nonfiction

Ghostland, by Edward Parnell

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Subtitled In Search of a Haunted Country, this unusual book combines travelogue, literary review, and memoir. England is that country, home to nearly all of the ghost stories I grew up on and to the legends that fired my imagination as a child. Parnell sets out to revisit the ghost stories that have been meaningful to him throughout his life, and actually go to the places where they are set or were written.

I felt as though I were making this journey with him. As he takes us to these places, he shares not only their sometimes beautiful, sometimes eerie atmosphere, but also his own memories of visiting them as a child with his family or later on birding expeditions with his brother Chris. He introduces us to the writer associated with the place and one or two of their stories. This is no dry, academic tome, but rather a genial, engaging story, as though we were in a pub somewhere listening to a fascinating storyteller.

Hard as it was to put down, I spent most of December reading this book because I kept stopping to find and read stories and books that Parnell discusses. Many of the authors, stories and places are old friends of mine. Some were new to me, all or in part. For example, I didn’t know that Rudyard Kipling had written ghost stories. I loved being introduced to The Children of Green Knowe, and returning to old haunts in the fen country and Arthurian-haunted Cornwall and Dorset.

Most of all, I enjoyed revisiting W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, a formative book for me, and similar in some ways to this book, being also a combination travelogue, memoir and collection of curious information. Parnell refers to a particular scene which

. . . cuts to the heart of Sebald’s work and his exploration of how we, both individually and collectively, come to forget (or at least suppress) the losses we have suffered, the memories of people and events that once came to us to us with such clarity, and the atrocities to which we are in some part complicit.

With this book, though, we are doing just the opposite: exploring the memories that haunt us. I was most moved by a story new to me: “Pirates,” by E. F. Benson, in which a fifty-six-year-old, successful business man comes across his childhood home, now abandoned and beginning to decay. The man becomes obsessed with buying and restoring it, recreating the happy home of his youth, returning even the furniture and other items now in his London home. The story gave me a jolt of recognition for I often dream that I’ve discovered my own beloved childhood home, miraculously not destroyed after all, and that I can buy it and, indeed, return these items from my current home to their rightful places. Then I wake up.

There is something about this time of year that makes me turn to ghost stories. Of course, traditionally the solstice and Christmas Eve are moments when the veil between the living and the dead thins, and perhaps disappears. And there’s something about ghost stories and England. Parnell mentions the Happisburgh footprints discovered in 2013 in Norfolk, England. Dating to the end of the Early Pleistocene, they are the oldest known hominid footprints discovered outside of Africa.

Although only in his late thirties, Parnell has suffered great losses: the deaths of both parents and Chris, his only sibling, leaving him—as one of my friends said of herself—the Last of the Mohicans. He talks about the period during and after the Great War, with its huge loss of life, when those desperate to see again their lost loved ones embraced Spiritualism. One of the themes that lends power to this story is the question of how best to heal from grief. Can we really sense something of them lingering around us? Do we hold onto our dead or let them go?

And of course there are the attendant themes around memory: what we hold onto and what we suppress, why these particular memories stay with us, even though at the time the incidents may have seemed inconsequential. As the year dies, I think about death and welcome my ghosts. I believe this is a book I will return to every December.

Who or what haunts you?

Best Books I Read in 2024

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are ten of the best books I read in 2024. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Note: I did not include poetry here, though I read the work of some amazing poets, such as Richard Wilbur, Sam Schmidt, Linda Pastan, Ellen Bryant Voight, and Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re interested in reading a wider range of poets, consider joining in on the monthly Poetry Discussion Group I host. Free, no experience necessary, and copies of the poems are provided. Details on my website.

Fiction

  1. Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become. Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. A powerful story that puts our current social and political tensions into a (so far) fictional authoritarian world.

  1. The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd

Nell Young loves maps and once dreamed of working with her brilliant father in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Her even more brilliant cartographer mother died when Nell was a toddler. When Nell gets an emergency call from the New York Public Library, she embarks on a quest to identify the monster behind a string of thefts and murder. The delightfully complicated plot uses maps in surprising and satisfying ways.

  1. The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

This fascinating novel is based on the true story of twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo who in 1865 leads a group of her fellow former slaves to build a community in the Carolinas. The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

  1. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her remaining child, Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. In this complex story, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. It is a cracking good read, and accurate in its depiction of the time and place, at least according to my memories.

