2015 read #46: H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
285 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 2 to September 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

There's something about the commingling of exquisitely perceptive nature writing with a raw, emotional, viscerally depicted memoir of personal grief and loss that sinks right into the quiet silt and calcified fossils in my heart. The most obvious parallel for this book is, of course, Wild by Cheryl Strayed: like Strayed, Macdonald is crushed under her grief for the loss of a parent and eventually immerses herself in a particular sense of wildness in order to reorder her life and fill the void. But Macdonald's prose is sensitive and keen in ways Strayed's good but not brilliant wording could never be, recalling Macdonald's peers in modern English nature prose-poetry, such as Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin. Macfarlane's grief at the passing of Deakin, in fact, makes his The Wild Places something of an exact analog. Macdonald, however, avoids the philosophical abstractions of Macfarlane and the contented noodling of Deakin to craft her own direct, incisive language of hurt and literal bewilderment. I have to go all the way back to the brilliance of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost to find a proper comparison: another near-perfect examination of loss and landscape.

Macdonald additionally interweaves a fascinating portrayal of T. H. White, most pertinently the author of The Goshawk, whose psychological profile provides both parallels and contrasts for Macdonald's own emotional burdens. Her psychosexual analysis of White is possibly too pat -- White's bumbling mistreatment of his beloved Gos probably doesn't tie in quite so directly with White's childhood abuse and suppressed desires -- but Macdonald makes of it fascinating reading.

2015 read #45: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
196 pages
Published 1945
Read from August 30 to September 2
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Having absorbed a vague idea of Steinbeck as a champion of the proletariat, I had invented a picture in my head of what Cannery Row would be, a sort of fishified follow-up to The Jungle, furnished with my own details of cannery thugs suppressing a movement to unionize and crooked California cops cracking heads among the Dustbowl spillover from the Central Valley. The actual Cannery Row, a humorous and low-key character study of genial vagrants, eccentrics, and casual wife-beaters living and drinking in the low-rent lots abutting the canneries, wasn't at all what I had imagined, but having read Travels with Charley, I can't say I was especially taken off-guard. I now have a general sense of what I might call the Steinbeckian mode, a wry Californian slant on the eccentric character sketch, also observable in the (much later, of course) below-poverty-line vignettes in Silver Jews songs. I appreciate any author who can furnish me with an eponymous adjective, especially when she or he gives a name to something I enjoy.

Planting Cannery Row firmly into its time period is a through-line of "woman-hating" (in the early twentieth century sense), a thesis examined by comparing the blissful bachelor life of Mack and his boys with the penultimate chapter, which depicts a gopher growing fat and happy in a choice burrowing spot on Cannery Row, but finding only trouble when he goes out to seek a mate, and finally abandoning his idyllic spot and risking traps in order to secure female companionship. That, too, seems Steinbeckian, to judge from Steinbeck's depictions of his final marriage in Travels ("She was a real woman, which meant that she was attracted to real men" -- a paraphrase). The most fascinating character by far, Doc adds the complication of love lost to this theme, perhaps the contrast of a subtler, more educated, more introverted mind approaching the problem of what constitutes happiness in life.

2015 read #44: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow.

Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
270 pages
Published 1975
Read from August 27 to August 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Someone (I believe it was Jory, the poet) recommended this one to me way back in the final days of my reading Dark Ages, sometime in 2012 or so. In a sense I could see how this novel would appeal to a poet, with its brevity, its laconic, almost clipped sentences, rarely extending beyond a single clause. Doctorow's brisk recitation of the lives of his characters can be vivid and moving, but is just as often more like the bare framework of a lusher novel left unwritten, rushing through weeks of events within a paragraph. Some resemblance to works of actual history is evident here. Nevertheless, the story is satisfying, provided you buy into the plot contrivance of the various characters continually crossing paths over the space of years -- which, really, could be a critique of much fiction.

Doctorow addresses uncomfortable realities of American history -- the horrors of tenement life, the exploitation of labor, institutional suppression of Black people together with their rights and interests -- directly enough, but with a cloying optimism that makes this a veritable textbook of the White liberal worldview: Things were really bad before, but if we all just work together and get along, things will be great in the future! The endcap, with the three children -- towheaded boy of privilege, sloe-eyed Jewish girl elevated from the slums, bastard child of a Black pianist -- living and playing together in Hollywood harmony, is far from subtle. While undoubtedly the Great American Novel of its time, a reassurance that the turmoil and resentments of its own age would soon be overcome by can-do American spirit and tolerance, Ragtime could be just as applicable to White liberal thought right up until the last few years, when the mere existence of a Black president was enough to unearth the (none too shallow) ugliness and disgusting hatred still rotting through the nation, and the justice system remains scarcely less skewed and violent in its racial prejudices than it was during the 1900s. Ragtime's optimism seems as far from the realities of human (more precisely, American) experience as the anarchic idealism of Red Emma Goldman or the occult Egyptomania of J. P. Morgan, as depicted within the novel. But it's a comforting sort of naivete,

2015 read #43: My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel.

