Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2021 - My Wrap-Up

Yay! I made it -- with hours to spare! (Ha!) 

That puts a nice bow on reading for 2021! Maybe it will cast an afterglow of success on 2022 reading, also.

This is a really fun challenge and sooooo easy that it's hard to imagine not being willing to do it. The only real question is: what mountain do you aspire to climb?

This year I kept my "mountain" small, committing to 10 books, and that went pretty well. I didn't even overlap with my other challenge very much. That made for some good reading: 32 books this year! 

And let me just say, it's way better to be planting a flag and waving with enthusiasm from the top of a smaller mountain than lying exhausted and defeated by the side of the trail on a larger one.

We'll see what next year brings. I'll definitely be participating again! 

My achievement this year:

Pike's Peak: 

1. Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen 

2. Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

3. Snowman: The True Story of a Champion - Catherine Hapka 

4. The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living - Helen and Scott Nearing 

5. The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking - Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler

6. Abide With Me - Elizabeth Strout 

7. The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong - David Orr 

8. Strange as This Weather Has Been - Ann Pancake (Orion Book Award)

9. Early Autumn - Louis Bromfield 

10. Superior Women - Alice Adams 

11. Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life - Twyla Tharp 

12. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf - John Muir 

Reviews are available under the Reviews tab or more easily here, if you're interested. 

Weather Report

I'm embarrassed to say that it took me a very long time to really see the cover of this novel. Look closely and maybe you'll do better than I did. For me, it was reading it that helped. 

That may be a metaphor for what Ann Pancake wants to accomplish in Strange as this Weather Has Been. It opened my eyes by depicting interesting, realistic characters in a well-researched, disintegrating West Virginia setting. I have a different feeling for coal mining issues and impacts now, and a better understanding of the people affected.

Normally I don't care for the multiple-perspectives-and-voices writing method, but Pancake does an effective job with it here. Perhaps it was necessary to get everything in -- the adult perspective that can wrap in community issues and scientific understanding and the innocence and differing priorities that reflect various phases of childhood. 

The narrative focuses primarily on Lace, beginning with her as a teenager and young adult, raised in an insular town, escaping to college only to be disturbed by homesickness. Lace falls for local boy Jimmy, and marriage and family seal away her chance of a different life that she can't quite imagine because it would mean leaving the land she grew up on and the mountains she roamed and knew. It's not a happy marriage -- Jimmy struggles to support the family and has developed the darkness that surrounds someone who peaked in high school and has been declining ever since -- and it solidifies Lace's place in the world. 

Lace's teenaged daughter Bant feels the unhappiness between her parents and some of her mom's former desire to escape. She also carries a strong identification with the woods and the mountain, experiencing the pain of their destruction in a visceral way. Her younger brother Dane internalizes the family's fears and worries, taking seriously the messages about impending destruction that form the atmosphere in the community. The youngest brother, Corey, in contrast, barrels through life with unlimited enthusiasm for machinery and the adventures that change can bring. 

What they have in common is the possibility that the earthworks impounding the slurry, a toxic semi-liquid mining byproduct, could burst at any moment, flooding their town from above with hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic sludge. 

What they have in common is the fact that in their neighbors' homes the tap water is not drinkable and the walls and floors are failing from blasting and shifting ground, stealing their equity and dooming them to continue living there. 

What they have in common is the dearth of decent jobs that forces men to work for the companies that are destroying the mountains and community they call home. 

What they have in common is an intimate knowledge -- an inheritance of lore they learned from their parents -- of the mountains called Cherryboy and Yellowroot, now being irreparably altered.

How Lace and her family react to these commonalities makes this novel a compelling fiction that personalizes the back-and-forth of environmental alarm and community resilience. I gained a new understanding of what it takes to live in a place that your family has known and loved for generations,  and the grim courage it takes to watch it destroyed around you. 

Excerpt (Lace's voice):

Even before that visit from Bell Kerwin, we'd been hearing the heavy equipment. Muffled distant at first, but by October, exactly a year after Charlie told me about the permit, we were hearing it right up over our heads. Killing the trees, I knew that's what they did first, and I know it didn't necessarily mean an impoundment was going in. But it for certain meant the death of Yellowroot. If I'd looked at it head-on, I don't think I could have borne it. Because through all those hard, hard years, I understood now, as I'd lost my self, my dream, my dad, my mom -- it was place crept in and filled the lack.

