We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time
by José Andrés. HarperCollins 2018
4 stars - Dec 2020
I really didn’t know what to make of this. After the first twenty pages I feared it was a boastful vanity piece for this celebrity chef who prides himself on making things happen. And Chef Andrés has certainly been accused of being that guy. But once into this book, it turns out to be a thoughtful and passionate story about how to work in real disaster situations, with a lot of political commentary. He never mentions her, but it is very reminiscent of Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell in its championing of grass-roots, decentralized care structures that are emergent in times of crisis – and as an important antidote to the fear-based, top-down approaches that traditional power tends to favour. FEMA in New Orleans was skewered by Solnit, and FEMA in Puerto Rico is skewered in this book. Oddly likeable, this loudmouth chef.
Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies
by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. House of Anansi 2020
4 stars? - Dec 2020
Much (most) of this book went clear over my head, but parts of it moved me. The chapter with the migrating geese analogy just blew me away. And her weaving of poetry in prose is just gorgeous throughout. I can see reading this again with hopes of understanding more of it.
A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles. Penguin 2016
3 stars - Dec 2020
A book too long by half – or perhaps overwritten by half – with a pretty entertaining plot arc, but with such terribly cardboard characters. The main character is just so flawless, as are his immediate ‘family.’ The soviet bureaucrats are of course, like keystone cops, absurd and laughable. And the knowing/winking foreigners he encounters are so clearly the author’s personal projections into the story. Yay capitalists; haha you foolish socialists; we were right all along. Sigh.
Moominland Midwinter
by Tove Jansson. Square Fish 2010
4 stars (re-read) - Dec 2020
After getting through Moominvalley in November, this is the winter book I wanted to read. I read this out loud to Kelly, and it really is delightful. As I said in a review of one of Jansson’s other books, she is capable to packing more human insight and subtle expression into a few words than any other author.
Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in a Digital Age
by Laura Mandell. Wiley 2018
4 stars (re-read) - Dec 2020
An ambitious, impassioned manifesto, which puts the finger on a number of previously not-well-articulated aspects of print literacy and culture, as part of a manifesto for how the digital moment might allow us to address those for the better. It is a flawed book: in its energy and ambition, it blazes brightly and rips through so much ground it leaves wreckage along the way – in contrast to a slower, more studious approach. But that’s also this book’s charm. Laura Mandell is not only making a scholarly argument about what print does to us, she is also reflexively straining under those constraints. As a result, it doesn’t read like a ‘monograph’ at all… more like an extended, very well footnoted, blog post. It’s an essay, really… a digital age essay curiously in monograph form, because of course, it has to be. Worth re-reading again.
Moominvalley in November
by Tove Jansson. Puffin 1971
5 stars (re-read) - Nov 2020
I wanted to re-read this because it’s November. I actually wanted to read Midwinter, but not finding that on my shelf I turned to this, the last of the Moominvalley novels, the saddest, and perhaps the deepest. My rating goes up one star over last time, I think because I read it slower this time, savouring each individual line and paragraph. Jansson is supremely talented at packing whole worlds into individual sentences, and this book is, in its slim 196 pages, a vast, evocative meditation on loneliness and society, longing and finding, loss and appreciation, and the edifices of imagination that are actually the worlds we inhabit on a daily basis. It has so much to teach; and worth re-reading again and again.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and The Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Milkweed Editions 2013
5 stars - Nov 2020
Where to begin? Not only is this a stunningly rich and insightful – not to mention warm and heartfelt – perspective on our relationship to the world, it is also beautifully written and masterfully constructed: thirty-three individual stories (parables?) in 5 thematic categories, each story featuring a very small and focused cast of human and nonhuman characters, with the whole thing making one massive arc. The arc isn’t a narrative arc, but it is a journey through a deliberate set of perspectives. I have never read anything quite like this before; the closest thing I can think of are Thoreau’s meditative walks and his journals – this is, in some ways, like Faith in a Seed, except it is a far greater literary and cultural-critical achievement. It can serve as a reference book like that Thoreau text too, as its depiction of plants and places is so specific and so thorough. It builds complexity slowly, like the Thomas King book I reviewed last month, starting simple, and gradually unveiling a whole world. Amazingly, you don’t have to know or care about the lichens, nuts, grasses, and trees that populate this book in order to enjoy it, but having read it, you can’t help but do so anyway. A world-changing book, semingly effortlessly delivered.
Sightlines
by Kathleen Jamie. Sort of Books 2012
3.5 stars (re-read) - Nov 2020
I read this before, in 2015, and my review is much the same as it was then: hit and miss. I think I liked the parts I liked better this time, though: where she really digs in to history, both personal and natural. The chapters about the archaeological dig and her visits to St Kilda and North Rona are the best of this book.