My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel
Introduction by Peter Hopkirk
328 pages
Published 1927
Read from August 20 to August 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

An adventure tale on the antique model, full of benighted natives (though David-Neel's genial, paternalistic contempt for the rural poor of Tibet seems rooted more in classist assumptions than racial ones -- though she demonstrates those in plenty, as well) and a European slyly making her way across a distant, half-fabulous land. David-Neel embellishes her ostensibly true story (which I have no cause to doubt, at least in its broad outlines, any more than I would doubt any other exotic travel narrative of its time) with hints of Orientalist mysticism, lampshading each event with "Surely I must have been asleep and dreaming when I heard and saw this," clearly intending her readers to wonder if she really might have struggled with ghosts of lamas over cursed daggers, or called down demons upon startled robbers. If the intent was to whet interest in her subsequent volumes on Tibetan mysticism, it worked -- I'm halfway intrigued about it, and have already priced Magic and Mystery in Tibet on Amazon. I would put no more credence into it than I would, say, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventures with mediums, and for the same reasons, but it would be an area of folklore almost wholly new to me, and therefore especially tempting.

The first two-thirds or so of David-Neel's narrative is brisk and engaging, but even though the pace didn't appreciably suffer in the latter passages, I found myself losing interest and wishing the book were over with already. Perhaps that, once again, says more about my current attention span than about the relative merits of this work.

2015 read #42: Beauty by Robin McKinley.

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty & the Beast by Robin McKinley
247 pages
Published 1978
Read from August 10 to August 19
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Considering how long ago this book was published, and that it was Robin McKinley's first published novel, it isn't surprising that Beauty feels somewhat shallow and lacking compared to the other books of hers I've read. The Beauty and the Beast is one of the less thematically rich and engaging fairy tales, or at least one with a subtext harder to square with the feminist angles McKinley would pursue in her later work. After all, it's all about a virtuous girl choosing to redeem a man with the power of her love -- the tale that could describe any number of situations of abuse and gaslighting. McKinley's elaboration of the tale is breezy and pleasant enough in the early chapters, but once Beauty meets the Beast, I found myself bored and my interest nearly gone.

2015 read #41: Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck.

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
214 pages
Published 1962
Read from August 9 to August 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Only my second exposure to Steinbeck, Travels is my first brush with his non-fiction. I read Of Mice and Men close to a decade ago, and recall little of substance from it. I was impressed by Steinbeck's Twainian wit and amused by his multi-page panegyric to the wonder, the promise, the optimism of the mobile home park. (There's a bit of retrofuturism you won't see revived, though Steinbeck's mobile home utopia lives on in the current fad for "off the grid" bubble homes.) Steinbeck's observations of segregationist "Cheerladies" is one of the horrors of the too-recent past, sanitized in favor of pictures of the bravery of the Black children escorted into school, that wider culture has been content to ignore and forget, and which go a long way toward explaining the sad reality of our present.

I'm still digesting this brief but vivid work; I lack the critical breadth of experience and fount of words to pick it apart in detail. Sufficient to say that I would readily consider Travels one of the better books I've read this year.

2015 read #40: Doll Bones by Holly Black.

Doll Bones by Holly Black
247 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 7 to August 9
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

My brother and I didn't so much tell each other stories as come up with characters and bounce them off each other in improv comedy skits. I would go on to use the characters -- toned down versions, largely stripped of their adolescent-boy vulgarity and sexual depravity, but still recognizable -- in my earliest writings. Our characters began life as GI Joes: my main character Doug was the Freefall doll, while Randy's protagonist George was derived from Mainframe. The characters emerged in the process of playing a sort of graph-paper baseball with our dolls, then evolved over time, incorporating elements of slapstick cartoons and ultra-violence and Classical mythology until the former baseball superstars were immortal gods wielding whimsical, lecherous tyranny over their demesne. Writing stories down was my thing, begun when I was 9 or 10 years old, when Randy and I decided to transcribe one of our skits as it played out; he gave up after a page, while I (for example) cast my "sequel" to Jurassic Park with appropriate substitutions from our pantheon, years before I learned that fan-fiction was a thing. But whenever I doubted the central relationship in this book, in which the three 12 year old protagonists act out a protracted storytelling "game" with dolls and cardboard boxes standing in for pirates and queens and temples, I only had to remind myself how I got into the writing business -- and to recall that my brother, four years older than I, was still play-acting with our GI Joe dolls when I began writing out my stories.

I wanted to like this book. I thought I had read a promising short story or two by Holly Black, but I must have gotten her mixed up with the likes of Margo Lanagan or Kelly Link; I can't find a single reference to Black in my archived reviews, and I certainly wouldn't have encountered her before I began this reading project. But even without that to recommend her, the conceit of Doll Bones sounded nicely creepy, and the travails of adolescence and finding your friendships changed is always a productive mine for YA fantasy. Unfortunately, Doll Bones failed to distinguish itself on either front, neither especially creepy nor memorable and affecting. It goes through the motions, what with the big accusatory scene in which friendships are questioned right as the quest reaches its breaking point, doing its thing efficiently but without much impact. Plus there's the implausibility of three kids stealing a sailboat in broad daylight and noodling it down the Ohio River. I dunno, for a book revolving around a possibly-haunted doll possibly made from a little girl's bones, that just struck me as too far-fetched.