Snapper by Brian Kimberling

Library Copy

Hello my lovely friends. I greet you from the dispatches of my sick-bed. Nothing serious, just allergies or a head cold or something like that. Regardless, it's been enough to knock me off my feet for a while. And that usually means buying more time alone in bed with a book, trying to work through a NyQuil educed haze (when I'm not slipping in and out of sleep). What is it about NyQuil that makes the side-effects barely worth the benefits?
If anyone understands this every-man's plight, it's Brian Kimberling's hero Nathan. Nathan isn't an unintelligent man, but he kind of bumbles along in life. Nathan is a "bird-watcher" - he gathers data about the local wild song birds in what is essentially field work for the Government and local Ornithologists in Indiana. But when he isn't working, he bewilderingly gets into some hapless messes. There's a sense that he isn't as innocent as he tries to put himself out as, but there's no proof to support that. From his buddies that certainly are not innocents, to the lovely Lola, a free-spirited woman Nathan is obsessed with. Indiana is as much a character as any of the humans, as well. I'd never given much thought to the Hoosier state until this book made it seem familiar and homey.

While reading this in a cafe, one of my baristas claimed that (based on the cover) it didn't look very interesting. I guess it might not, but it is charming and hilarious, and I tried to tell him as much. Though it's categorized as a novel, each chapter reads a little more like individual short stories, so there's no strung together, cohesive plot. Just familiar characters popping in and out at various points in the time-line. (Remember when I said I was a mite NyQuil-stoned when I read this?)

H is for Hawk by Helen McDonald

Library e-book

This book, arrrgh! *grasps chest* Thiiis Boook!! Easily my favorite book I've read so far this year. I didn't read it because it's a New York Times bestseller (what's that?) or a winner of multiple literary awards (sounds neat-o, but I don't care). I, in all earnestness, read it because I recognized that the illustration on the cover was some sort of relief print (either lino-cut or woodcut - I was a printmaking student in college). All of those honors heaped upon this book was a complete waste on me. But more importantly, I wanted to read it because I love books on natural science and I did recognize that this book was gaining popularity in the literary crowd. I love natural science, but I've never visited a popular bookstore or library where their natural sciences were well trodden. It's unusual for this sort of thing to really shoot up on the best seller's list. Even though I would have been interested in this book no matter what, I think my interest in reading it was heightened just a tad more.

I was not anticipating this book to be a sum of what it actually was - it was more than a little book about hawks. I suppose that's why it's more widely loved - if it were just about hawks it wouldn't be so popular. H is for Hawk is a memoir about Helen Macdonald dealing with the death of her father. Ever since childhood, she's been obsessed with falcons, hawks, and other birds of prey. She'd even convinced her parents to take her to a falconry hunt. Now as an adult, he's an adjunct history professor, but overcoming her father's death has sent her back to her childhood obsession with hawks to where she has decided to train a goshawk. Goshawks, she'd been warned, are incredibly difficult to train. But maybe this is just the challenge she needs to keep her from wallowing.
During any particular stage of grief, most of us are recommended to read Eat, Pray, Love to help with the coping. (I know it was overwhelmingly prescribed to me.) While Elizabeth's wisdom is very helpful in Eat, Pray, Love, how many of us would actually be able to globe trot the way that she did following a divorce? Maybe some of us can, but I can promise that a huge percentage of the readers who made her book a best seller couldn't have. We were forced to live vicariously through her, though many of us were moved nonetheless. While certainly for various reasons most of us couldn't and wouldn't be able to train a hawk in response to loss or heart break, somehow it feels (to me, at least) more accessible. In her fits of mania, I recognized myself. Though we've grieved over different kinds of loss, grief is still the same.
So, this book is about ecology, dealing with grief, a little about a woman falconer, and a brief biography on the author T.H. White who not only wrote The Once and Future King, but wrote a masterpiece of a book called The Goshawk - very influential in Helen's training of her goshawk.

This book moved me deeply and may be the best thing I've read so far this year. Not only is it beautifully written, but I get it, I get it. I get wanting to hide from humanity and retreating (almost dangerously far) into a more wild world just a step apart from the one we live in now. I get it. For that reason alone, I can recommend this book highly, but I don't know if everyone will feel what she's saying. That felt so deeply personal, it's like she read my diary from 3 years ago, plagiarized my sketch books from across the Atlantic ocean, it's like she was "killing me softly." But I know she didn't, because even though everyone deals with their grief differently, it's still the same thing.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Library

This morning, on my way out of the house for work, I noticed (to my despair) a crushed snail on my path. It was probably crushed under my father's heavy work shoes earlier that morning on his way to work. I don't know about you, but stepping on snails is very distressing to me - not just because of the squick factor, but because I really love the little guys.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating was my re-introduction to one of my favorite genres as a child - the natural sciences. This book might even have been something I would have read as a child (if it had been published back then). It was part memoir, part natural history.
It's a very short and sweet story at first about an ill, bedridden woman. Doctors are perplexed and unable to give her a clear diagnosis as the mysterious illness takes it's toll on her body. She is transplanted from the hubbub of her daily life to a lonely and quiet horizontal life in bed. Well, lonely until a friend brings her a pot of wild violets. And in this pot of violets is a tiny friend - a forest snail. This little bedside table companion proves to be just the company she needed. Her daily observations and studies of her little friend led her to a singular breakthrough - no one before had so closely observed a snail for so long. Perhaps no one had such a, well, human connection with a snail before. A humble and simple creature, certainly - nothing tremendous. But who are we to say it isn't as valuable a life?

I read this book very quickly (over a short weekend) and while it may fall far back in my memory after some time, it was a relaxing and enlightening little book.