My memory bank shot today is one from not so long ago, just this past autumn. It was taken in the back garden at Caitlin's and Bob's rented house in Corbridge. Caitlin and Louis are sitting on the steps of their garden shed, a favourite hangout of Louis'.
They're engaged in what we thought of as "parallel reading." Louis would demand a book be read to him by an adult, but he also wanted to read another book himself at the same time. Reading for him meant pointing out and naming the characters and other interesting features in the illustrations, and sometimes recounting remembered bits of the story. Was he also listening out of one ear to the other story? Don't know. In any case, he's mostly past that behaviour now. We saw hardly any of it at Christmas. There were, of course, lots of distractions at Christmas, and lots of new toys.
I love his little leg cocked up to hold open the big book he's "reading." Caitlin is reading The Smeds and the Smoos by Julia Donaldson, a favourite of the whole family. Louis' book is another Donaldson title, The Gruffalo's Child.
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I find I'm drawn more and more lately to books about nature, books whose authors write about the wonder they feel and the personal insights they gain from directly engaging with and studying the natural world. It's not a new genre - Gerald Durrell's books pop to mind as an example from an earlier generation - but nature writing has been revitalized in the last 20 years or so, and some say, raised to a new level. It has become a sub-genre of what is now known as "literary non-fiction."
The first author I found that I liked was Robert Macfarlane, a British naturalist, adventurer and poet, and the author of several award-winning and critically-acclaimed books. He started off writing about mountaineering, but more recently his adventures have been slightly less arduous, but still involving considerable risk and danger at times.
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| Robert MacFarlane |
I've just finished The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. It's about way-finding and wayfaring. In each chapter, he goes to a different wild, or relatively wild, place to explore "ways" - walking routes - that have existed for centuries, in some cases, since ancient times: on the peat bogs of the Outer Hebrides, the Cairngorm mountains in the Scottish highlands, foothills of the Himalayas, etc. He almost always meets up with a local expert or guide - usually another naturalist, sometimes another nature writer - whom he profiles while describing the experience of walking with them. Woven through it is a discussion of the symbolic importance and history of these ancient foot ways.
The other title of MacFarlane's I've read, his most recent and best received, is Underland. It's structured similarly to The Old Ways, but each chapter explores a different underground world: catacombs in Paris, salt mines in eastern England that reach out under the North Sea, inside glaciers in Greenland, in the deep tunnels in Norway where nuclear waste is stored and, of course, caves in several places. He writes about the allure and cultural meaning of these underground worlds. In Underland, MacFarlane has taken the profiling of his local hosts and guides to a new level. They are often eccentric, romantic figures and come alive like fully-realized characters in a good novel.
The other book in something the same vein that I enjoyed is H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald She's a British naturalist, falconer and academic philosopher of science. The book, which won two major awards in Britain, is a memoir of her experience successfully training a Northern Goshawk, a bird supposedly almost impossible to train for falconry. The decision to undertake the project was made as, and partly because, she was grieving the unexpected early death of her father. It might be hard to imagine how this could make for compelling reading, but it does. Also highly recommended.
All of this is just a lead-in to the book I really wanted to mention, which I've just started, but can already unreservedly recommend. It's called The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman, an American who has been writing about science and nature for 30 years and has won a few awards for it. This is her ninth book. It was published last year to rave reviews. I can see why.
It's subtitled A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think. She writes about new science, often using entirely new methods, and the new understandings that have emerged around the incredible diversity in bird populations and, in particular, the incredible variety of behaviours. A central thesis is that the new science shows birds are far more intelligent than was ever realized or acknowledged, but with a different kind of intelligence from humans, achieved by different physiological strategies.
It might sound too science-y - I admit I had some reservations on that score myself before I started it - and it might sound like more than you ever really wanted to know about the subject. But the writing is very accessible, and it's quite entertaining.
A footnote: If you haven't seen the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series, The Durrells in Corfu, keep an eye out for reruns. It's delightful. (You can also buy it at Amazon or any of the other streaming content providers.) It's about the Durrell family's sojourn on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. Gerald was just a boy but already a mad-keen student and collector of animal life, and big brother Laurence was just starting his career as a slightly outré literary novelist. It stars the wonderful Keeley Hawes as the widowed mother. The actor who plays Prince Charles in the latest season of The Crown, Josh O'Connor, is Laurence.
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| Durrells in Corfu cast |
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