.

The River itself is as odd a piece as The Frozen Thames, a book that defies cataloguers to put it in a specific place on the shelves. Our library has decided it is a biography. Of... a river I guess? Because that is what it is - a word portrait of a river. In short passages, some a few pages and some a single line, Humphreys introduces the reader to Depot Creek, specifically to a little plot of land - her little plot of land - on the banks of said Creek. Using this as a jumping off point, we are introduced to the creek itself, the Napanee River, the town of Bellrock, the people who have used the river and inhabited the land where Humphreys lives now, the wildlife that use the river, and so on. In some cases she just describes something - the river, the history, a creature on the river - and in others she has written pieces from the perspective of someone who may have existed, or who did exist. These would be fiction, but they're still trying to do the same thing that the nonfiction descriptive passages are: get to the heart of what the river actually is, what it truly means.

It's lovely. It's melancholy. It's a unique gem of a book. It's also beautiful as a physical item; the photographs and drawings strategically placed through the pages are perfect. This is not one to e-read; you will be much happier if you can have it in your hands. Recommended for anyone who loves beautiful words and is interested in history, natural history, and the attempt to peer into the heart of something so prosaic and so unknowable as a river. I didn't love it, because it's not exactly a loveable book. It's a bit prickly, a bit detached. But I will remember it and I will come back to it.

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp
by Kathi Appelt
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013
336 pages

This is a book that kind of surprised me. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about it, but in the end I enjoyed it very much. The thing was, when I started, I was kind of - meh. The dynamic in this book is often found in children's books with an environmental theme: little guy, loves the swamp, all good; big bad guy, inexplicably hates all nature, and is totally, almost comically, irredeemable. Little guy through dint of hard work and some luck shows up the big guy, who vanishes from the picture, never to return. Paradise is saved.

I find this plot and character dynamic really problematic for a couple of reasons, but let's flesh out The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp a bit first. The success of this book is in the details. And do not get me wrong: this book is successful. It's funny, tender, clever, creative, and hugely enjoyable. I'll get my vent off my chest first, but then I'll get to the good bits.

In this case, the "little guy" is actually played by three characters in two separate but connected storylines: Bingo and J'miah are the titular true blue Swamp Scouts, raccoons who have taken an oath to protect the swamp and serve the Sugar Man, the giant creature who mostly sleeps but occasionally wakes to eat some delicious sugar cane or deal out some mayhem to enemies of the swamp. Chap Brayburn is the 12-year-old grandson of a man by the name of Audie, proprietor of Paradise Pies Cafe, birdwatcher and swamp dweller. Audie is recently deceased. So now, enter Sonny Boy Beaucoup, our first big bad guy, owner of the swamp who is about to repossess Paradise Pies Cafe and turn the whole mess into an alligator wrestling stadium and theme park with his business partner and World Champion Alligator Wrestler, diminutive, unsavoury, and fierce Jaeger Stitch. Our second strand of big bad guys, to counter Bingo and J'miah, are the Farrow Gang, a family of big, bad, itinerant wild hogs bent on eating the swamp's delicious muscovado sugar cane. The swamp is in terrible, terrible danger from foes human and not.

Okay, so my problem with setups like this is that there are never any grey areas, and maybe for children's literature that's okay, sometimes. Kids do have a more defined idea of right and wrong in situations like this, and cut-and-dried "swamp/other undervalued natural area = good, development of said area = bad" with heroes and villains really does appeal. Heck, it appeals to adults; I felt as satisfied as anyone when Sonny Boy gets his. And I am a naturalist, I would even go so far as to call myself an environmentalist: I am all for anything that celebrates nature and the environment and touts its value. I can enjoy a wish-fulfillment fantasy where the developer who hates nature gets his ass kicked in the end.

The problem with this kind of black and white situation is that it exists essentially nowhere in reality and while it's fun to play that wish-fulfillment game, it's also destructive. Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that there are quite so many supervillainous, obsessive nature haters out there as environmentally-themed fiction would have us believe. People who don't see the value of a meadow, yes; people who want to destroy the meadow because it's a personal affront to them that it exists? Who rub their hands together, revelling in their gleeful evil plans? I am not so sure. Perhaps I am wrong.

