2024 read #40: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.*

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson*

277 pages

Published 1998

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread. 

When I read this book at 16, way back in 1999, I was already fixated on hiking the Appalachian Trail. I had grown up living in the woods — or, more precisely, I had grown up on the road, which by age 12 had devolved into sleeping in the car in various parks and forests from the Adirondacks to the Cascades, from the Mogollon Rim to the Black Hills.

My father had, in his saner days, indulged in the Rocky Mountain High vibe of the ’70s. He harbored a glimmer of that even as he turned paranoid and violent with age, one dim spark of humanity lingering as he devolved into a monster. At one point in my tweens, he thrifted the February 1987 issue of National Geographic, which had the article “Appalachian Trail: A Tunnel Through Time.” I pored through it again and again, examining every photograph, imagining myself at this particular shelter, navigating that specific piece of trail, finding this certain wildflower. When I fantasized about leaving my father behind in my impending adulthood, it was natural that I couldn’t conceptualize anything beyond walking away into the woods. (I certainly couldn’t imagine integrating into human society.)

All of which is more depressing and confessional than what I meant to say, which is merely that, as an outdoor hipster, I was well acquainted with the Appalachian Trail long before I encountered this book on the Wal-Mart bestseller rack. For the public at large, though, I understand that A Walk in the Woods was a moment of discovery. It is often cited as one of the main reasons the AT became over-popularized, setting in motion what would ultimately become the “walking frat party” of the yearly thru-hiker bubble. (Browsing the shelves of used bookstores, where, to this day, 80% of the outdoor recreation section will be stacks of this book, lends its anecdotal support to this idea.) Like any treasured place, the AT was better loved when it was less famous.

All of that, of course, still lay in the future. A quarter-century ago, avoiding my father as best as I could from the passenger seat, I read and reread A Walk in the Woods with all the intensity of a religious text, a meditation. So much so that, like childhood staples The War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park, every word and every line is familiar to this day, which I wasn’t expecting when I picked it up again for this revisit. I had truly forgotten how much this book had meant to me, once upon a time.

That nostalgia gloss is an awkward reading companion today. Turns out I don’t really like Woods anymore. Living in a car, I didn’t pick up on Bryson’s casual misogyny. Most women who cross his path get lampooned: desperate, unattractive, fat, unintelligent, prattling, oblivious. The only men he caricatures with equal gusto are the Appalachian rural poor, because of course this book is classist as hell, too.

In general, Bryson’s humor feels stale and mean-spirited to me nowadays, reading like an uncomplicated normie sitcom from the ’90s: Everybody Loves Raymond, maybe, or The King of Queens, something with a lot of fat jokes and a scolding wife, with the character Katz as the larger-than-life neighbor who gets cheers from the studio audience. Sometimes Bryson indulges in moments of almost enjoying himself, but then it’s right back to whole chapters of complaining about fat people, hostels, mice, maps, gizmos, rain, rain gear, or the National Park Service. It’s exhausting far more often than it is charming. (In retrospect, it explains why On the Beaten Path would be published so quickly thereafter. Clearly, the publishers thought “cranky misanthrope on the Appalachian Trail” was a license to print money.)

2024 read #39: Oroonoko by Aphra Behn.

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A True History by Aphra Behn

Edited with introduction and notes by Janet Todd

133 pages

Published 1688

Read from March 28 to March 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

My partner R and I are in the midst of packing for a move up north. Almost all of my books are already boxed up. What’s left is a dwindling pile of books I’m unsure whether I want to pack or leave behind. This book, a Penguin Classics edition I got at a used bookstore for 75 cents, is part of this residue. Now that I've read it, I have no need to bring it!

