One of my favorite things about living in the UK has been putting myself through a crash course of classic and new British (and Irish) nature writing. Robert Macfarlane started it off for me, and I was spurred on to read books like Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and Mark Boyle’s The Way Home. I’ve also dipped into pastoral poets like Patrick Kavanagh, Edward Thomas, and Robert Frost. There’s a loose family of writers and connected traditions around landscape and nature in British literature which I find to be more rewarding than almost anything else. The Wood by John Lewis-Stempel is one highlight among many.
Continuing the trend of my last two reviews covering short, literary, fantasy books I’m here going to write a bit about another of my favorites: The Slow Regard of Silent Things, one of the oddest books I’ve ever read.
The second book in Le Guin’s Earthsea series, The Tombs of Atuan is a fascinating counterpoint to A Wizard of Earthsea. Where the first book is about journeying to the ends of the Earth, Atuan is about being trapped inside it. The first book is a coming-of-age tale of a young man embracing his own shadow. Atuan is the story of a young woman escaping from a societal shadow larger than herself, and reclaiming her own individual identity. Where A Wizard of Earthsea is all exhilarating adventure and the open sea, this book is almost oppressively dark and confined. I love them both.
A Wizard of Earthsea is a very nearly perfect book. Its plot’s finely balanced symmetry, the exceptionally clear and unburdened prose, the sheer thrill of the story. It’s a true classic. The edition I have on hand is only 132 pages, and Le Guin does more with that small amount of space than most writers could with 500 or 1000 pages. A Wizard of Earthsea is one of those few cases where fantasy has transcended its genre to become simply literature.
What sets Myths of the Norsemen apart from the countless other takes on Norse mythology is the fact that it weaves all the major Eddaic stories about the gods of Asgard into a single continuous narrative. Roger Lancelyn Green bundles the myths into a digestible, novelesque package. I recently wanted to re-familiarize myself with the myths, and I picked up this 60-year-old children’s book. I’ve since gone back to it twice and have enjoyed myself each time.
H is for Hawk is an emotionally intense book. I found it in a charity shop, the bold print and staring eyes of the illustrated hawk on the spine catching my attention instantly. It is shot through with the intensity of the author’s loss, the intensity of the hawk itself, and the intensity of T.H. White’s often painful life story. Helen Macdonald is a Cambridge University fellow, an amateur falconer, and a writer. At the outset of the book she tells of the sudden and unforeseen death of her father, how it spun her life out of control, and how she regained a hold on herself by training a notoriously wild and temperamental bird – a goshawk.
Erling Kagge is, according to the inside back cover of Silence, a Norwegian explorer, writer, and publisher “who was the first in history to reach the ‘three poles’ – North, South and the summit of Everest.” Silence itself is a slim book in which Kagge makes a heartfelt case, based on his experiences spending long periods of time traversing the outdoors alone, that silence is not an absence but a positive necessity. My friend Tina, another Norwegian, lent me this book and I’ve read it twice. It’s a quick read, and simple, and grounding.
One of the timelier books I’ve read recently, Factfulness makes the simple argument that we should only hold opinions which are backed up by facts. For instance, did you know that the entire world is currently being lifted out of extreme poverty and into a global middle class? Humanity is not, in fact, split into the very rich on one end and the very poor on the other: most people are in the middle and moving up. The impacts of this are far-ranging and a cause for profound optimism, according to international health professor Hans Rosling. Reading Factfulness is an education in the most fundamental sense. What statements about the world are true, and which are false? Are things getting better or worse, and what can we do to help? Rosling and his co-authors (his son and his daughter-in-law) explain what makes the world such an anxious place even when almost everything is improving.
Returning to this book was like meeting an old friend. I discovered Robert Macfarlane’s books early in 2019 and read four of them in quick succession, including Underland, which came out in May of that year. Each one is a fascinating non-linear journey through landscapes and ideas, and The Wild Places is one of the best.
“To translate from one language into another is a fearsome task. It is fitting punishment for that human pride which led to the great confusion of languages.” So begins Nobuyuki Yuasa in his introduction to a volume of translated travel writings by the classic Japanese poet Bashō.
