I’m going to post these excerpts from “my other blog” here because they’re about books and I think I’d like to keep that material together here rather than just including a link. Hope you don’t mind the duplication.
I’m reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. The subtitle is Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, and the book offers brilliant narratives of plant life based on all the science you could hope for from a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY. Fascinating stuff about the ways that pecan trees manage to synchronize their irregular fruiting, about the marriage of algae and fungi that is lichen, about the surprising discovery that some plants — sweetgrass is her prime example — do better for being harvested. . . But it’s the book’s rich spirituality that keeps me turning pages, the “indigenous wisdom” she draws from to lament what’s been lost, yes, but also to point to harmonious ways of being in the world, ways that humans can (and do!) play a positive ecological role. Ways that helping Nature (and admitting that we’re part of it) helps us. . . .
So much of what I’ve been reading in her essays over the last week resonated even more forcefully yesterday as my husband and I watched Leave No Trace, a beautiful, moving, and powerful film directed by Debra Granik (who last brought us A Winter’s Bone). Superb acting by a new sure-to-be-star Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster, but the implicit commentary about home and homelessness in America is given a rich emotional weight, arouses (in me, at least) such a nostalgia, an atavistic longing for a “natural” home in the world. . . The forests of the Pacific Northwest might read differently to me, as they did to Paul last evening, because we have spent some time in them, although we haven’t camped for decades. But the contrast between the world that humanity, our indigenous selves, was once born into, and what we’ve made of it. . . That’s me, though. The film’s nowhere near as heavy or preachy as those last sentences might suggest, and I highly recommend you see it — and the lush gravity of the forest scenes really deserve a big screen and good sound system.
And for a lighter read, a perfect summer book (although I’d also enjoy curling up with this in an armchair some rainy fall day. . .
Liam Callanan’s Paris by the Book. Love, romance, Paris, a mysterious disappearance, Paris, a 40-something mother re-building her life by managing a(n English language) bookshop in Paris, a 30-something gallant courting said mother, two adolescent daughters who quickly acquire texting/SMS skills in a second language, numerous well-drawn and quirky characters, and um, did I mention Paris?! The book is satisfyingly but not ponderously rife with literary and filmic allusions — fans of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline books and of Pascal Lamorisse’s brilliant film The Red Balloon will be pleased.
I know! Two posts in less than a week. (and there’s another in the pipeline. . . )
Braiding Sweetgrass sounds wonderful, and I've added it to my list, although at this point there is no telling when I'll actually get to it.
I just started reading a sort of paranormal/spiritual mystery called Wine of Angels by Phil Rickman. A friend had recommended a series on Netflix based on the second novel in the series, Midwinter of the Spirit, and I thought I'd read the book first. Probably silly. But so far it is interesting, and the character development is appealing. It is not a fast paced book, but that is fine by me. The author seems to be very good at capturing the dynamics of village life, and the often turbulent undercurrents where change meets tradition in both village life and the church, so I'll be intrigued to see how the book turns out. I'm only a few chapters in.