  1. The Old Capital, by Yasunari Kawabata

Chieko lives with her parents in the same building that houses their shop in Kyoto. This gentle story of a few months in her life begins with three images that embody themes central to Japanese literary tradition while later, more modern themes emerge. The microcosm of Chieko and her family holds a much larger story about how we handle the past—what we keep and what we discard—not only traditions but also our memories and our own identities.  This beautifully written story is one that will haunt me.

Nonfiction

  1. Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities. As MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders of the natural world, she encourages us to see nature as something other than a reflection of ourselves. I read and reread these essays, loving the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world.”

  1. Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty. For a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

  1. Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

This astonishing book should be required reading everywhere in the Western world. This history of women in England for the last 900 years is fascinating and infuriating. Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. In this book, every assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically. As the book progresses through the centuries, we get stories of many extraordinary women and their struggles.

  1. The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, created in 1960 to provide a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. The book provides fascinating insight into the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

  1. Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

 

What are the best books you read in 2024?

Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

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Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

Marcel Proust, half-Jewish, from a bourgeois background, first became infatuated with Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus through his friendship with her son. As the widow of composer Georges Bizet, Geneviève drew artists and musicians to her salon where she dressed in gauzy peignoirs in half-mourning colors.

Later he became obsessed with Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, who made much of her descent from Petrarch’s Laura and from the Marquis de Sade—think of that combination! She chose to make her name by being the wildest of the wild and cosying up to whoever held political power.

Finally, Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Vicomtesse Greffulhe embodied his “dream of patrician elegance and grace.” Dominated and all but imprisoned by her husband, she made herself famous for the beautiful clothes she designed or had designed for her. Trivial, yes, but her way of pushing back against a society where, as she wrote, “ ‘women are meant to be trophies, pretty possessions . . . Smiling, placid, charming.’ ”

The book is less about Proust than it is about Geneviève, Laure, and Élisabeth, providing a vivid portrait of the restricted lives of even these most privileged women. However, his journey—he himself pursuing a place in society—is our journey; he is our guide into this world.

He is not without his own conflicts. Especially towards the end, we learn a bit more about how he claimed to be studying the “monde” or “gratin,” the highest circles of society, in order to gain material for his writing. True enough, but he seems also to have simply been as fascinated by it as any of us obsessively watching Downton Abbey these days. Weber says:

Proust concedes that a man of letters might just as fruitfully write about the impoverished as about the privileged. He goes on to explain, however, that when authors pursue ‘opulence,’ what really motivates them is a longing for the unattainable . . . The gratin intrigues them as artists because it is not readily accessible to them (whereas poverty presumably is).

Yet his pursuit of each woman ends in disillusion. “He would spend the next three decades writing and rewriting variations on this theme: the unreachable muse whose charm evaporates upon contact.” He is shocked to find that high social status is no guarantee of virtue. “[T]he juxtaposition of surface elegance and hidden corruption would become a defining feature of his portrayal of the monde.”

The end of the 19th century saw France’s Third Republic becoming more stable, as the hopes for restoring the monarchy dissipated, leaving the aristocracy with no political power. As some would say of today’s Western societies, they took refuge in entertaining themselves to death.

I seem to have read a number of Gilded Age books recently, perhaps looking for ways to understand and push back against our own age of extreme inequality, when the richest 1% own more of the world’s wealth than the bottom 95% put together. If nothing else, my readings of the robber barons of late 19th century U.S. tell me that they stored up trouble for their next generations. Look at all the mansions and luxury “cottages” of that time which had to be abandoned by the following generation.

Instituting an income tax system in 1913 after the ratification of the 16th amendment had something to do with that, of course, but I also remember my own time at an exclusive prep school. So many of those entitled young people simply coasted through, drinking and drugging too much, confident that Daddy’s money guaranteed them a free ride through life, without any effort on their part. Not all, of course. There were those who worked hard and deployed their intelligence to good effect. Still, we see it today in the Nepo-in-chief, who failed at every business he undertook, bailed out by bluster, fraud, and—yes—Daddy’s money.