I approached Oroonoko as a document from a transitional stage in the culture of Atlantic Europe. Recognizable concepts of race as a social hierarchy were gradually developing from the “Christian vs heathen” dichotomy, as a result of colonialism, plantation economies, and the slave trade, but these ideas were in their infancy, and far from universal. (See Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People.) Class and rank were more pressing concerns to avowed royalist Behn. Traumatized as a youth by the English Civil War and the joyless years of the Commonwealth, Behn wrote Oroonoko toward the tumultuous end of James II's reign, when another Stuart sovereign was on the verge of capitulation. The true horror for Behn is not that Africans were enslaved, but rather that an African prince, a natural aristocrat who quotes Plutarch and praises England’s “great monarch” Charles I, could have been enslaved, like a mere commoner.

Which isn't to say that the book isn’t horridly racist. It’s an Early Modern English caricature of a West African couple, set in an early colonial Suriname. It’s all kinds of racist.

Oroonoko is also a document of literary transition. Some consider it one of the earliest novels in English; it predates Robinson Crusoe by three decades. As a book, it’s as awkward as a toddler’s steps. Behn’s background in drama is clear; much of the book reads like someone is summing up for you a play they attended, all the melodrama with none of the poetry of line or command of performance. (At a climactic death scene, Behn writes, “[It] is not to be doubted but the parting… must be very moving.”) Behn claims in her dedication to have penned the story in a matter of hours, which I can well believe. The result is a dud, only marginally worthwhile due to its interesting position in the evolution of the genre.

2024 read #38: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

280 pages

Published 1974

Read from March 13 to March 28

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Classics of nature writing are haunted by the outlines of everything we’ve destroyed.

In the fifty years since Pilgrim was published, we’ve lost uncountable numbers of birds; insect populations have been in free fall; amphibians have collapsed. The very soil has become sterile, quenched by herbicides and pesticides. Where Dillard pondered the vastness of divinity and the cruel beauty of nature under troublesome clouds of starlings, you might be lucky to see a scatter of sparrows today. Most of Tinker Creek itself, Dillard’s “one great giver,” today seems a ghost watershed, squeezed between the culs-de-sac and fulfillment centers that sprawl out from Roanoke and the I-81 corridor.

The spirit of intellectual Christianity lurking throughout this book is also pretty much extinct. At least it is in America, where the loudest elements of the faith champion a skin-deep literalism, fully commercialized and dead inside. Atheism and Christlike Christianity alike are capable of transcendence, the ecstatic revelations of humility before the infinite; the greatest exaltation an American evangelist can know is browbeating a waitress on a Sunday afternoon.

At its heart, Pilgrim is a book-length consideration of the cruelty within nature’s beauty, a rumination on how any conception of a creator god must incorporate the blood-spill as well as the birdsong, the parasite alongside the petals:

For if God is in one sense the igniter, a fireball that spins over the ground of continents, God is also the destroyer, lightning, blind power, impartial as the atmosphere. 

From an atheist’s point of view, of course, the matter is much clearer, though no less awe-making. We are intelligent animals reliant on our deeply enmeshed social bonds; beauty (or rather the appreciation of it) is the newcomer, yet vital to us nonetheless, as vital as the sometimes bloody workings of mere survival. We are part of nature, inseparable, and that is glory.

I can respect intellectual Christianity, but it has died back faster than the insects have, these last fifty years. In contrast to either atheism or intellectual Christianity, contemporary evangelicalism presents a pop-up picture book understanding of the world, a paper cutout universe merely six thousand years deep, reducing us all to children play-acting for our abusive sky-dad’s jollies. Animals, plants, nature as a whole — all of it recedes into the background art from a Dick & Jane book. I can only imagine how many contemporary Southern Baptists in Dillard’s western Virginia would decry her spiritual masterpiece as evolutionist sacrilege.

I’m pretty sure Robert Macfarlane name-dropped this book in one or more of his tributes to the titans of nature writing past. It’s more than worthy of such notice. Every line jolts or shimmers with the mystery of language, scintillating or concealing in intricate patterns like cloud-shadow tumbling ahead of the wind. At least once a page, this book takes my breath away:

Some trees sink taproots to rock; some spread wide mats of roots clutching at acres. They will not be blown. We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?

