Lately I’ve been dropping in and out of books, trying to find one that will catch my attention. So I offer you this week a few paragraphs on several books rather than a full review of one book, following my thought process as I dipped into each one.
The Grey Wolf – by Louise Penny
This was my light read for the month. I’ve read almost all of Louise Penny’s books. If you haven’t heard of her, she’s a Canadian mystery writer whose books are set in Three Pines, a small community near Montreal that seems to reveal itself to people who need it and is blissfully difficult to find for those who don’t. Penny has won a number of awards for her books, which usually come out annually, but she skipped a year before publishing this one. Her main character is Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté (Quebec police force). The book was compelling and engaging, but I felt like Penny was using themes from previous books: corruption amongst people in positions of authority—both in the Sûreté itself and in politics. Gamache having to hide his investigation from those people. Monasteries feature prominently in this latest offering, and have shown up in previous books. But there are also old enemies who become allies, and unlikely heroes who help at the last minute. My biggest beef with this book is that it is a cliffhanger! Now I won’t know what the full story is until I read the next book, The Dark Wolf. In another year!
Piranesi – by Susanna Clarke
I read Clarke’s first book, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, when the paperback came out in 2006. It’s a book about two wizards set in 19th century England. Wikipedia puts it in the time of the Napoleonic Wars. While the book starts with the perception that there are no longer magicians in the country, Mr. Norrell proves otherwise, and soon takes on a pupil, Jonathan Strange. The book is about their complicated relationship and the geopolitics of the time. It took Clarke ten years to write; not hard to imagine when you see how well she captures even the smallest details of this magic world.
I read recently that Clarke was working on a new book, and in searching for it I came across Piranesi, which she published in 2020. I love this book and can’t recommend it enough.
Piranesi lives in a stone ‘House’ that is populated with wall sculptures and broken limestone, with three oceans that periodically flood the lower levels at high tide. Every so often there’s a triple high tide, which brings the water even higher into the House. Piranesi has built himself a quiet life, capturing rainwater in bowls for drinking, fishing in ponds for food, collecting and drying seaweed for food and insulation, and catching lobsters. He knows all of the Halls of the House, all of the sculptures on the walls, where the herring gulls nest and where to go to avoid the tides. Once a week he meets the ‘Other,’ an elderly man who talks of summoning the ‘Great and Secret Knowledge’ through the House. Piranesi keeps track of everything in his notebooks, including his calculations of the tides. He organizes those notebooks by creating an index at the back of each one.
But who is Piranesi? Where did he come from? What and where is this House? And who is the ‘Other,’ who doesn’t seem to know the House inside out like Piranesi does?
This is a book about identity: how we lose it and how we create it; place: how we make home in a new environment; and self: what does it mean to be a particular person, and how do we become someone completely different? It’s about survival and adaptation. Making a life with what we have. Connecting with people even if we don’t understand them. The themes explored in this book are particularly relevant given the popularity of social media and the selves we invent online that may not be the same selves we are in real life. I highly recommend this book, as strange as it may sound. Clarke has a way of building worlds so that they seem perfectly reasonable and inhabitable.
Homing: A Quest to Care for Myself and the Earth – by Alice Irene Whittaker
I really wanted to like this book. The premise is right up my alley: a perfectionist woman (who used to have anorexia) moves her family to a cabin in the woods where she grapples with her perfectionism and asks “how can I take care of the Earth if I can’t take care of myself?” See, great premise. Lots to like about this.
But the honeymoon ended when I started reading it. Whittaker uses big words when she can use small ones, which have more impact. I felt like she was trying out a new dictionary and thesaurus. For example, “[I] tucked back into the merciful forest…” How can you tuck into a forest? Why is it merciful? Perhaps because there are fewer insects (she does mention in the previous sentence that she’s swatting at bugs)? Part of my problem with the book is one of voice. The sections about herself are written in a conversational voice, while the sections detailing things like straw bale houses or other nonfiction details are written in a dry, technical voice. Maybe if she could meld the two it would be an easier read. I also didn’t enjoy her constant self-flagellation about doing things that weren’t ‘green,’ like driving her car. If you move to the rural woods, you should know that you’ll be driving everywhere. Anyway. I’m not going to say any more as some of you may like it. But right now I don’t have time to read books that don’t grab me right away.
A Natural History of Empty Lots – Christopher Brown
I can’t remember how I discovered this book. I remember reading about it and then discovering that my library had it. I just got it last week, and am thoroughly enjoying it. It reminds me of Charlie Hailey’s The Porch, for some reason. Maybe because it’s a paean to urban edgelands in the same way that Hailey’s is to porches, which also straddle the natural and human-built world.
Brown writes about the vacant lot in an industrial area of Austin, Texas, on which he builds his house. He explores his local edgelands / brownfields / vacant lots to find non-traditional ‘nature.’ He squeezes through fences and gates, walks up dried riverbeds and canoes them in the wet season. “The pockets of wild space that exist within the city do so because they are largely unseen and unnamed.” Also, “…the city is a machine designed to make you believe you are free, when its real aim is to control you.” The latter quote is supported with a litany of ways in which we are ‘directed’ around the city, through sidewalks and road crossings and parks etc., and not allowed to see the edgelands, the liminal spaces where the city meets nature. “The landscapes we move through are manufactured ones, shaped by us, even when they are green.”
As Brown writes about his initiation into exploring the edgelands: “The more lost I got, the more it could turn scary. At the same time that was when I learned the most, and had the most fun. And in time, I started to look for ways to go deeper—walking where I was not supposed to walk.” And he feels revived by his forays into places he shouldn’t be: “When you walk where the land tells you to go, right through the often-invisible boundaries we erect to partition it, you can almost feel what it would be like to truly be free….”
I’m looking forward to finishing this one—it has a lot to say about unseen urban nature, its resilience, and how to rethink urban “blight” by prioritizing green spaces, of whatever type they might be.
