The Aubrey-Maturin seafaring novels by Patrick O’Brian are so dear to me. I’ve read the complete 20-volume set three times, and I’m slowly working my way through a fourth reading, which aficionados call a circumnavigation. I discovered these novels shortly after O’Brian passed away in 2000 and have been reading them almost continually ever since.
In this tenth volume, The Far Side of the World, O’Brian found his stride. The nine previous books created such a rich tapestry of backstories for the beloved characters that here they simply shine in their strengths and lovable weaknesses. There are storms, crew troubles, and miraculous rescues, all aboard the dear old Surprise, a ship that features prominently in most of the series.
I was slow to pick up this classic dystopian novel, but now I’m glad I waited. Had I read this five years ago, it would have struck me as merely imaginative. But the current political environment, coupled with a recent study of history, particularly the rise of Nazi Germany, made the premise of this book seem all too plausible. In fact, there’s very little here that isn’t drawn from some dark period in our human history, which adds to the novel’s prophetic feel.
I had forgotten what a gifted writer and storyteller Margaret Atwell is. Her lush descriptions of Offred’s world feel cinematic, as if her obscured eyesight transforms her vision into a panning camera.
Given our wings, our blinkers, it’s hard to look up, hard to get the full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps.
Chloe Dalton, burned out from a hectic career as a crisis-management policy expert, leaves London to work remotely near her family in the English countryside. She stumbles upon a helpless baby hare and rescues it from certain death. Thus begins a story of how this woman raised a wild hare.
Underlying the wonderful and often humorous stories of coexisting with this wild animal, we watch an adrenaline-addicted professional find balance and peace through a connection with nature. Thoreau had Walden Pond; Dillard had Tinker Creek. Dalton makes a meditative study of a Buddha-like hare within a few acres of wild English countryside. Buried within her observations of the hare and its environment are subtle lessons: let go of any illusions of control; find the joy and serenity in the present moment; and understand that your place is within the natural world, not outside of it.
How to sum up this wise, wonderful book? Cheryl Strayed, writing under the pseudonym Dear Sugar, wrote a weekly advice column from 2010 through 2012. The questions covered the gamut of the human experience: grief, love, infidelity, abuse, parenting, estranged families, friendship, wedding planning, divorce, you name it. Sugar’s response often included heartfelt sorrow or sometimes an upbraiding, but almost always a story from her life that fit the situation perfectly. These weren’t two or three-paragraph responses. These were beautifully crafted, thoughtful, deeply moving essays. This book collects the best of those essays.
I listened to this while driving and taking walks around the neighborhood. Since this book is narrated by Strayed, the feeling of a personal connection was amplified, especially when her voice cracked with emotion as she related her own stories. There were times I would stop on a walk and marvel at this raw emotion wrapped in unconventional yet utterly appropriate advice.
Another masterpiece from Claire Keegan, this one about an unnamed child who spends a summer with her aunt and uncle on a farm on the coast of Ireland. We soon learn that the child has been utterly neglected and is in dire need of love and attention. Her aunt and uncle have their own grief, and we bear witness to a summer of tremendous healing for this newly formed family.
Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.
It’s astonishing how Keegan crafts so much story with characters of real depth in so few pages. The language is economical, yet lyrical. And moving. I did not want this to end. When I finished, I turned back and read it again to savor it more slowly and pick up on things I missed.
Because of the subject matter, the death of a child, I read this highly acclaimed novel with trepidation. O’Farrell writes beautifully, and she lulled me into a world of a quasi-fairyland of evil step-mothers, abusive fathers, young impossible love, magic forests and elves, and the joy of life in harmony with nature.
While there were inklings and premonitions, the book carries on for two hundred pages before anything truly awful happens. When the tragedy finally strikes, the writing tone and structure shift from a conventional novel to short, trance-like visions of a mother’s inconsolable grief. Most people can only imagine the mere surface of grief like this. O’Farrell writes with brutal honesty as if she knows exactly what this is.
How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be.
While Shakespeare is never named, his character represents an important counterpoint in the novel. He begins as an unhappy son with ambitions far beyond his father’s business, a suitor and newlywed, a fledgling playwright separated from his wife and family, and finally as a grieving father.
I won’t spoil it, but the ending is about as perfect as you could wish for a novel dealing with the loss of a child.
Favorite Highlights
Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was.
She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?
How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?