Note: This book counts toward the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

Like Conversation with a Friend

Oh, this was nice.

I enjoy a book that blends the personal with the scientific. It's the best way to learn. A writer I know calls this "creative nonfiction" and that sums it up nicely -- although I admit I found it disconcerting when he would adjust the details of the personal side. His science was spot on, but sometimes our conversations would include me saying, "But it wasn't during X hike that we saw Y." His answer always insisted that the story was better that way . . . not that I found that very persuasive. In fact, it made me question the accuracy of other events he wrote about. Not the science, just the storytelling.

But I digress. 

I'm willing to give Carl Safina and The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World the benefit of the doubt. I love the way Safina describes his beachfront life with his dog, walking the sand to discover what has turned up overnight, greeting the morning in all weather and all seasons with the dunes and the birds and the fishes. It sounds like an ideal life for a naturalist who loves the world as he does. It's also the ideal entrance into the scientific subject matter for that particular section.

I also loved his travels, cold water and warm water, and the things he discovers along the way when he leaves his Long Island cottage. I may never make it to Alaska or to the Carribbean -- I'm more of a long weekend traveler, not a long-distance, long-term traveler -- but I enjoy tagging along virtually. Safina is a very interesting companion, blending his travel stories of the people he meets with whatever scientific investigation they're pursuing. Anyone who's interested in nature will relish the opportunity to stand at their elbows and eavesdrop, without ever being jet-lagged or cold.

The discoveries these engaging people are making are generally Not Good. The world is damaged and we may or may not change our ways in time. It may already be too late, actually. (It was particularly affecting when Safina's host at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault described how the temperature ranges for growing certain crops are changing drastically due to climate change. In this case, "drastically" means predicted temperatures in the future have zero overlap with existing growing temperatures in certain regions. As in, you can't grow corn here anymore, it's become too hot.)

Safina faces this truth head on, but in the way a solid, discerning friend would broach the conversation with you, and would also -- we hope -- stop mid-sentence to point out a particular beachcombing bird that flew all the way from another continent before backgrounding his words with its cry. 

Excerpt (visiting Svalbard, Norway, north of the Arctic Circle):

Here at the outer limits of their summer ranges, these birds seem familiar; I know them from home. Even Ruddy Turnstones sometimes get this far. From their North American populations, these species all send delegates to waters near my beach house. The murres, auks, skuas, fulmars, the terns, the loons, the eiders and Long-tailed Ducks, of course, even the bunting -- I've seen them all around Lazy Point. That's how small the world is and how big their lives are. Now, far from my own shores, they make me feel unexpectedly at home.

Note: This book counts toward the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

The Color Coded Reading Challenge 2018 - My Wrap-Up

Whoo hoo! I'm finished!

True to form, I read the last book a while back but have just now posted that one last review.

Here's what I read this year, and a nice variety it is, too. Lots of prize winners, plus a couple of books that had been on my TBR list for a long time, despite the fact that they didn't win anything. Settings ran the gamut from Florida to China, while subject matter ranged from monarch butterflies to near-fatal depression to Japanese garden design and mysterious events during World War II. A little fiction, a little poetry -- this mixed bag was all good and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Blue: Flight Behavior - Barbara Kingsolver (Orion Book Award finalist)
Red: The Boat to Redemption - Su Tong (Asian Literary Prize)
Yellow: A Travel Guide for Reckless Hearts: Stories - N.M. Kelby (Florida Book Award)
Green: The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng (Asian Literary Prize)
Brown: The Body Artist - Don DeLillo
Black: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness - William Styron
White: The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson (Booker Prize)
Any other color: Orange: Three Sisters - Bi Feiyu (Asian Literary Prize)
Implied color: Light: The Light Around the Body - Robert Bly (National Book Award for Poetry)

My reviews are under the Reviews tab, if you're interested.

I really enjoy this challenge -- it's low intensity and has a little bit of the thrill of the chase built into it. The fact that I've always had an affinity for things organized around the color spectrum probably has something to do with it, too. Displays like this make me happy (even when they're not made out of cute shoes).

