Hearing on The Writer’s Almanac that his birthday was this week reminded me of Ishiguro and his latest book which I read a few months ago. Ishiguro is always taking on new challenges. I’ve been a fan for a long time, enjoying the deeply felt precision of An Artist of the Floating World and A Pale View of Hills and the startling rightness of The Remains of the Day. I struggled with The Unconsoled because the narrative seemed to follow the logic of dreams where you might walk through a door to a cafe in Munich and find yourself in a mall in Tokyo or a boardroom in L.A. I finally gave up trying to puzzle out the dream logic and just let the scenes wash over me: certainly a different way for me to experience a novel.

With Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro returns to linear narrative (yes, I know there’s another book in the middle that I haven’t read yet—gotta save something for the drought days). I found the book easy to read; the challenge came when I tried to figure out what I thought about the subject matter, even what I felt about it. I had thought I was pretty clear before I started the book, but have ended up having to reconsider. I’m so afraid of giving anything away that I don’t want to give any details about this story, just urge everyone to read it and talk to your friends about it. Believe me, you will have a lot to talk about.

As a writer, I was curious about the way Ishiguro handled the withholding of information to create suspense. There are lots of techniques, such as the one I call “the Chinatown” after the film (“‘We used to work together. In Chinatown.'”). Stephen Greenblatt calls it “the creation of a strategic opacity” in his book Will in the World. Ian Rankin—one of my favorite authors—uses this one effectively. There will just be an off-hand reference to an incident or a person early on, and I’ll think ‘Okay, there will be an explanation in the next page or two’. There isn’t, so I read a couple more pages. Eventually, I forget what it was I wanted to know, only that there was something . . . The missing information sets up a dissonance, something I’m barely aware of, like a burr under my mind saying ‘Read on! Read on!’ Then at the end of the book, there’s a profound sense of relief when the half-forgotten question is finally answered and the dissonance resolved.

What Ishiguro does here is much more subtle. He uses normal, familiar words, words that I only gradually realised were somehow off. Thus began the dissonance, ever so slightly at first, but growing. My interest didn’t even end with the book’s resolution. Months later, I find myself thinking about it and finding new insights—sometimes surprising ones—into what I believe and the consequences of my beliefs. Just what I want from a book.

Before leaving the Transcendentalists, I wanted to reread this young adult book where I first heard about them. I discovered it one cold, rainy day at Whippoorwill Girl Scout camp where—having escaped from the prescribed activities—I was poking around some bookshelves in a dark corner of the hall. Behind some mildewed Readers Digest Condensed Books, I found this book, the corners of the cover frayed by mice, the pages brown-spotted with damp. I hid behind a chair and got through the first seven chapters before being discovered by one of the leaders and told to put it back.

It took me almost two years to find the book again and read the rest. I couldn’t remember the title or the author’s name, only the story, and after a while I began to believe that I had dreamed the whole thing. When I finally came across the book on the library’s shelves, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was as though a fantasy had suddenly become real.

Ned and Nora live in a Gothic monstrosity of a house in Concord, Massachusetts, with their aunt and uncle. Aunt Lily teaches piano lessons to support the family because Uncle Freddy—who used to be a famous scholar—has lost his mind and spends his days arguing with marble busts of Thoreau and Emerson. The children have a run-in with a couple of town worthies who consider the house and the family a blot on their sacred soil and threaten to take the house for unpaid taxes and burn it down.

The children discover a mysterious room at the top of the house with some dusty toys and two twin beds. Confronting Aunt Lily, they learn that Lily and Freddy’s youngest sister and brother had gone missing from that room as children, followed by Lily’s sweetheart, Prince Krishna. Ned and Nora decide to sleep in the room themselves. In their dreams, they are plunged into magical adventures, adventures which turn dangerous.

There are a few books I read as a child whose images have become so ingrained in my thoughts that they have become part of my private mythology. This is one of them. It wasn’t until I was grown and had read Emerson and Thoreau for myself that I recognised that each adventure embodies one of the Transcendentalist ideas and images, such as the rough wooden harp the children find while climbing in an elm tree, an aeolian harp, although it is not named in the book. The wind blowing across the harp strings translates the voices of nature into sounds they could understand: “‘These trees and stones are audible to me,'” as Uncle Freddy quotes Emerson.