The thing is, this black and white rhetoric isn't limited to fiction; it's been a staple of some segments of environmental movements, and that kind of rhetoric doesn't generally win friends or supporters. I did genuinely believe as a kid that people who built parking lots and malls were evil and actively hated the planet, but as an adult I can see that's not the case; they simply don't see it, I think, and sometimes they do see it but they also see jobs, economy, and yes, personal cash. (As an aside sure to win me friends, I do still occasionally wonder if the tar sands operators and their political champions do actively hate nature; I am not quite sure how they can justify what they do without some sort of pathological issue.) I can see where jobs and economy and protecting nature intersect, I can see where there are no simple solutions and where pretending there are does everyone, including the environmental movements, a disservice.

All right, so there, in a too-big nutshell, is my problem with this book, which is mostly a problem with this type of book. On the surface this is a simple, moral-heavy story with incredibly simplistic solutions. I want a little more nuance in the discussion, because I think kids can handle the nuance. I think adults need the nuance. Let's get to the parts that I liked, the parts that had me reading quickly and past my bedtime and occasionally giggling out loud.

The narrator's voice. And I know I'm not going to be joined in this by everyone who reads this book, but I really, really enjoyed the narrator's voice. Perhaps it puts me in mind a bit of a very Southern US E. Nesbit, with its empathetic warmth, the comic asides, and chattiness, and I like that sort of thing. The narration should have seemed hokey and overdone, but it didn't. To me, it added to the charm and the atmosphere of the book. And the narrator keeps the pace moving at a good clip; I can't believe how quickly I read once I got going. I didn't want to put the thing down.

Many of the sections are told from the point of view of the raccoons, and these were by far my favourites, though I liked Chap a lot. The raccoon storyline was what brought originality to the book, made it something beyond the little-guy-vs-big-bad environmental fable. It's a bit coming-of-age, a bit of myth-making, with the denizens of the swamp heavily anthropomorphized but still animals. I developed an incredible fondness for Bingo and J'miah and that could be because I do have a bit of a fondness for raccoons in general (while still recognizing they can be terribly destructive, even slightly malicious little jerks) but it's also because Appelt makes them relatable, charming, full of mischief and also full of good intentions.

I loved how human ephemera plays a roll in the ecology of the swamp. Bingo and J'miah live in an old Chrysler De Soto, and J'miah discovers some treasures in it - to tell what they are is to spoil it, and part of the joy of the narration is the way it hops around, lighting on things and connecting them, bit by bit.

And - slight spoiler - I loved that Appelt felt that the existence in the swamp of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, that elusive but perhaps still-extant dweller of the deepest parts of the swamps of the southern States, could remain a question mark. That kind of ambiguity and subtlety is missing from the overall plot and I would have liked more, but I am happy with what I got.

Recommended and I'm really looking forward to hearing what the parent-child book club has to say about this one. If the cut-and-dried environmentally-themed narrative with bad guys and good guys doesn't appeal to you, this will probably irritate you on some levels, and if you're not a fan of folksy narrators this book will drive you up the wall and likely over it. People who have problems with anthropomorphized animals will also want to steer clear. But if you're curious about an original story, steeped in atmosphere, told with warm humour and charm, this is a good choice. If you like an environmental message and like it when people get their nature facts right, this is also fun. If you like rattlesnakes, if you wish the bad guys would just be unsympathetically bad and lose a little more often, if you want to believe that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is still there somewhere in the deepest, darkest part of the swamp, pick this one up. Many thanks to Cecelia for bringing it to my attention in the first place!

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.

Winter by Adam Gopnik

Winter: Five Windows on the Season

by Adam Gopnik

House of Anansi Press, 2011

210 pages

Disclaimer: I love winter. So does Adam Gopnik. And I have decided that I'm going to try to stop apologising for this love of mine, as fashionable as complaining about the snow and cold weather is: winter is a wonderful season, and Gopnik spends quite a lot of time validating my fondness of it. If you thought that maybe five lectures and 210 pages was too long to spend talking about winter, you would be wrong. Gopnik manages it and one gets the impression he could have kept going. And this reader - and most readers, I'd wager, even those who have no love of cold and ice - would have been pretty happy to keep following.

Winter is part of the Massey Lectures series, the printed version of the spoken lecture series heard every year on CBC's Ideas. I quite like the idea of reading each of the lecture series, although I haven't gotten very far with this mission and they just keep on piling up (there is a new one every year. How am I supposed to keep up with that?) 