There are a lot of names to keep track  of in Weber’s book, some famous today—Bizet, de Maupassant—some forgotten. I debated whether the book could have been streamlined a bit, but in truth I am just as guilty as Proust: I enjoyed all the details of salons and balls and intrigues. They do give me a better understanding of the context for his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, but that is not what kept me glued to the pages of this book. No, I reveled in experiencing a world far off in time and place, yet having much to say about the one I inhabit today.

What biography have you read that introduced you to a different world?

The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

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Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of a “messy experiment” at Radcliffe College. President Mary Ingraham Bunting became concerned with what happened to the graduates of this all-women college. Since at that time women were expected to marry and spend their time caring for their husbands and family, these educated women were expected to give up their academic or creative pursuits, or reduce them to hobbies, in order to become what Virginia Woolf called “the angel in the house.”

Remembering her own career as a microbiologist–and now college president–while raising a family, Bunting created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1960. Fellowships provided a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. For a two-year period, the Institute would provide a fellow the prerequisites for creative work, as described by Woolf in her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own.”

Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. They called themselves The Equivalents per the Institute’s requirement “that applicants have either a doctorate or ‘the equivalent’ in creative achievement.” Her extensive research underlies this engaging story of five very different women and their creative journeys. And the book is so much more: a cultural history of the time, an in-depth look at creativity—what enhances it and what destroys it—and an examination of privilege.

I confess that it is the latter that most interests me because, after all, even in the 1950s and 1960s, while White women in droves were immersing themselves in being housewives, Black and working class women were already working while trying to raise a family. I appreciate that in covering the nascent second wave of feminism, Doherty includes the Black women’s movement. While acknowledging it isn’t “her” experience, she does examine the very real problems Black women had with what became the  mostly middle- and upper-class White women’s movement.

Tillie Olsen’s story provides a needed corrective to Sexton’s upper-class privilege and that of the others’ somewhat lesser privilege. Olsen was “a first-generation, working-class American, an itinerant, and an agitator” who said outright that “the true struggle was the class struggle.” After early publication and literary acclaim, she had been side-tracked by the overwhelming labor of house, family, and dead-end job. Eventually the author of the best-seller Silences, she was alert to all the things that keep us from creating.

The way Doherty sensitively examines these women’s different struggles and achievements lifts this narrative above the ghoulish interest in Sexton’s suicide attempts and the tendency to concentrate on those artists who have been anointed as important—almost exclusively White males at the time, or the handful of women championed by them—to look at a broad range of circumstances and personalities.

She acknowledges the privilege but goes deeper. As Olsen said, “There’s nothing wrong with privilege except that not everybody has it.” This is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Fellowships, grants, prizes are wonderful but not everyone has the resources—time and money—to pursue and take advantage of them. As a single parent working two and sometimes three jobs to support my family, my own writing career had to be mostly put on hold for years.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

Do you have a room of your own?

The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown

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Most people are familiar with this story of the rowing team from the University of Washington that won the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. A good example of narrative nonfiction, it is a well-researched, factual account that is eminently readable.

All the basic elements of good prose are here: the clarity of well-constructed sentences, good pacing through varying sentence structure, consistency achieved by presenting information in a logical sequence that the reader can easily follow. Beyond these, I want to point out a few methods that Brown employed to make it so absorbing a read.

One is that he centers the book on one character: Joe Rantz, a student from a working class background, left to fend for himself at a young age after his remaining parent abandoned him in the small town of Sequim, Washington. Recruited by rowing coach Alvin Ulbrickson, he attended the University of Washington; however, for him to aspire to a coveted spot on the rowing team meant competing against the privileged young men from expensive prep schools who embodied the elite image of rowing.

With a main character to root for as he confronts the physical challenges of competitive rowing and the psychological challenges of the U.S. class system, Brown begins to introduce other people of interest. One at a time—giving us a chance to get to know them before moving on—he gives us Ulbrickson, the head coach; Robert Mox, coxswain; Donald Hume, stroke; and freshman coach Tom Bolles.

Another way Brown makes the story so compelling is through making the Olympic race the climactic moment near the end of the book. Even though most readers know the outcome before starting the book, the suspense of waiting to see how it happens is immense. The suspense is fed by all the minor trials and setbacks, all the races against Washington’s main rival, California, and the Ivy League founders of the Rowing League, Columbia, Cornell, and Pennsylvania. Adding to the tension is the fact that the story takes place during the depths of the Great Depression.