Photo: Zappos

I can't wait to sign up for next year!

Understanding, As Much As Possible

Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk gave me -- as much as possible -- a window into the mind of a hawk, one that I have longed for with varying intensity over the years. It may have begun with the hawk scenes The Once and Future King. It may have begun earlier. But I have always longed to be a medieval lady with a hawk on her fist -- or, failing that, a modern lady, ditto.

(On the other side of the coin is my opinion that wild things belong in the wild and should not be subjected to our human whims. Surprisingly, I got over that fairly quickly, perhaps because Macdonald was doing something I'd always longed to do. And it seems harmless enough that she should do it, when I never will. Whether that's a rationalization or just good sense deserves further consideration.) 

Part memoir, part literary exploration, part training exploration, part love story, Macdonald's Orion Book Award-winning book is a thrilled blend of various genres into a lyrical whole that has just enough personal drama and gritty detail to keep it from being too much of a good thing. As she learns to handle, fly, and bond with her goshawk Mabel, with the help of both a deeply flawed antique falconry manual (not coincidentally written by T. H. White, also the author of The Once and Future King) and several human mentors, Macdonald processes her father's death and her own imperfection.

And when she writes of the hawk in magnificent action, Macdonald takes us into the thickets and skies with Mabel, swooping and soaring, bloody and beautiful and bonded and wild.

Excerpt (Helen walks Mabel, getting her used to people and things):

On this second expedition from the house Mabel grips the glove more tightly than ever. She is tense. She looks smaller and feels heavier in this mood . . . . She follows bicycles with her eyes. She hunches ready to spring when people come too close. Children alarm her. She is unsure about dogs. . . .

After ten minutes of haunted apprehension, the goshawk decides that she's not going to be eaten, or beaten to death, by any of these things. She rouses [shakes and settles her feathers] and begins to eat. Cars and buses rattle fumily past, and when the food is gone she stands staring at the strange world about her. So do I. I've been with the hawk so long, just her and me, that I'm seeing my city through her eyes. . . . The things she sees are uninteresting to her. Irrelevant. Until there's a clatter of wings. We both look up. There's a pigeon, a woodpigeon, sailing down to roost in a lime tree above us. Time slows. The air thickens and the hawk is transformed. It's as if all her weapons systems were suddenly engaged. Red cross-hairs. She stands on her toes and cranes her neck. This. This flightpath. This thing, she thinks. This is fascinating. Some part of the hawk's young brain has just worked something out, and it has everything to do with death.  

Note: I read this for the Reading Naturally Challenge and counted it for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge, too.

A Story for the Times

Surprising. Funny. Serious. Contemporary. Varied. Talky. Engrossing.

These are a few of the adjectives that apply to Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Flight Behavior. We first meet Dellarobia Turnbow stuggling along a forest path, dressed inappropriately and wishing desperately for a cigarette, to begin an affair with her latest crush. She is desperate to escape her not-good-enough domestic scene: the steady but dull husband she had to marry because she was pregnant and the truncated parameters of stay-at-home wifedom with two small children and overbearing in-laws. Little does she know that when she stumbles upon the winter gathering place of millions of monarch butterflies, her life will change as dramatically as if she'd seen a Biblical burning bush.

Kingsolver weaves issues of family, place, marriage, faith, science, culture, and personal fulfillment into her story, portraying these individual concerns in the context of the causes and effects of climate change, with the butterflies and their (fictional) locale as the primary example. Dellarobia is blessed with a sharp mind, a dormant ambition, and a clever best friend, so her story moves briskly along. It bogs down somewhat when its educational message is delivered in conversations with scientist and monarch expert Ovid Byron. Overall, though, Kingsolver rises to the challenge of presenting scientific information in story form and in a way that's sympathetic to varying opinions.

Dellarobia's conversation and thoughts are sprinkled generously with sharp--sometimes caustic--commentary, lightening the mood and highlighting her abilities. Kingsolver can turn a phrase, and for the most part does so successfully, although in a few instances one suspects that she conjured or overheard a particularly clever comment and purposely worked it in. Considering how central environmental gloom and Appalachian poverty are to the story, the jaunty commentary wears a little thin by novel's end.