Indians on Vacation
by Thomas King. HarperCollings 2020
4 stars - Oct 2020
Here is an author who really knows how to tell a story. This novel builds in complexity slowly and subtly, starting out extremely light and almost snide, but reaching a climax of serious issues, ethical dilemmas, and intricate complexity. Great characters, great situations, good arcs.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake. Random House 2020
4 stars - Oct 2020
I retreat from fiction into a good NF book about mushrooms and mycorhyzae. Super informative, inspirational in parts, and decently written. A lot of breadth here – maybe too much. It might have been better with more depth and less coverage, but it’s a damn nice book anyway.
Fortress Beseiged
by Qian Zhongshu. Penguin Classics 2006
2 stars - Oct 2020
This may have made more sense in the mid 20th-century (and perhaps in Chinese), but for me right now it was a long, painful, misanthropic trip. It’s not funny enough to redeem itself, but humour is the only thing that keeps this from being a completely masochistic read.
Gut Symmetries
by Jeannette Winterson
3 stars - Oct 2020
She’s a terrific stylist and her research gives these intertwined personal histories great depth – and a great mythic dimension. But what a silly plot. And what a silly ending. Good lord.
Hotel du Lac
by Anita Brookner. Vintage 1985
2 stars - Oct 2020
This won the Booker? Perhaps it’s just the passage of time and shift in cultural norms since the early 80s (80s? it feels more like the 30s), but the very premise of this book, and the characters themselves, seem ridiculous to me now. If it were a funny book, maybe they would have seemed charming, but it’s mostly a morose book, so WTF?
The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel
by Emily Winterburn. The History Press 2017
3 stars - Oct 2020
I ordered this because I liked Emily Winterburn’s guide to astronomy, The Stargazer’s Guide so much. This is her deep dive into history of science, in which she re-creates the most prolific ten years of Caroline Herschel’s life as an astronomer. It’s very rich in its portrayal of 18th-century science as well as 18th-century domestic life and manners among the aspirational middle class. But while we get a good sense of Herschel as a solitary thinker of considerable talent and determination, I can’t help feeling a little sorry for her, given her lonely social life. Winterburn has written this more like a popular history than a monograph, but I think the story is more significant to an academic audience than a popular one.
Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans
by John Marzluff and Tony Angell. Simon&Schuster 2012
3.5 stars - Sept 2020
This is an entirely enjoyable collection of anecdotes and research about corvid intelligence – language, insight, delinquency, frolic, rick taking, and social and environmental awareness – that paints a very compelling picture of crow and raven intelligence as being quite comparable to human intelligence. The brain structure is quite different, but the strategy of generalist skill and continual testing of the environment results in a kind of intelligence quite like ours. The book’s weakness is its continual reference to brain chemistry; while this keeps the claims and conjectures made in the book tied to empirical science, the often reductive descriptions of emotional or social behaviour in terms of brain chemistry is jarring. We wouldn’t think much of it in relation to human intelligence, so it’s too bad that, applied to a non-human intelligence, the authors feel it is so necessary.
Why Fish Don’t Exist
by Lulu Miller. Simon&Schuster 2020
5 stars - Sept 2020
I actually didn’t like this when I first started it; the tone seemed all wrong for what I took to be a literary biography of a scientific personality, David Starr Jordan, ichthyologist and founding president of Stanford University. But it turns out the book isn’t really about him at all (though it does provide a reasonable biography of the man). Sy Montgomery’s blurb on the cover reads, “Shocking” and I think that’s about the best descriptor here. This book peels back layers like an onion – an onion that is WAY bigger than you think it is at the beginning. 5 stars, changed the way I look at the world. An absolute tour de force of humanistic science journalism.
The Book of Salt
by Monique Truong. Houghton Mifflin 2003
4.5 stars - Sept 2020
A novel that really works, and that didn’t disappoint. And a first novel, at that. This tale, told in the first person, of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas’ Vietnamese cook, is absolutely scintillating in its depth of feeling, range of emotion, and dedication to ambiguity. So much layered – so subtly – into a mere 260 pages. Wow.
The Empathy Exams
by Leslie Jamison. Graywolf 2014
3.5 stars - Sept 2020
Unlike anything else I can think of… this collection of essays, journalistic and yet profoundly personal, explores the idea of empathy – in contexts like medicine, incarceration, poverty, war, and even endurance sports. Jamison is a hard narrator to like but her essays reveal much, about herself and about perception.
Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter. Vintage 1984
3.5 stars - Aug 2020
The first half of this is really, really fabulous, a feminist utopic fairy tale partly set in a brothel. The middle is carnivalesque and chaotic (though not in a bad way), and deals in some of the darker, mythic themes that Carter likes to trade in. But then one gets the impression Carter didn’t quite know how to land this one, and it gets quite weird at the end, and also even kind of trite. Novelists writing cheques they can’t cash, again – happens even to complete geniuses like Angela Carter.
Forest Green
by Kate Pullinger. Doubleday 2020
3.5 stars - Aug 2020
What puts a man homeless on the streets; Kate’s novel answers this question by elaborating one man’s biography, and the series of heartbreaks that eventually crush his ability to do anything else. A harrowing read.
Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson. Vintage 2006 (orig 2003)
4 stars (re-read) - Aug 2020
A gripping yet subtle exploration of the psychology of intense and terrible events, told in an aging man’s recollection of his coming to terms, at 15, of a set of traumatic events. The two time perspectives (present and past-tense, separated by 50 yrs) ground this story very effectively; we come to like all the characters, even though many of them are hugely flawed. The novel’s treatment of women is unfortunately very sketchy; men’s interior lives are explored in fascinating ways, but women’s experience of the same events is reduced to a few surfaces. If Petterson had managed the latter better this would easily have been a 5 star book for me.
Bilgewater
by Jane Gardam. Abacus 1997 [1976]
3.5 stars - Aug 2020
Quirky and pleasing tale of a young woman growing up in a British boy’s school, and her coming to terms with a wider world. Pretty lightweight stuff, but it has its subtleties, and is an enjoyable read.
Recollections of My Nonexistence
by Rebecca Solnit. Viking 2020
4.5 stars - July 2020
This was lovely. After reading many of Solnit’s books, I feel like I have a sense of her as a person as well after reading this. Very insightful and engaging.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
by Jenny Odell. Melville House 2019
5 stars - July 2020
This is shockingly good, stunningly rich. It’s as if all my best, half-thought and not quite fully imagined ideas from the last five years somehow got told back to me, except fully fleshed out, researched, and written beautifully. This is a book not actually about doing nothing (although to a guy on the brink of a sabbatical that’s a hell of a sales handle) but rather about rest, thought, attention, retreat, refusal, strangers, community, bioregionalism, history, Oakland, birds, iNaturalist, capitalism, commodification, art, social media, Bartleby, and manifest dismantling. Best, most timely book I’ve read in years.
On Nostalgia
by David Berry. Coach House Books 2019
2.5 stars - July 2020
Intriguing but ultimately quite boring.
How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks
by Dave Tompkins. Stop Smiling Books (Melville House), 2010
5 stars (re-read) - July 2020
I picked this incredible book up again and re-read it; I’m a little better conversant with the history of techno and early hip-hop than I was when I first read it, so more of it resonated and meant new things (e.g., Rik Davis of Cybotron filtering Kraftwerk through his own Vietnam PTSD with Lovercraftian overtones is far more interesting than any other version of this history I’ve heard.) This is an absolutely stupendous work of cultural history, and it is written in a kind of prose poetry that reminds me of no one so much as Lisa Robertson. He is actively playing with language and double-meanings the whole way through; there isn’t a straight sentence in the book, and it is so much richer for that.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by Agatha Christie. [1926]
3.5 stars - June 2020
An interesting twist on the usual narrative structure of a murder mystery. I have to admit I guessed the culprit before it was revealed, though.
Murder on the Orient Express
by Agatha Christie. [1934]
3.5 stars - June 2020
The most famous of Christie’s. I think it is too heavy on plot and mechanics, and not strong enough on characters.
Death on the Nile
by Agatha Christie. [1937]
4 stars - June 2020
My favourite Agatha Christie. Great atmosphere, lovable characters, terrific human interaction, great plotting.
Duchamp is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb
by Kenneth Goldsmith. Columbia University Press, 2020
3.5 stars - June 2020
Goldsmith assembles his manifestos, how-tos, and colour commentary on UbuWeb into a single, remarkably accessible volume. His chapter on copyright is particularly good. You can’t read this book without learning a TON, because the scope of both the project and the book is so vast.
Whose Story is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters
by Rebecca Solnit. Haymarket Books, 2019
4 stars - June 2020
A collection of Solnit essays, the angriest I’ve read. It’s about Trump’s America, and women and #metoo and abortion rights. Not the most memorable of her work, but very pointed and tough.
The Papers of Tony Veitch
by William McIlvanney. Pantheon, 2004
4 stars - May 2020
Rod Clarke’s recommendation on my complaining that I didn’t like Winspear. Hard-boiled-detective-driven mystery, in seedy Glasgow of the 70s. Great characters, great dialect, complex plot. Well-done mystery.