These details are proof of the extensive research the author completed. The details that Brown chooses to include—the tip of the iceberg—serve the story by giving the reader a fuller picture of the time and the character’s motivations. In particular, the details about the construction of the shells are presented in context and in such a way as to fascinate any reader.

Three themes of the book adds to its hold the reader. One is the portrait of poverty at the time (though it’s certainly as bad as today in some areas). Joe’s struggle to get by as an abandoned teenager, as well as his and some of his teammates’ difficulty in coming up with the necessary funds, give the reader a better appreciation of the effects of the Depression.

A second theme is the difference between today and life in 1930s. Beyond economics, there is the relative isolation, with only radio and newspapers as media. The physical isolation comes through in the description of the trip to the East Coast to compete in the League championship. It is Joe’s first train trip and his first view of other parts of the country.

The final theme I want to point out is the context of the 1936 Olympics itself: Hitler’s Germany. The Berlin Olympics served Hitler’s goal of presenting Nazi Germany as a superior nation. Beyond hiding evidence of the Nazi’s abuses, the image of Berlin was meticulously orchestrated by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl as propaganda to prove to the world Aryan “purity” and Nazi supremacy. However familiar we may already be with this context, the details and the engaging way they are presented give us a deeper understanding of this early foray in marketing an image and a precursor of the horror to come. They also add further pressure to the U.S. team in the climactic race, as they strive to overcome the handicaps imposed by the Nazi organisers and beat their German rivals.

Narrative nonfiction occupies a particularly fertile middle ground between fiction and nonfiction. And it’s even more challenging for an author who must undertake the necessary research and abide by the limitations of accuracy imposed by nonfiction, while also employing the tools of a fiction writer. Brown ably demonstrates proficiency in all of these areas. This book deserves its accolades.

If you’ve read this popular book, what was your main takeaway?

The book review that helped me understand the haters

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The lead article in the 4 January 2024 issue of the London Review of Books (Vol. 46 No. 1) began to sound eerily familiar. In “Say Anything, Do Anything,” James Meek reviews Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television, by Peter Biskind.

The premise of Pandora’s Box is that a series of daring, innovative shows on US cable channels, starting in the 1990s, blew away the anodyne output of the traditional TV broadcast networks.

Released from the censorship that delivered shows that were “lowest common denominator programming, comforting, predictable and morally neat,” cable channels began producing shows such as The Sopranos, Oz, The Wire, Dexter, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. These shows were not only explicit in language and violence but featured “[a]nti-heroes like Tony Soprano, the man who garottes a fink while taking his teenage daughter on a tour of prospective colleges.”

While the movement from traditional TV shows to cable was supported by new bandwidth availability and an exponentially higher number of shows to choose from, Meek also identifies the use of algorithms to determine what viewing audiences want.

Netflix was a data-mining operation long before it got into streaming and [Reed] Hastings believed his algorithm could be used to predict the films and TV shows subscribers would like, whether they’d been made or not; if not, he’d make them.

And what did audiences want? Sports, of course, but also more nudity and lots and lots of violence. Thus, dramas like Game of Thrones became big hits.

I’m not a prude, but I am grateful that I can fast-forward through the endless nude scenes in certain dramas. Trained as a writer, I can’t help mentally wielding my red pen against gratuitous scenes that don’t move the story forward. As a woman, I can’t help suspecting these scenes are due in part to the misogynistic writers’ rooms described in Biskind’s book.

Look, I’m not here to rail against television. I have enjoyed and appreciated the craft of shows like Breaking Bad, Deadwood, and The Wire. In fact, the scene Meek calls out—”the almost loving meeting between the Baltimore drug dealers and childhood friends Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in The Wire, where each knows the other is setting him up to be killed”—is in my opinion the single best scene in any TV drama ever.

But I don’t idolise Stringer Bell or Al Swearengen in Deadwood or Walter White in Breaking Bad. They do evil things. I appreciate that they are presented as complex characters, instead of purely evil monsters. They have their own moral codes, a line they won’t cross. Meek mentions the save-the-cat device (per Blake Snyder) of making audiences like them by having them rescue a woman or child.

What gave me chills, though, were the parts of the book about the “significant fraction” of a show’s fans that cheered the violence, demanding more, and glorifying the characters because of their evil deeds. Meek mentions the “little old ladies” who fawned over Joe Pantoliano, Ralphie in The Sopranos. Pantoliano said, “‘They were flirting with me, turned on that I was the guy who beat up this hooker. It was sick.’”