Gopnik's love for this season - this accident of nature, this clockwork shift to ice due to an axial tilt as our planet orbits the sun - is incredibly well-informed. If you look at the tags on this post, you'll get an idea of the sorts of range this book has. He starts with an exploration of the way the way winter has been viewed through the years has shifted, from being a season of bitterness, loss, and hardship, to being a season of warmth, light, and fellowship. He proceeds to an investigation of the polar winter, winter as place, and specifically the draw it held for Victorian explorers. The third lecture is essentially about Christmas, and the place it holds in the Western secular holiday year, as our festival of cold and light. Then there is an extended digression into winter sport, which is mostly about ice hockey, though he spends a serious amount of time looking at the advent and evolution of ice skating period. (Gopnik is a hockey fan, and is quite clear about that, so the entire chapter devoted to expressing his love of the game is not a surprise.) And finally he looks at what it may mean to us to lose winter, either by moving away from it, or by the self-inflicted wound of climate change. Throughout each chapter he is looking at the psychology of winter; that is, what does winter instill in us, culturally, individually? What ideas and thoughts and meanings do we instill into the season? What is winter, exactly, and what has it been?

Books like this that investigate a single idea from so many angles tend to really capture me, particularly if they're done well, and I think this book is. The writing style is very informal - Gopnik's introduction explains that things, as written out, are essentially transcripts of some practice lectures he gave, with a bit of tightening for readability. At times, when a sentence construct felt a little weird, I read it out loud to myself and that fixed the problem. Gopnik is thoughtful, funny, insightful, and relaxed. He circles around particular points and draws his arguments tighter and tighter. He lets the reader in on secrets, he tells us fascinating facts, he laughs at the absurd even as he respects it.

But there was a bit of a thing, and I almost hesitate to even bring it up, because the problem with noting something like this is that, these days, it can be enough for people to pillory the book and the author unfairly. (It can also be enough to earn me the label of "too sensitive" and I hope I don't deserve it in this case, but I am wary of that too.) It was noticeable, and it did bug me, so:

Gopnik is looking a lot at history, and it is a primarily male history. There are not a lot of women in this book. Franny Mendelssohn, sister of the more familiar composer, gets a brief, positive mention. Anna Brownell Jameson, the writer of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada - her diary, essentially - gets a lot of page time in the first lecture. And that is about it, except for some nameless skaters flirting with men in images of skating in Central Park, affectionate mentions of his wife and daughter, the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen, and then - the throwaway and unnecessary reference that solidified my feeling that maybe Gopnik should have been paying a bit more attention to the issue of gender in his lectures - a Playmate makes a very baffling metaphorical appearance. It's not that the book feels like a frat party, exactly. I don't think Gopnik is generally disrespectful of the female, the feminine, and certainly not of individual women. But I was noticing a lack, and then the Playmate comment made me actually wince. It wasn't offensive on its own, but given the lack of female presence in the book, it took on a bit more of a profile than it should have.

The thing is, history, as written by most, and as enrolled in these lectures by Gopnik, is very heavy on men and very short on women, and these lectures are a look into the history of our relationship with winter. Men feature prominently. Women don't as much, so when they do feature, I'd like it to matter. I'd like it to not be played for laughs. I'd like it to not feel a little bit as though we are the temptresses, the objects of desire, that our only relationship with winter is as it allows us to express our otherwise forbidden sexuality (as in his argument about the social role ice skating fulfilled for women and gay men around the turn of the twentieth century). Given his admiration and respect for Anna Brownell Jameson, I don't actually think Gopnik really does think of women only in this way. Unfortunately the book doesn't quite reflect that.

There is still lots to love about this book, and lots of really excellent things about it. Sure, Gopnik overreaches his point sometimes, or gets a little repetitive as he circles around his argument; but mostly it's well-written, very accessible, entertaining, thought-provoking, funny, gentle, kind. He captures the feeling of winter, particularly in his first chapter and the chapter on Christmas, the awe and wonder and affection and respect that I hold for the season. It is hard for me to know if someone who isn't as fond of winter as I am would be swayed by his argument, but I think it would be pretty difficult not to be touched by it. Recommended, for Canadians especially: we whinge a lot about this season. I don't think it would hurt us to think about it a little more deeply than just complaining about shoveling and cold.

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

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.

Lakeland by Allan Casey

Lakeland
by Allan Casey
Greystone Books, 2009
352 pages

If it is a wizard you seek, find one who has seen enough for his hair to go grey.

I placed the e-copy of this on hold quite a while ago in the hopes of reading it at some point. It's the One Book One Community book for my region this year, and I'd been thinking of reading it anyway after hearing Allan Casey interviewed. It's kind of a brave choice for OBOC, though it's not out of line from some of their earlier choices (ie. The 100-Mile Diet). To get a whole community to read a non-fiction book isn't easy, but this is an excellent choice. Perhaps I'm only saying that because it's right up my regular reading alley anyway, though.