Despite these glitches, the twists and turns of the plot pull the reader along and keep engagement high. As the wintery death that means extinction looms over the monarchs, Dellarobia moves closer and closer to her own crisis of decision-making. Her moment of choice, when it comes, arrives on a timetable similar to climate change itself: seemingly sudden, but long in the making.   

Excerpt:

Today [Dellarobia's best friend] Dovey made her a deal. She would make the grocery run for the party when she got off work at three, while Dellarobia dug around in the junk drawers of her former valor, trying to locate the nerve. Somewhere between outrage and giving up, that was where she found it. She was sick of begging for ornaments to hang on a tree, as part of some year-end conspiracy of alleged joy and goodwill arriving from heaven with no hard currency as backup. Fed up with stories about poor people with good hearts raising their damn cups of kindness. Sick of needing permission to throw a party in her own home, and not asking, because she was too proud to beg favors in this family. That's how the simple folk lived, in her particular Christmas story. It was overdue for a rewrite.

Note: This book counts toward the Color Coded Reading Challenge (blue), the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2018, and the Reading Naturally Challenge 2018.         

Reading Naturally Challenge 2018 - My Sign-Up

This is the second year for the Reading Naturally Challenge 2018 and I hope to do much better with it this year!

Sign-ups are still open here and the rules are simple:  Choose your reading level by how many books you'd like to commit to reading. Then choose one book per category (fiction or non-fiction, any genre) from the categories identified. Categories include Classics, Animal or Bird Related, Outdoorsy Heroine, Set in a Wilderness Locale, and several more.

The idea is that even if you like reading, say, cozy mysteries, you could probably easily find one that had an outdoorsy heroine or was set in a wilderness locale. Nature thoroughly infuses so much of what we do--and what we read!--that the categories ought to be easy to fill.

There are prizes, too! Doing the reading might be enough of a prize, but a little extra incentive never hurts!

My level: Immersed in Nature (7 or more books--all from the TBR list!)

1. Plant Related: Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany - Matthew Hall
2. Classic: A Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold (review)
3. Set in a Wilderness Locale: Swamplandia! - Karen Russell (Orion Book Award finalist)
4. Spiritual: The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature - Starhawk
5. Dystopia Flavored: Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth - Craig Childs (Orion Book Award)
6. Extreme Element: Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul - Scott Weidensal
7. Outdoorsy Heroine: Flight Behavior -Barbara Kingsolver (Orion Book Award finalist) (review)
8. Skills Related: Joy of Backpacking: Your Complete Guide to Attaining Pure Happiness in the Outdoors - Brian Beffort
9. Current Issue: The New Normal: An Agenda for Responsible Living - David Wann
10. Water Related: River-Horse: Across America by Boat - William Least Heat-Moon
11. Orion Book Award Winner: 2012 winner: The View from Lazy Point - Carl Safina
12. Biography or Memoir of an Environmentalist or Conservationist: A Naturalist in Florida: A Celebration of Eden - Archie Carr
13. Animal or Bird Related: H Is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald (Orion Book Award finalist) (review)

The Color Coded Reading Challenge 2018 - My Sign-Up

I love the Color Coded Reading Challenge and am back this year, using the TBR shelf exclusively. Yay for that!

Bev at My Reader's Block is a friendly and efficient hostess who's also an avid and accomplished reader, so if you're so inclined, join in for some extra incentive and whole lot of inspiration!

The rules (posted here) are easy to follow. Basically, you read a book with any shade of the required colors either in the title or featured prominently on the cover. You also get two "freebies" of your own choice: a color that's not on the list and a color that's implied (rainbow, spectrum, etc.). 

Colors, here we come!