Perhaps a little disingenuously, [David] Chase said later that ‘he was troubled by how much the “less yakking, more whacking” contingent of his fan base loved his mobbed-up characters, no matter how badly they behaved. The show is “about evil”, he said. “I was surprised by how hard it was to get people to see that.”’

Evil that becomes commonplace. Evil that becomes entertainment. Evil that becomes something to cheer on. Until some people don’t even see it as evil. They applaud when a would-be dictator, already a convicted criminal, threatens to use the power of the government against his political opponents. and respond “Kill them!”

Of course, I’ve long thought about the moral damage to viewers from the bullying and cruelty of reality shows that depend on elimination, whether by firing, being voted off the island, or whatever. This part of Meek’s review hit home for me because many of these shows I’ve watched and liked. I especially appreciated the nuanced way a good man like Walter White gradually, and for reasons that seem good to him, embraces evil.

I remember the flap over films like Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that glorified criminals. It seemed silly to think that watching them would make me or anyone else go out and rob a bank. I’m older now, and appreciate the more subtle ways that such things work upon our psyches. Also, that exposure a two-hours film is quite different from binge-watching five or six seasons of a TV show.

Still, I’m not advocating censorship. I’m just saying that the bloodthirsty viewers, the ones who adore their violent anti-heroes, remind me of the crowds these days baying for the blood of journalists, political opponents, immigrants—anyone they’re told to hate. I’ve been surprised by how hard it’s been to get them to see the evil in these demands. I guess I shouldn’t be. After all, they’ve been practicing this behavior night after nights in their own homes.

What TV dramas do you watch? Why?

Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

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If you’re going to read the history of women in England for the last 900 years, then you can’t be surprised that it is a huge book. Long? Yes. Also, fascinating and infuriating.

Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. Sound like a generalisation? Read this book, where each assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically.

Gregory’s extensive research yields statistic after statistic, example—by name—after example of women doing the work of society while having no power. She divides the book by eras and, within each presents a cogent description of areas such as the status of women’s health, marriage rights, widows, work (paid and unpaid), female soldiers, sexuality, slavery, rape, and prostitution.

Bottom line? Every time things start to look better for women, every time they are given a modicum of power, the immediate reaction by terrified men shoves them backwards. Think it’s all in the past? Look at how the percentage of rapes of women that are investigated by British police—already appalling low—have declined in recent years. If I remember correctly, the most recent figure in the book is from about ten years ago and is shockingly only two percent. Two percent!

Century after century, women are excluded from profitable work, from unions and guilds, from being able even to train for better work. All this while they are the ones feeding the family, more often than not. Elite women cheerfully throw their lower class fellow females under the wheels of their chariots.

A lot of this I already knew, but the tsunami of detail, of individual stories, really brought the horror of this persistent imbalance of power home to me. One area I hadn’t realised is that women were the true force behind the great resistance movements in England, the ones that pushed back against enclosure of common lands, automation, and other power grabs by the wealthy that left everyone else to starve. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was sparked by two women from Kent, Joan Hampcok and Agnes Jekyn protesting a poll tax, not Wat Tyler, as the history books would have it.

If you think that 500+ pages of this would be boring, think again. There are surprises everywhere. Did you know that boxing was primarily a women’s sport in the early 18th century? Gregory writes with a cool attention to story, grabbing the reader’s attention and not releasing it. You cannot even turn away from her ten pages listing names of women murdered in Britain in 2019, nearly all dying from domestic violence. She tells us of the broken ribs and deformed bodies of women laced into too-tight corsets, of women colliers dragging coal out of mines like pit ponies.

She reminds us of how men of every period attempted to define women—quoting their very words—in ways that demeaned them and reinforced male dominion. All these unscientific theories of women’s nature spoke of her weakness of body, mind, and morals.

We are introduced to so many extraordinary women in these pages, but the author reminds us to look around us. “The history of women is a struggle over identity and inclusion: we are all ‘normal’ women even when we have been described as exceptional or deviant or inadequate, even when our vanity prompts us to stand apart, or our ambition to compete with each other.”