Casey has structured this book as a sort of travelogue; he undertook to visit important Canadian lakes (excluding the Canadian lakes we always think of, that is, Erie, Ontario, Huron and Superior, which aren't exclusively Canadian anyway) and write one chapter per lake. He looks at the environmental context and also the cultural importance of the lakes, in some cases their economics, in others their biology, and often both. Each chapter introduces us to at least one person with life-long ties to the lake in question, and sometimes to others with more fleeting ties.

It's not always a comfortable or comforting book to read, in that Casey is a clear-eyed and practical recorder of events, people, places, and problems. He's not unrealistically optimistic. He's also not gloomy, either, which can be the other (and more common) problem with books of this sort. This book is also not a call-to-action, which are the sorts of environmental reads I hate most, because they tend to get me all fired up and then, almost immediately, I feel desperate and guilty, impotent and ashamed. Lakeland more of a call to awareness, and a very effective one at that. What this means is that I often think about the book, and the lakes, and our relationship to them, in ways that I haven't done before, without becoming mired in that perennial environmental problem of apathy born of a feeling of hopelessness.

I can only speak for myself, but the kinds of problems Casey identifies suggest that the fact that I am not the only Canadian out there to take our lakes for granted. It's a problem of abundance. We have so many, we are so used to them. They are a part of our psyche, our cultural unconscious. So we don't recognize how incredibly lucky we are to have them. I can't imagine living in a country without easy easy access to lakes. This week I'm spending by one of the Muskoka lakes (I am one of the fortunate to have access to these from the comfort of a building without a million dollars burning a hole in my bank account) and I read this book sitting on the shore of Georgian Bay, which is my lake, the lake that I judge all other lakes by. 

I think Lakeland is saved from becoming too gloomy or strident by Casey's excellent writing skills, and his excellent sense of proportion. The book is not unrelentingly about the problems. It's often funny, often beautiful, and his turn of phrase is almost poetic at points. His love for the country he calls Lakeland is transparently visible, his desire to bring all of us along with him is infectious. He looks at the problems and then finds the good, the little toeholds where things might take off for the better. It's a friendly book, and much of what he writes is familiar to a long-time lake-lover like myself.

I think this is one of those books that every Canadian should read -- new Canadians, to orient them to a vital part of the psychology of their new home, and Canadians from families that have been here for generations, to remind us of just how lucky we are to have our lakes. It's a worthwhile read for others, too; I'd wager a guess that not a few Americans understand how wonderful a Canadian lake is, or have a special American lake of their own. As a primer for anyone interested in Canada or travelling to visit us, one could do far worse. It's a uniquely Canadian book, but I think its appeal is wider.

Longtime readers know I don't normally highlight causes here, but the Canadian government has decided we don't need to bother with lake research in this country any more, which is completely baffling. They are shutting down the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area to "save money" (it will cost several billion dollars to shut them down properly) and we will lose a vital part of our scientific, and dare I say, cultural heritage. Be aware.

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

Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen

Skinny Dip

by Carl Hiaasen

Knopf, 2004

368 pages

I am on a roll with actually reading book club books. I consider two read all the way through a roll, yes, why do you ask?

Especially since this is an adult book even. It's longer than 100 pages! Woot!

And I liked it. I really did. It's a fair ways off my usual beaten path, that of fantasy and/or romance. That said, it included, in some ways, a bit of both. Skinny Dip is a revenge fantasy, and there's a hint of very satisfying, if very peripheral, romance throughout the thing. Plus, this book is funny. It might even be, for some people, laugh out loud funny. I didn't laugh out loud, but that didn't mean I wasn't grinning or appreciating the humour.

Chaz Perrone is a screw-up. He's a biologist who hates all living things, except for beautiful women and the grass on his golf greens. He's married, but not faithfully, and he's a lousy son. He has no ambition, unless you can count making lots of money with as little effort as possible ambitious. Currently, he's doing this by faking water samples in the Florida Everglades to keep a very crooked, very rich industrial farmer in the polluting business. And he's pretty sure his wildlife-loving wife has caught on, so it's over the side of a cruise ship with her. It all seems to have gone perfectly.

Except that Chaz is a screw-up, and Joey's not dead. She's also a champion swimmer. And now that she's been "murdered," she's about to make Chaz's life really miserable.