Birds of a Feather
by Jacqueline Winspear. Penguin 2004
2 stars - May 2020
Maisie Dobbs mystery. Pretty predictable. Cardboard characters. It’s mostly about window-dressing, which is well enough done, but it’s too bad the characters are just mannequins.
The Murder of Halland
by Pia Juul, trans by Martin Aitken. Coach House Books, 2015 [2009]
3.5 stars (re-read) - May 2020
A very weird and atmospheric Danish story about a woman’s life in the days after her husband turns up murdered. It’s not a mystery; rather, it’s an addled kind of running memoir of her transition (from something not really clear) to a more whole person.
Moominvalley in November
by Tove Jansson. Square Fish, 2010 [1971]
4 stars - May 2020
I wanted to close out my reading (and re-reading) of the Moomin books. This is the last installment, in which all the bit-part characters from the series come looking for the Moomins, to settle in for winter, but the family has left (presumably to go live At Sea). It is very sad and disorienting, but the atmosphere she creates here is the real thing.
South Away
by Meaghan Marie Hackinen. NeWest Press, 2019
4 stars - Apr 2020
A warm and open-hearted memoir of a crazy bike odyssey the author and her sister took, from Smithers to Baja, in which they learn a lot about the world, fear, courage, trust, and so on. Very real and candid.
The Beaudelaire Fractal
by Lisa Robertson. Coach House Books, 2020
4.5 stars - April 2020
Loved this, because it’s Lisa Robertson doing her trademark prose poetry, which I can’t get enough of. It’s not a conventional novel by any means; it reads more like a hyperdimensional memoir, about Paris, about the 80s, about clothes, about Baudelaire, and about the impossibility of women fitting in to a patriarchal world.
Talking to Strangers
by Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown, 2019
3 stars - Apr 2020
Interesting but not terribly memorable. It’s more about people’s messed-up-ness than about “strangers” per se. It ends up being a lot about police violence, but not as insightfully as Resmaa Menakem’s Grandmother’s Hands.
Scarlet and Black
by Stendhal, trans M Shaw, 1830
4 stars - Mar 2020
Sweeping tale of ambition and power in early 19th century France. Shame about the characters.
The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)
by Jonathan Stroud. Little, Brown, 2017
3.5 stars - Mar 2020
The last of the Lockwood & Co series (see The Screaming Staircase, read in 2013). I actually read all five over the years. These are terrific, character-driven YA adventure stories, with a very dark, grim setting: an England utterly crippled by ghost hauntings, where only teens have the ability to fight them. This 5-book story arc concerns a trio of ghostbusters as they learn their trade and each other. The first and last books in the series are the best, which makes it a satisfying series.
The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World
by Andrea Wulf. Vintage, 2016
3.5 stars - Mar 2020
After I read The Adventures of Alexander Humboldt, I wanted to read the full historical treatment. This is that. It is too long by half, but it’s everything you could want to know about Humboldt.
The Adventures of Alexander Humboldt
by Andrea Wulf & Lillian Melcher. Pantheon, 2019
4 stars - Mar 2020
This is a large-format hardcover illustrated biography. Not quite a graphic novel, rather a massive illustrated scrapbook, along the lines of Peter Sis’ Darwin and The Wall. Absolutely gorgeously crafted by Lillian Melcher, and written by the leading biographer of Humboldt.
Just Ride
by Grant Petersen. Workman, 2012
3 stars - Mar 2020
A funny and strongly opinionated book about cycling and everything that is wrong with it (to begin: racing) written by the guy from Rivendell Bicycle Works. Cantankerous and iconoclastic.
March (Books 1, 2, 3)
by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. Top Shelf, 2013–2016.
5 stars (re-read) - Feb 2020
Such an amazing story, with so much important detail. This should be required reading.
The Wildwood
by Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis. Balzer + Bray, 2011
4 stars (re-read) - Jan 2020
I liked this better the second time. It’s too long, and should have been edited down a bit. But it’s lovely imagery and world-building, and a cracking plot.
The Fairy Caravan
by Beatrix Potter. Penguin Books, Limited (UK), 1992 [1929]
4 stars (re-read) - Jan 2020
Got way more out of this reading it (silently, and slower) this second time. A unique book.
The Little Prince
by Antoine St Exupery. Wordsworth Classics 1995 [1944]
by Joann Sfar & Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. HMH Books, 2010 [2008]
4 stars (re-read) - Jan 2020
I re-read Joann Sfar’s graphic novel of it, and then read the original, and was surprised how faithful and complete the Sfar version is. Almost all the dialogue is there, and the entire plot except for a couple of the Prince’s stop-ins at random weird planets. Re-read this again, and again.