Yes, it’s a long book. You may want to pace yourself, though I confess that I tore through it. This is the book that I’m recommending to everyone this year.

Have you read any part of this remarkable book? What did you think about it?

Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

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Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty.

In today’s world, where so many people value opinions and beliefs over fact, it is a huge relief to communicate with someone who actually believes in science. Both of her parents were scientists–an entomologist and a nutritionist–and she spent much of her youth in the woods of Northern Ontario. She talks about the family pulling over when an infestation was spotted so that they could collect the invading critters. “Other families stopped for ice-cream cones. Ours stopped for infestations.”

That early influence shows in her concern with the threats to our environment, both in her fiction and her nonfiction, including a number of pieces in this collection. She writes of how this concern fueled her Oryx & Crake trilogy and her MaddAddam trilogy, as well as a moving tribute to Rachel Carson, calling her “a pivotal figure of the twentieth century” and “Saint Rachel.”

Another theme that threads through this collection is the way autocracies try to silence writers and control women. She has been a force in founding Pen Canada and acted as its president in the 1980s. In “If We Don’t Defend Free Speech, We Live in Tyranny” she writes about the attack on Salman Rushdie and the murder of translator Hotoshi Igarashi. In another piece she states that “There is nothing that repressive governments desire more than imposed silence . . . secrecy is an important tool not only of power but of atrocity.”

She generously continues to write about The Handmaid’s Tale, noting that “absolutist governments have always taken an inordinate interest in the reproductive capabilities of women.” She adds that writing a dystopia from a woman’s point of view “does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things.”

These pieces are not all darkness with a glimmer of wit. In “Literature and the Environment” she writes that “as long as we have hope—and we still do have hope—we will be telling stories, and—if we have the time and the materials—we’ll be setting them down; because the telling of stories, and the wish to listen to them, transmit them, and derive meaning from them, is built into us as human beings.”

Indeed, the pieces I most appreciated were about how essential the arts are to our well-being and about writing in particular. Parsing out her approach to these short pieces taught me so much about her methodology. Often she starts with a clear statement of purpose: “I’ll divide my talk into three parts, and I’ll even tell you what they are, just so you know what’s coming.” That’s from a speech honoring the Department of Forestry’s centennial. I’m touched by how, despite her blockbuster status, she’s willing to turn up and speak at so many events.

After the statement of purpose, she wanders here and there in the best tradition of essay-writing. She includes asides, rhetorical questions, digressions, allusions. She explores the question without answering it, instead opening our minds—gently and respectfully. I also especially appreciated the pieces about other authors and about her late husband, author Graeme Gibson: both joyful moments and mor trying times as he drifted deeper into dementia.

While some readers may be unnerved by this collection’s length, diversity, and chronological structure (rather than thematic), I found it a joy to read. Most of the pieces are quite short, making it a perfect bedtime book: you can read a few pieces and chuckle at her quips before you turn out the light.

I’m grateful to Atwood for collecting these pieces—no small task—and putting them out for us to absorb. In fact, for a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

What have you read by Margaret Atwood? Her novels, poems, and/or essays?

Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

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The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammer, where objects of many sorts from the natural world are displayed so that their strangeness and accidental proximity might inspire wonder and perhaps prompt a larger discussion.

Like the best sort of host, MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders and then lets us make of them what we will. There’s no lecturing. Although she is a presence in the book, it is not about her. Instead, her evocative prose bears witness to these marvels, inviting us to experience them ourselves.

The essays range around the world and into varied environments: from fields and forests to volcanos and the Empire State Building. As MacDonald tells us about wild boars, boxing hares, and several sorts of birds, she encourages us to see the natural world as something other than a reflection of ourselves.  “What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has.” We are introduced to animals and birds as sentient beings in their own right, with their own needs and wants.

Another theme that runs through these essays is the effect of the loss of habitat on these creatures: those we have lost, such as the wood warblers, and the adaptions some have made, such as the peregrine falcons nesting on the decommissioned power chimneys of the Poolbeg Power Station in Ireland.

For much of the 20th century, falcons were celebrated as romantic icons of threatened wilderness. The mountains and waterfall gorges where they chose to nest were sublime sites, where visitors could contemplate nature and meditate on the brevity of human existence. But there’s a romanticism to industrial sites too. The rusting chimneys and broken windows of the Poolbeg site have their own troubling beauty, that of things that have outlasted their use. Falcons haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality, mountains by virtue of their eternity, industrial ruins by virtue of their reminding us that this too will in time be gone and that we should protect what is here and now.