Hiaasen's sense of humour, which is part of his attraction to many I think, is dark and absurd. Example #1: Joey Perrone's first husband was killed by being flattened by a skydiver whose parachute didn't open. Example #2: Tool, a bodyguard stuck on Chaz by the criminal he works for, is extremely hairy and was mistaken for a bear by a hunter, and now lives with a bullet lodged in his posterior crack. The way the entire story unfolds is like this; unlikely-but-just-likely-enough coincidences and events butting up against each other to make for a gleeful black comedy. Somehow, I enjoy the central characters enough -- larger-than-life though many of them were -- and the plot enough that I wanted to suspend disbelief long enough to get to the end of the story. Of course things like that would never happen (would they?) but for the sake of an enjoyable reading experience, I'll let it pass. And then, by the time I'm halfway through, I'm gobbling it all up.

Because of the things I want to talk about, the this review does include some spoilers. It's really unavoidable in this case. I can say that I think this book in particular is about the journey, not the destination, but if you want to be left wondering about the ultimate fates of the various characters as I was, you're better off stopping here. But first, the recommendations:

Entertaining and smart, I'd recommend this book for adults looking for a funny, somewhat dark but never truly dark story. Those with a weak stomach for a bit of violence, any swearing (there's a lot of it) or sex (though not sexy sex) will not enjoy this book, but those who have ever wanted to see real slimeballs get put through the wringer will. Those who like a bit of an environmental bent to their stories (not always easy to find) will like this book, possibly a lot. As for me, it's not really the sort of thing I would search out, not because it's not well-written or enjoyable, but because it's way far out of my usual reading zones. I'm glad I read it. I don't know that I'll be reading a lot more Hiaasen in the future, but I wouldn't rule it out. Based on this book, I know I'd enjoy something else he's written.

/spoilers begin!

This is a good reading experience. Hiaasen has done such a wonderful job with his characters, both good and bad, that there is quite a lot of delight in seeing things turn out the way the reader hopes they will. Everyone, barring no one, gets what they deserve by the end of the book. It's so incredibly satisfying. The journey to get there is entertaining and very twisted. It's as though Hiaasen took a cast of characters from his head and said to himself, "If I was to write a book set in the kind of world where karma works perfectly in a relatively short amount of time, what would happen to each of these characters?"

And if he is unkind to some of his characters -- Chaz in particular, of course -- the reader can't help but watch with a very satisfied smirk and yes, an incredible amount of schadenfreude. Not just because of what he did to Joey, which was despicable enough (though not despicable enough to merit everything he goes through, I suspect) but because of his entire outlook on life, because of everything he has done or not done that we know about, and because of everything that we don't explicitly know about but suspect. Frankly, the only character who I think got off easy for his crimes was the big bad himself, Red Hammernutt.

Conversely, when we meet and then get to know Tool, the extremely hairy and unpleasant bodyguard, Hiaasen has written him in such a way that the reader actually finds herself sympathizing with the guy and hoping things go better for them than the karmic setup suggests they might. And as we go along in his story, one hopes more and more that things will go all right for the guy, despite the fact that he's almost (but never entirely) repellant. There's a moment when that hope appears dashed -- although one realizes later that one was set up to know it couldn't end like that -- and when Tool gets his happy ending, the reader is relieved and very pleased.

This is the reader's fantasy that Hiaasen is manipulating. He knows that every person out there has entertained the fervent but hopeless desire that people would always get what they deserve. He gives us that in such a way that we don't feel like we're being pandered to, or that he's taking the easy way out. It's an explicit goal of the story. But this is also Hiaasen's fantasy: Hiaasen is a big fan of the Everglades, an advocate for environmental responsibility and sustainable practices. One gets the feeling that Joey's not the only one getting revenge on Chaz, and that Tool's not the only one dealing with Red Hammernutt. Anyone at all who has any feeling for the environment and has often despaired about how it's treated has wished that the people who don't seem to care at all would get a wake-up call, or at least disappear. This adds an extra dimension of catharsis for us. Hiaasen hasn't just wished it, he's written it. I can appreciate that.

All of that said, the very ending, the last paragraphs, did make me squirm just a little. I haven't decided yet whether or not Chaz deserved the open-ended that. It might have gone just a little, just a touch too far. Which I think may have been intentional. Chaz still isn't taking responsibility for anything, and he's still a jerk, but... well. By pushing it that extra little step, Hiaasen has added just a little bit of weight to the gloating reader. Because yes, you wished the worst for him, but did you wish him that?

Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat

Owls in the Family

by Farley Mowat

Yearling Books, 1996 (originally published in 1962)

91 pages

So, my parent-child book club loved this book, pretty unanimously. The adults had different views on it than the kids did, and I have to say that as someone who had read it both as a kid and as an adult, I had an interesting perspective on it.

I loved this book as a kid. I remembered it as being hilarious, and sometimes a little touching, and just flat out amazing. It started a lifelong love of owls (which, coming from a family of seriously dedicated birdwatchers, I'll admit I was primed for). I remembered it being a lot longer, and there were a lot of things I'd forgotten. Like how Billy (a thinly disguised stand in for Mowat) found the second owl, Weeps. Or the part with the crows. Or the ending, which caused some of the most interesting discussion tonight -- most of us agreed it was way too abrupt, and not nearly as elegant as the rest of the book.

As an adult, the humour doesn't seem as funny, and the discovery of Weeps as well as the crow chapter really stuck out more. And the ultra casual attitude towards wildlife life and death, either at the hands of nature or the hands of humans. And the keeping of ground squirrels and rats in conditions unlikely to make a humane society officer very happy today. In fact, the entire idea of going out into the wild to catch animals to keep as pets makes my inner former environmental educator froth at the mouth. Such a bad idea. But I digress into no-fun-adult-territory.

It is still funny, and as an adult, it's definitely worth reading, if only for an appreciation of how much things have changed, and in some ways, how much poorer we are for that. How many kids get to disappear onto the prairie for a day with a pal, wandering around and looking for wildlife? How many kids get to hang out in an old cave dug by a long-gone itinerant next to a river, and maybe stay the night by themselves? Next to none, certainly around here, though we never really had much in Ontario to speak of anyways -- nothing like they have out West. There is a sense of wonder about this book, a casual wisdom about the wild Billy has that seems very unusual, and very precious, to me now.

The prairie really lives in this book, and the abundance of wildlife is remarkable. The casual attitude taken towards it comes from its abundance; wildlife is everywhere, largely a nuisance or alternatively, an entertainment. While it's clear that Billy and his friends love animals, it's a childlike, utilitarian love -- the sort of love, though, that matures into something deep and meaningful and much more respectful, if encouraged carefully by the adults in a child's life. This book made me reflect on how the way we treat other living things, and each other, really changes as we grow up. The way we relate to the world around us changes, too.

And I think that's part of what makes this book so valuable, is that it is told in such a pitch-perfect way for both its times and its protagonist's age. There are no excuses made for what I can see as an adult might have been a... well, a way of relating to the natural world that I might have winced at, if not actively disapproved. The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is one of the reasons this book is so loved by children, and such a valuable story to have in the children's classics canon. Highly recommended for reading and discussing with the children in your life.

ps. from the former outdoor ed teacher: Owls? Make terrible, terrible pets. Please, for the love of all that is holy, don't ever get a child an owl for a pet.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
written and read by Bill Bryson
Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio, 1998
5 discs (abridged)

Soooo. This was not at all what I expected. This is another one of those "It's on the list! You must read it!" books, and knowing I was short on time, and knowing it was one of the few on the list that my library has in audiobook, I decided to go that route. Which was, I think, an excellent decision. I am kind of on an audiobook roll here, my friends. This makes two audiobooks that I have listened to the whole way through in less than a month.

Now, no, this wasn't what was advertised to me when I first came across this title. I've been lead to believe that Bryson is hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny, that this was a sort of slapstick comedy of errors. I also thought this was the unabridged version, and suffered the same sort of unpleasant shock as Nan when Bryson calmly announced the name of the abridger at the end of the final disc. Well damn, I thought, no wonder I was sorry it was over so soon. At 5 discs, this audiobook is very much on the light side for adult-length audiobooks. And I really was sorry it was finished, experiencing an almost physical pang when I slipped that last disc out of the player.

So no, it's not LOL hi-larious, though there are points where I admit to a surprised guffaw. I did smile an awful lot, for someone on an hour long commute desperate to get home. Bryson's sense of humour is not slapstick or obvious. It is dry, subtle, gratifyingly humble, and self-deprecating to the extreme. I think I only had trouble getting used to it because I was expecting something much different. Also, Bryson spends much of the time being quite earnest and serious, though never entirely humourless, about his topics: the trail itself, hiking in general, bears, the devastation wreaked in the name of the US Forest Service and the US Parks Service, the lack of pedestrians and pedestrian-friendly spaces in the US, and you get the idea. These musings on the State of the Union as Bryson saw it (the book was first published in 1999) and in particular on the Environmental State of the Union are interspersed generously between the narrative from the Bryson's move back to the US after decades in the UK through the end of his summer of dedicated AT hiking. And all of it, bar perhaps a few paragraphs where the statistics and facts get a bit mind-numbing, is absolutely fascinating.