Blue: Flight Behavior - Barbara Kingsolver (Orion Book Award finalist) (review)
Red: The Boat to Redemption - Su Tong (Asian Literary Prize) (review)
Yellow: Something to Answer For - P.H. Newby (Booker Prize) Substitute: A Travel Guide for Reckless Hearts: Stories - N.M. Kelby (Florida Book Award) (review)
Green: The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng (Asian Literary Prize) (review)
Brown: The Body Artist - Don DeLillo (review)
Black: Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders (Booker Prize) Substitute: The Road - Cormac McCarthy) (Pulitzer Prize) Substitute: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness - William Styron (review)
White: The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson (Booker Prize) (review)
Any other color: Orange: Three Sisters - Bi Feiyu (Asian Literary Prize) (review)
Implied color: Light: All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr (Pulitzer) Substitute: The Light Around the Body - Robert Bly (National Book Award for Poetry) (light is all the colors, get it?) (review)

Orion Book Award

A new list! I'll be reading the winners and the finalists for this prize, to nurture and expand my connection with the natural world. As much as I enjoy and believe in the value of my own experience, it's also good to have guides along the way.

Green is haven't seen. Blue indicates TBR status. Miles to go . . . in a good way.

The Orion Book Awards (website)

2016 winner: The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness - Sy Montgomery 
2016 finalist: The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America - Summer Brennan
2016 finalist: H Is for Hawk: A Memoir - Helen MacDonald
2016 finalist: A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka - Meera Subramanian 
2015 winner (nonfiction): Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - George Monbiot
2015 winner (fiction): The Bees - Laline Paull 
2015 finalists (nonfiction): A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World - Jay Griffiths
2015 finalists (nonfiction): The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History - Elizabeth Kolbert 
2015 finalists (nonfiction): Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming - McKenzie Funk 
2015 finalists (nonfiction): Zoologies - Alison Hawthorne Deming 
2015 finalists (fiction): Divine Animal - Scott Russell Sanders
2015 finalists (fiction): Invisible Beasts - Sharona Muir 
2015 finalists (fiction): The Land of Love and Drowning - Tiphanie Yanique
2015 finalists (fiction): Long Man - Amy Greene 
2014 winner: Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World - Kathleen Jamie (nonfiction)
2014 winner: Maddaddam - Margaret Atwood (fiction) (HB)
2014 finalists (nonfiction): Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants - Robin Wall Kimmerer (PB)
2014 finalist (nonfiction): Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? - Alan Weisman
2014 finalist (nonfiction): The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild - Lyanda Lynn Haupt
2014 finalist (fiction): All the Land to Hold Us - Rick Bass
2014 finalist (fiction): Archipelago - Monique Roffey (PB)
2014 finalist (fiction): The Last Animal - Abby Geni
2013 winner: Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth - Craig Childs
2013 finalist: Flight Behavior - Barbara Kingsolver 
2013 finalist: Things That Are: Essays - Amy Leach
2013 finalist: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot - Robert Macfarlane
2013 finalist: The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry - Joe Wilkins
2012 winner: The View from Lazy Point - Carl Safina
2012 finalist: Fire Season - Phillip Connors
2012 finalist: Oil on Water - Helon Habila
2012 finalist: Swamplandia! - Karen Russell (PB)
2012 finalist: Raising Elijah - Sandra Steingraber
2011 winner: Insectopedia - Hugh Raffles
2011 finalist: Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology - David Abram
2011 finalist: About a Mountain - John D’Agata
2011 finalist: The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival - John Vaillant
2011 finalist: Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean - Julia Whitty
2010 winner: Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future -Charles Bowden
2010 finalist: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World - Wade Davis
2010 finalist: Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape - Richard Manning
2010 finalist: Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories - Lydia Peelle
2010 finalist: The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature - Curtis White
2009 winner: Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land - Amy Irvine
2009 finalist: The Wild Places - Robert Macfarlane
2009 finalist: The Bridge at the Edge of the World - James Gustave Speth (PB)
2009 finalist: Inventing Niagara - Ginger Strand
2009 finalist: Finding Beauty in a Broken World - Terry Tempest Williams (PB)
2008 winner: The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story - Diane Ackerman (PB)
2008 finalist: Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel - Ann Pancake
2008 finalist: The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring - Richard Preston
2008 finalist: Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place - Robert Michael Pyle
2008 finalist: The World Without Us - Alan Weisman (HB)
2007 winner: Wild: An Elemental Journey - Jay Griffiths
2007 finalist: The Lives of Rocks: Stories - Rick Bass (PB)
2007 finalist: Inferno - Charles Bowden and Michael P. Berman
2007 finalist: Returning to Earth - Jim Harrison
2007 finalist: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Michael Pollan