Although she deplores the idea that the natural world should be preserved because we humans find it useful in lifting our moods or teaching us about ourselves, insisting instead that it has its own right to exist independently of us, she is not averse to showing how we benefit. She says, “At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need be spoken. And if you were watching urban falcons, this is not a distant world but one alongside you, a place of transient and graceful refuge.”

Among my favorite parts is the titular essay, which is about chimney swifts and their still mysterious ascent. Twice a day, at dusk and dawn, they fly up out of human sight, where “flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next. They’re quietly, perfectly orienting themselves.” Another thing I learned is that “Unlike other birds, they never descend to the ground.” Now, when I walk in the evening and see the swifts whirling above, her words speak to me: “Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding.”

Another, related theme in these essays is loss: the lost paradises of youth, the chestnut and elm trees that once graced our streets, the extinction or near-extinction of many species. This spring I was thrilled to hear a cuckoo while walking in England, where their population has dramatically declined. She says:

Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief.

And:

Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather, passed from existence into a memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can’t say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was.

Yet there is hope here as well, and treasures to embrace. Even her “Eulogy” for her friend Stu is filled with peace and hope along with the sadness, its ending giving me goosebumps just remembering it.

I keep thinking I’ve finished this book, yet find myself coming back again and again to this essay or that one. I love the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world” and opens for me some of its wonders.

What essay or book have you read that reminded you of the wonders of the natural world?

The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel

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Subtitled The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, this nonfiction book introduces us to Chris Knight, a man who spent 27 years living alone in a tent in the Maine woods. Not alone the way Thoreau was at Walden Pond, where he entertained guests and took his laundry home to his mother, but truly alone. In all that time, the only word Knight uttered to another person was a gruff Hi to a hiker he ran into.

Obsessed with avoiding discovery, or even another chance encounter, he never built a fire or walked in the woods when there was snow on the ground. When the ground was dry, he knew the woods so well that he could move through them without making a sound or leaving a sign.

In researching this book, Finkel sets out to answer the questions we can’t help but ask: Why would he choose such a life? How did he survive the winters in just a tent? What about food, medicine, etc.? No matter how much you cut back on that etcetera, you surely need a sharp knife, a candle or lantern, clothes to replace those that wear out.

We learn, often in his own words, how Chris broke into nearby cabins to steal food, clothing, reading material, and other things—only dire necessities and only cabins that didn’t have year-round occupants. People in the area told stories about the North Pond hermit, and it was during a theft that he was finally arrested.

Wondering why anyone would choose such a hard path, Finkel delves into the lives of solitaries, from the Desert Fathers and anchorites to solitary confinement in prisons. He reviews current thinking about the autism spectrum and goes further to consult scientists about a physical component.

One’s desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin, sometimes called the master chemical of sociability, and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.

Nurture always goes hand in hand with nature, and we learn that Chris’s family was compulsively private, living off the grid and having only minimal contact with neighbors. When 20-year-old Chris disappeared, driving away from his first and only job (one that he’d only barely begun), they didn’t report him missing or try to find him.

Finkel interviews Chris in jail and exchanges letters with him, thus giving us first-person accounts of Chris’s life in the woods. I can only imagine, having worked in one, how awful jail must have been for this man who had lived in silence (aside from natural sounds) for 27 years.

It’s a fascinating story, and one ripe for discussion. Was Chris lucky to be arrested before he aged to the point where he could no longer manage his survival? He was already slowing down. While he never took much, Chris’s thefts scared people and invaded their privacy; only once he was arrested did they return to not locking their doors. And what about Finkel himself? His pursuit of Chris in the face of the man’s reluctance to talk or meet with him borders on stalking. Or does it cross over? Is it okay because he’s brought us this incredible story?

While privacy ranks high on my list of moral imperatives, I have to admit that I’m grateful to know this much of Chris’s story. I make time to be alone, preferably among the trees, when I can. I’ve lived in a tent in the New England woods, though in a shelter with a wood stove in the winter. I would never do what he did, but a part of me understands it.

It’s possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

Have you read a story—fiction or nonfiction—about someone who has turned their back on society?