One of my pet peeves in books about nature (as discussed before) can be an authors' tendency to slip in a horribly depressing fact ("this beautiful bird, a warbler of some sort AND WARBLERS ARE VANISHING FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH DUE TO HUMANS, YOU BASTARDS is eating spruce budworm and calling to its mate") right in the middle of describing some experience or another. The first time Bryson switched into fact-relating mode, out of the narrative, I thought, Oh jeez. Not again. I got over it, though, largely because Bryson actually delves into the facts, fleshes them out, and creates a chapter of it; I don't feel ambushed, just enlightened. As I've said before, I have no problem with relating these facts -- it's just I don't like the way its normally done. I think Bryson's got the right idea: be clear about your intention, give me enough information to make an informed judgement, and for heaven's sake don't interrupt a narrative to scold me for a sentence before going back your merry way.

His narration on this audiobook also took me a bit of getting used to; he has a very odd accent and his delivery seems at first almost unbearably flat. Stick it out, because there's something about his reading that is deeply approachable and very genuine, when it's not downright hypnotic. I can hear his voice in my head this minute. I suspect, though I can't know yet, that this audiobook has changed something about the way I experience hiking fundamentally. It's also made me think seriously about trying some backwoods hiking myself because I actually think I probably could do it. I've camped before, I've done canoe trips (without portages) before, I've done a bit of hiking though never more than day-trips. Bryson doesn't make backwoods hiking sound appealing, exactly, so much as magnetic. He gets to the heart of the difficulties, the long stretches of monotony, the real and imagined dangers, and the flashes of absolute brilliance that make backwoods trekking so captivating to a certain crowd.

I really, really loved this audiobook, and I'm very grateful that having it assigned for reading meant I actually listened to it. I'm keen to read the unabridged version at some point, but I think I'll probably find myself looking for more of Bryson's audiobooks, abridged or not, in the meantime.

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.

A Blessing of Toads by Sharon Lovejoy

I've been wanting to read and review this book since Nan posted about it months ago. I won it in her generous giveaway but it seemed to arrive at a particularly low point in my non-fic reading abilities, and I didn't want to ruin the book by reading it in the wrong mood.

I'm so glad I waited. This is a lovely book, and while it was a good book to read all at once, I think it would also be a good candidate for picking up and reading a little bit at a time. A Blessing of Toads is a collection of Sharon Lovejoy's articles from Country Living Gardener magazine, little bite-sized pieces (none longer than five pages) all smushed together into one book. To be honest, I've never read Country Living Gardener and I've never read anything by Lovejoy, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Whatever my expectations were, they were surpassed.

I learned a lot. I've been in outdoor education for the past eight years, and I grew up in a very nature-conscious family. I've been surrounded by naturalists my entire life, and so Lovejoy didn't have to convince me of the wonders of having nature in the garden -- to me, that's the point. But I learned a lot from her about nature, and also about things I could be doing to attract further critters to the backyard. Even more, she reminded me (I knew, but sometimes it's hard to remember) to just take the time to watch. I know there are amazing things happening in my garden every day, I just need to look for them. So I was envious of her stories -- of her family of crows, of her garter snake, of her phoebe nest -- but I realize I am just starting. I've got a long way to go, and I've also got some time to catch up.

Lovejoy also has the perfect gardening philosophy for me:

I like this laissez-faire gardening attitude. Newman's words of wisdom coupled with Julian Donahue's comment, "A lazy gardener is one of the best friends of wildlife," leads me to believe that I may have found my gardening niche.

She calls hornworms unicornworms. I'm going to start using this, and maybe I won't be so squicked out by them (because I can handle almost anything, but a hornworm is a big, twitchy, squishy thing with a horn, people -- a unicornworm is the trusty steed of the tomato flower sprite, and noble, not terrifying). She also coins the title term, "a blessing of toads" to replace the term "a knot of toads" for a group of the trusty little amphibians. I like the way she thinks.

A few of the other things I learned:

• syrphid flies (flowerflies) have voraceous larvae called "aphid tigers" that will eat a plant clean of aphids and other garden pests
• Nashville warblers can eat three tent caterpillars a minute -- now, not saying they do that every minute of every day, but that warbler is really moving

I also liked:

"Crepuscular" is a great word that rolls around in my mouth like a handful of jawbreakers.