The adventure that I think about most often, though, is the one where they go into a mirror and find two statues of themselves, two of Nora, two of Ned, a little older than their current age. Ned and Nora separate, each choosing one of their statues. Behind that one stand two more. Their choices eventually lead them to statues of themselves as adults, at which point they are able to see if they have chosen wisely. Unlike real life, though, they are able to go back and make different choices.

Thinking about the Transcendentalists led me to this book, though it’s mostly set in the South during the Civil War. The story follows Mr. March, the absent father in Little Women.

I dislike novels with real people for characters or even characters from other books, like the spate of modern novels with Sherlock Holmes as a main character. It seems like an invasion of privacy. Here, Mr. March is so peripheral a character to Alcott’s books that it didn’t bother me, although the cameos of John Brown, Thoreau and Emerson did.

Brooks conjures up detailed portraits of daily life. Whether set in an army camp, a plantation or a hospital in Washington, the scenes are richly imagined. I wished some of the secondary characters were portrayed with similar depth, but since we were seeing them through Mr. March’s innocent eyes, their similarity to stock characters of 19th century fiction made sense.

What interested me the most was the controversy around his being in the army in the first place. Making choices that I know will change my life has always been hard for me. Whether I invest a lot of thought into weighing pros and cons or just decide on a whim, my choices never turn out the way I think they will. I don’t want to allow such turning points to drift by without a real decision, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Stoppard’s play, but also realise that sometimes I myself am not even aware of the reasons for my choices.

I would like to believe that the choices by which we create our lives are guided by our most fundamental principles, but that doesn’t seem to happen very often. Mr. March trots out the right reasons for joining the army but freely acknowledges the extent to which he was simply carried away by the moment. I most hate making choices where others have to suffer the consequences. Knowing what kinds of hardships his family would face while he was gone, I was surprised that he didn’t even consider the effect on them of his decision to go off to war.

What is the best use of a life, in wartime or in peace? I have not picked up a gun, but I know the seductive desire to hand yourself over to be a tool for some greater purpose. How does one live a good life? And how do we interpret “good”, anyway? It’s easy to measure success by achievements; more difficult to measure it by the quality of the attempts. These are the questions that keep me reading.

Ben Bachman has written an account of his journey in stages up the Connecticut River from Saybrook, Connecticut, to Pittsburg, New Hampshire. It’s creative nonfiction—true stories written using the techniques of fiction—and Bachman managed to slip in information about history, geology, and modern-day politics of the places he passed without disrupting the flow of the story. Traveling mostly by canoe but occasionally on foot, Bachman observed the moods of the river and its inhabitants, human and otherwise.

He described the river as part of the hydrologic cycle: “not so much a discrete entity as it is part of a much larger global system, not so much a thing as a process.” Absorbed by his descriptions of wind-ruffled water, I learned that streams minimize energy loss by meandering and that there is a standard sequence for riffles: five to seven times the width of the channel.

The river encompasses unimaginable history. I was entranced with his discovery of fossilized Triassic ripples and even dinosaur tracks 100 million years old, and riveted by his descriptions of the industry and politics behind the locks and old stone mills.

Most of all, though, I loved the way he brought New England, especially Massachusetts, alive for me. This is the time of year I most miss being in Massachusetts: October, when the trees are turning and the air is clear. Bachman wrote of a winter afternoon, “The air had that superb, absolutely dust-free clarity that . . . makes it seem as though you are seeing true colors for the first time.”

It was reading Emerson and Thoreau that made me move to Massachusetts in the first place. I wanted to walk their paths and discover the richness of each moment of life that they described. “Every hour and season yields its tribute of delight,” Emerson wrote. Truly the New England woods were a joy to me, far away from the smothering vines and tangled underbrush of the woods back home in the south. In Massachusetts I found not only a sense of the past but also the place where we as Americans became ourselves. De Tocqueville had to coin the word ‘individualism' to describe Americans. (Yes, I’m well aware that America is more than the U.S., stretching as it does from Nunavik to Tierra Del Fuego. We need a new word.)

Emerson wrote of the need for public duty to balance that individualism, weighing solitude and society. Thoreau wrote about our life in nature, away from the prison of a house. Bachman’s book speaks to both. The railroad yards of East Deerfield and Holyoke’s wooden three-deckers find their place in these pages alongside the cliffs and clouds, alewives and shad, eagles and mergansers. And always the river, whether tumbling down falls or spreading into pools. Dammed, diverted, exploited or ignored, the Connecticut River cuts through my beloved New England. Bachman’s book carried me up that river, revealing unsuspected delights and diversions.