Dear readers,
It's been a long time since I shared a reading list of books I loved, but since it's my rule to only recommend books I really, really loved, I am not sending you recommendations for books I was lukewarm about. And while I've been reading as much as ever, I just haven't been that enthused with any of the books until I read Fire
Season, which a colleague had recommended. I've always trusted her taste, but I trust it even more now. I just can't keep up with her pace of reading!
Since this month's newsletter is already late--Passover had me sidelined--I thought I'd share my take on Fire Season, along with two other favorites as I find we readers are always casting about for the next good read.
|
|
Whenever I find myself retelling stories from a book to my family, I know it's a good one. In this case, my younger son was intrigued and asked me about it after he'd read the back cover, which explained that Fire Season is about a guy who spends half a year in a fire lookout
tower, watching over the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, one of the most fire prone areas in America.
I told my son that the author, Philip Connors, actually does not spend all that time in the tower, just the usual 9-5 "office" time. It turns out that fires are first spotted as thin spires of smoke rising from the forest, which you cannot see at night. The rest of the time he enjoys the outdoors and lives in a primitive cabin, with a cistern for water supply and a propane tank for minor
electrical needs. He does get days off now and then, when a sub comes in. Leaving means hiking 5 miles through challenging black bear terrain to where his truck is parked. The first time he climbs up in the season of the book, he has to crawl through a snow field to reach his cabin as his heavy backpack causes him to break into the deep snow, making it impossible to advance. He arrives at "his" cabin wet and cold, but thankfully, he had prepared fire wood when he left the cabin at the end of
previous summer.
It is, for sure, a life of solitude up there, which Connors captures in beautiful, lyrical prose: "Days pass in which there is nothing but wind, bending the pines to postures of worship of an unseen god in the east." (p. 55) I read Fire Season with my memoir class. All of us asked ourselves whether we could do what he did for many seasons: Spend six months by himself on a mountain top with only the occasional hiker stopping by, and only his boss and other lookouts, miles away, as human contact via the radio and no Internet connection, of course. It invites contemplation, for
sure!
Oh, the anecdote I retold my son was about one of Connor's colleagues on another lookout tower, who called in a helicopter to replenish the beer supply as he was partying with a group of hikers. Needless to say, neither the lookout nor the pilot, who indulged him, kept their jobs after that escapade.
|
|
|
|
|
|
I've recommended Ted Kooser's Local Wonders--Seasons in the Bohemian Alps before but since it is one of the few books I pick up again and again, I'm including it in today's list. Local
Wonders is such a wonderful meditation on the four seasons. Whenever the season changes, I like to pick up this slim volume of essays, organized by season, and read one of Kooser's short missives about the new season that's about to break through. I always find a nugget that delights me and gives me a new angle.
Ted Kooser was poet laureate of the U.S. from 2004-2006, and he is one of my writing heroes because he managed to build a career as a writer while also working as vice president of an insurance company. He got up early to write before spending the rest of his day in the corporate world. He showed me, when I was still clocking a 9-5 job, that it could be done.
Being a poet, Kooser's prose is exquisite. No matter which page I open, he delights me with some metaphor or turn of phrase. Today's find on spring: "I just counted twenty-seven turkey vultures perched in the trees at the head of our pond, taking the early morning sun, a few holding their wings open as if to air them like soiled bedding after a long winter." (p. 36)
|
|
|
|
|
|
As I was thinking about which other book I could include with this list to continue the theme of books that capture our natural world in an extraordinary way, Beryl Markham's West with the Night immediately came to mind. This is a classic of the days of women adventurers in Africa - Markham was a contemporary of Isak
Dinesen of Out of Africa fame, which is, by the way, very much not the love story the later movie made it out to be but rather a moving and evocative account of what it meant to manage a coffee plantation the Kenyan highlands in the 1920s.
Back to Markham, who was an early female pilot, a choice of career that is just remarkably courageous if you really contemplate the times she lived in. I'd wager to say that West with the Night is as good as Out of Africa, if not
better, perhaps because I feel Markham had more agency over her fate, and more freedom up there, soaring over the African landscape. Hemingway called it "a bloody wonderful book."
Here's one of my favorite passages: "I mounted Pegasus and waved good-bye and, behind me, heard the tired engine stir to life and sing with a broken voice that had no music in it. And the happy tinker who had revived it again jostled on his dreamy way wrapped in a nebula of dust. He had been lavish with a stranger. He had left me a word, tossed me a key to a door I never knew was there, and had still to
find."
|
|
|
|
If you have any books you've read recently that you loved, loved, loved and recommended to more than one friend, do me the favor and drop me a line to let me know! I have come to realize that it is indeed very hard to find good reading material and so I would welcome your tips.
Happy reading,
I do have the following workshop coming up in Chicagoland:
As always, it would be lovely if you could attend and if you do, please introduce yourself to me!
|
|
|