God had need of him, the priest says to her, taking her hand after the service one day. She turns on him, almost snarling, filled with the urge to strike him. I had need of him, she wants to say, and your God should have bided His time.
(and such a secret, private pain it is, to see a boy growing like that, from lad to man, effortlessly, without care, but he would never say that, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him).
“O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
I chose this children’s story as my last read of the year after listening to an episode of the Old School podcast where musician Nick Cave shares how the book changed his life.
The volume I curled up with in my easy chair tonight was a Christmas present from an aunt and uncle back in 1971. The pages now brittle with age, the inscription to “Bobby” faded, felt both foreign and eerily familiar. I was a precocious seven-year-old when I read this, but I surely wasn’t prepared for all the violence and poverty and deceit. I remembered only vague outlines of the story, but found my hair standing on end a few times as long-hidden memories resurfaced. I wonder how many unconscious phobias and life decisions have come from reading this at too-young an age.
This time around, I brought a father’s perspective to the book. How Gepetto must have suffered during the many years of searching for his lost son; how helpless he must have felt. It also reminded me of all the crazy stuff I got away with as a teenager and young adult, and like Pinocchio, I lived to tell the tale. I thought about how some never get these second chances.
In the podcast interview, Cave chokes up when he shares how reading the book helped him during a time of intense grief:
I read this book a lot around the death of my son. The idea that the missing child ends up being able to save the grieving father, who’s been sitting in the belly of the beast on his own, became extraordinarily moving to me. It’s an inversion of the way it should be. The absent child returns to basically parent the parent.
Is this really a children’s book? Maybe. It is a fantastic story, and the language is simple enough for a child to understand. But only an adult could appreciate the religious symbolism, the moral quandaries, and the woes of loss. I’d call this timeless literature masquerading as a children’s story. I’m better for reading it.
There are levels of hell on earth that only a parent who has lost a child have traveled. YiYun Li, a successful novelist and mother of two, lost her oldest son to suicide seven years ago. Her youngest son, James, whom this memoir is loosely about, took his life last year in the same fashion as his brother. In this memoir, Li pays tribute to James and shares what it’s like for a mother to lose her children to suicide.
Li is a gifted writer. The language here is sparse and omits any emotional flourish. She is clear-eyed and honest about her experience. As someone who has lost a child, I could only read this in small doses. I can’t imagine how difficult this was for her to write.
Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.
One of the incredible things about books is when an author writes something so beautiful and so recognizably true, but you could never have grasped the thought on your own. Most readers won’t understand, but a few, the ones who never chose to be part of this unfortunate club, will nod their heads, and cry, and set this book down in meditative thought many times during their reading.
I bought this little gem from the Midtown McNally Jackson bookstore on our last week of a five-month stay in New York. Collected here are witty commentaries, short stories, poems, and essays, all originally published in The New Yorker, and each an ode to what I’m sure White would agree is the greatest city on earth.
The two moments when New York seems most desirable, when the splendor falls all round about and the city looks like a girl with leaves in her hair, are just as you are leaving and must say goodbye, and just as you return and can say hello.
I had to stop myself from gulping this down in one sitting. I read it slowly over a few evenings, savoring, reminiscing, and laughing aloud in places. I loved “The Rock Dove,” a piece on the roosting habits of New York City pigeons, and “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” an essay on the challenges of leaving a city he loved. But honestly, every piece in this collection is great.
Ah, Ralph Waldo Emerson: what a treasure. I’ve read most of these essays before, but never so deeply, and never with such illumination. His wisdom is simple to understand, yet difficult to practice in a world of popular opinion and distracted thinking. Trust your own thoughts. Be yourself. Don’t try to impress or copy others. Cherish your friends. Most of all: be present. Life is here, now; life is not studying the people or times of long ago or so-called leaders preaching hate and divisiveness.
Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Self-Reliance is his most famous essay, and it reads as fresh today as in Emerson’s time. I enjoyed lesser-known Circles, which contends that all our knowledge and enthusiasms are temporary, soon to be replaced by even greater knowledge and better enthusiasms. To find truth, embrace change and nature. And Compensation, which celebrates the neutrality and balance of nature, even in grief:
The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
Emerson wrote Compensation before the death of his five-year-old son Waldo. His take on grief would turn bitter in his follow-on essay, Experience.
Alongside these essays, I’m slowly reading through a collection of Emerson’s journals. It’s amazing to watch him shape his thinking as these roughshod ideas appear and evolve over time in his private musings.
Favorite Highlights
Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.
People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