She's humble, enthusiastic, and energetic -- her personality bubbles through the pages, sometimes factual, sometimes whimsical, always informative. I am giving this book to my co-worker Joanne to read, because I know she'll love it.

Thanks again, Nan. We have some of Lovejoy's other work at the library and I'll be checking it out. I love finding a new garden writer who both inspires and relaxes me.

Island of the Blessed by Harry Thurston

I feel like I should be doing something really exciting here, to mark the end of my engrossed reading of Island of the Blessed. Fireworks. Trumpets. Something.

However, what I will do instead is try to keep this review to something short and sweet.

First, and most important: for all of my griping about the length, this book is worth it. I have learned so much since I started reading, and the whole thing is fascinating. Every chapter, every page, every paragraph, is worth reading and absorbing and digesting. There is absolutely no doubt that this book is large because the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP) is a huge undertaking, and Thurston has obviously taken great pains to do both the DOP and the oasis itself justice. As someone who hadn't even heard of the Dakhleh Oasis prior to picking up the book, I think he's succeeded; perhaps someone who has been there might feel differently, but I think he's managed to capture the essence of the prehistory, history, culture, and environment of this remarkable place. He's also telling the incredible stories of the archaeologists who are part of the DOP, and, on top of the place and the people, he's saying something about archaeology itself, and about human nature.

This is only the second book by Thurston that I have read. The first was the autobiographical natural history book A Place Between the Tides. Island of the Blessed is very, very different but equally good. In this book, Thurston remains largely in the background, surfacing occasionally to go on a walk with one of the DOP's scientists to a particular place of interest. His own opinions and commentary are largely confined to the Introduction and the Epilogue, and this has the effect of letting the Oasis and the archaeology tell the story. It works incredibly well. This book is masterfully written and incredibly accessible, as well as being completely absorbing. Even when I was anxious to start reading the next book (or books, as the case may be) I was far too interested in Island of the Blessed to put it down.

Thurston's skill with language is so deft that, without the reader noticing, he's describing the archaeologists and their environs in such a way that they are vivid and real people and places. One of my small gripes is that I want to see more pictures -- I want to see what a town in the Oasis looks like, I want to see what a wadi looks like, I want to see what the buried city of Kellis looks like -- but really, I don't need those photographs. I have a clear picture in my head. I can hear the different scientists' voices as they speak, and see them as they work on their various projects, because Thurston makes them all come alive. He makes me believe, as the DOP believes, that the great expanse of the Western Desert was once a vast savannah habitat, complete with waterholes, giraffes, and hippos. He explains, in language anyone can understand, how changes in climate and glaciation eventually led to desert conditions -- and what that meant for both the wild animals and the nascent human civilizations that lived there.

The book takes us from prehistory to current conditions in the Dakhleh Oasis. One of the things that Thurston wants us to understand is how unique this project is: it is one of the very few long-term archaeological studies that looks not just at human activities, but also environmental conditions that surrounded those human activities, in an effort to understand how each has affected the other. He spends more time on the periods where there is more evidence to talk about -- certain times in prehistory, the Roman civilizations -- but he doesn't leave anything out. He celebrates the important discoveries made by the DOP, and talks about the future of the project; and at the end, inevitably because of the nature of the DOP and the author, Thurston talks a little bit about the future of life at the Oasis. The prognosis is somewhat depressing, as expected -- the current water supply, fossil water buried in the bedrock and stored there since prehistoric times, is likely to last fifty years or less if current practices continue. And if the water runs out, life will cease to be possible in the "Everlasting Oasis." And Thurston doesn't say much, but an intelligent reader in a society where water isn't a limiting factor will suddenly understand how it's possible that wars really will be fought over water supply.

In the interests of actually posting this tonight, and thus completing my self-mandated one review a week, I'm going to leave it at that. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Egypt, for sure, but also anyone interested in archaeology, science, political issues of water use, desert cultures, the beginnings of human civilization, palaeontology; also anyone who wants an introduction to any of those things. I came into this book without really any knowledge at all in any of the areas Thurston was writing about, and I had no trouble following except that I do wish someone had provided some sort of visual timeline so I could get a sense of the length of time we're talking about, and what cultures overlapped whom and when. Thurston is thorough enough that I could write one out myself, but I'm lazy and it wasn't that important to my enjoyment or understanding.