Like the best nature writing, Pilgrim is about learning to see; and, having seen, sensing how much else exists beyond our awareness. The present is elusive, recursive, a revelation quickly lost in other stimulation. I’m reminded of The Anthropology of Turquoise or A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A magnificent book.

2024 read #37: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

214 pages

Published 1954

Read from March 20 to March 25

Rating: 3 out of 5

As a precocious reader whose parent seldom let them access anything more recent than the Edwardian era, I’ve been something of an Anglophile my whole life, swooning over misty mornings on the downs and the ancient lines of hedgerows depicted by Doyle. And as a lifelong history nerd, Roman Britain was long a special interest of mine: an era of long-distance trade, culture contact, and people moving between continents long before any modern conception of “race” had been invented, with Britain itself a wooded land of fog and wolves at the edge of the world. It’s a shame that the definitive modern fantasy novel about Roman Britain (The Mists of Avalon) was written by one of those sex predators all too common in twentieth century SFF. I’ll certainly never make the effort to read it.

The Eagle of the Ninth got name-checked in one of the British histories I read in recent months, possibly In the Land of Giants. And for the most part, it delivers on what I’d want from an adventure novel set in Roman Britain. Its historical accuracy is debatable, but Sutcliff vividly depicts the culture and day to day life in Roman fort and town, from food to clothing to smells and sounds. The dialogue has a formal rhythm that makes the characters truly feel like they’re from a culture distinct from the reader’s. Sutcliff’s descriptions of nature beyond the walls are impeccable, poetic, worthy of any contemporary British nature writer:

He heard the bees zooming among the bell-heather of the clearing, smelled the warm aromatic scents of the sun-baked birch woods overlaying the cold saltiness of the sea; singled out one among the wheeling gulls and watched it until it became lost in a flickering cloud of sun-touched wings.

Most unexpectedly for 1954, there are distinct queer overtones to the companionship between disabled Centurion Marcus and manumitted Brit Esca. It’s no The Last of the Wine, but it’s far more emotionally tender and more intimately portrayed than I would have expected.

That said, Eagle absolutely shows its age. There’s the whole thing about Marcus purchasing Esca as a personal slave in the first place. (Accurate to the time period, but a dubious way for a writer to begin a relationship between two fictional characters, by modern standards.) There’s a line about how hereditary slaves, unlike those captured in battle, are simply used to slavery and don’t mind it. There's also a hugely uncomfortable age gap relationship between Marcus and a teenage girl named Cottia. Again, possibly accurate to the time period, but a questionable choice for a modern writer to make.

2024 read #36: Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna by Michael Swanwick.

Michael Swanwick’s Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna by Michael Swanwick

Artwork by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

32 pages

Published 2004

Read March 13

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This chapbook — scarcely more than a pamphlet — collects two sequences of dinosaur-themed microfiction. The first, “Michael Swanwick’s Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna,” was published in 2003 as a promotional tie-in for Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth. The second, “Five British Dinosaurs,” was originally published in Interzone in 2002. I spent $9 on a secondhand copy — that’s almost 30 cents per page.

“Guide” includes thirteen vignettes, each centered on a particular extinct genus or species. “The Thief of Time: Eoraptor: early Carnian” was an out-of-the-gate highlight. Most of the vignettes are delightful, but a few of them are dated by the kind of sweeping nationalist assumptions certain authors liked to include twenty-odd years ago.

Each fic is scarcely a morsel, a scene-setting plus a punchline. It’s a shame they were written to promote a book that took place mostly in boardrooms, because Bones of the Earth would have benefited immensely from some colorful interstitials along these lines, while these yarns would benefit from just a bit more room to breathe.

“Five British Dinosaurs” is a more focused sequence of, well, British punchlines: pixies inadvertently leading Mary Ann Mantell to the first Iguanodon teeth, a bone-headed pachycephalosaur sitting in Parliament, a Megalosaurus stopping by for tea, and so on. I’d love to see more stories along these lines, fleshed out and given more life than this tasting-menu format permits.

2024 read #35: Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson.

Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson

224 pages

Published 2015

Read from March 5 to March 11

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I found this collection in a local used bookstore. I’ve had memorable experiences with Nalo Hopkinson’s novels in the past, and this book in particular has a cool, evocative cover, which was enough to make me buy it.

But reading Hopkinson’s foreword was what convinced me I’d likely love these stories. The collection’s title — a Cordwainer Smith quotation — is used here to describe Hopkinson’s growth from a depressed teenager, despising humanity, hopeless in the face of the world’s injustices, to a more confident and optimistic person, embraced and buoyed by community. Granted, 2015 was a wholly different world in many ways. Being optimistic was more plausible then than it is today. But I want to get back some sense of community, which I briefly gained after my own misanthropic teen years before I lost it again. So Hopkinson’s foreword was instantly relatable.

Plus, I’m intrigued by all the stories first published in now-forgotten themed anthologies: Girls Who Bite Back, Monstrous Affections, Queer Fear. They all sound so cool and interesting. I want to get into themed anthologies more going forward, both as a reader and as a writer.

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“The Easthound” (2012). Creative and atmospheric spin on werewolves. Warrens of children eke out survival after all the teens and adults “sprout” into furry carnivores, a pandemic of lycanthropy triggered by puberty. But all the survivors are getting older. A haunting story, expertly structured. Excellent.

“Soul Case” (2008). Brief but vivid account of the maroon nation of Chynchin, a fictional quilombo facing attack from colonialist soldiers on camels. I wish there had been more of this story. I’m assuming it forms a prologue / prequel / backstory to a longer body of work. (Some slight digging reveals that, yes, Chynchin appears in several of Hopkinson’s stories.)

“Message in a Bottle” (2005). Domestic near-future fiction is still all too rare, but it was even scarcer back in the '00s. This piece is as thoroughly '00s as it gets, though: narrator Greg watches young Kamla grow in her adoptive family, only to discover that Kamla (and many kids like her) are actually from the future, sent back in time in clone form in bodies designed to age slowly and live for centuries. It's a solid enough story, though the social and political changes since 2005 make the intergenerational research concerns here seem quaint.

“The Smile on the Face” (2005). Gilla is a teenage girl, pressured by social expectations to hate every aspect of herself: her hair, her size, her existence as a girl, her ability to talk to trees. But, as in the tale of St. Margaret she has to read for school — a Christian hagiography that sounds suspiciously like a woman abandoning the role foisted upon her by the faith and turning to old, feminine tree magic in her hour of need — Gilla learns to embrace her own power. Hopkinson ties these threads together so ably, she makes it look effortless.

“Left Foot, Right” (2014). A strange and beautiful contemporary fairy tale about grief, a car crash, crabs, and borrowed shoes. Quite good.

“Old Habits” (2011). Outstanding tale of ghosts stuck haunting a mall. Sweet, melancholy, and unexpectedly horrifying, all at once. Possibly my favorite story here so far.

“Emily Breakfast” (2010). This one begins so gently, and unfolds so slowly, I had no idea what to expect. It's an utterly charming slice-of-life tale, disarmingly intimate and queer and full of community, spiced with just the right amount of fantasy touches: cats with wings, chickens that breathe fire, messenger lizards. You know the standard SFF writing advice, that line that says genre elements should always be integral to the story and tie into its themes? This story ignores all that, and is all the better for it. It's so good! I aspire to write like this. Another favorite.

“Herbal” (2002). This zippy little fable literalizes the elephant in the room, and follows it through its logical outcome. Entertaining. 

“A Young Candy Daughter” (2004). Another charming little tale, this one about a young savior growing into her miracles.

“A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog” (2006). A sharply detailed and absorbing character study of narrator Tammy Griggs, who keeps orchids, sets off sprinklers to water them in apartments, and drifts in the liminal space between biology and magic. There are also hybrid rats with wings. Mesmerizing.

“Shift” (2002). A contemporary reframing of The Tempest that examines intersections of color and sex, power and prejudice. It is spellbinding in its lyricism, in its magics of water and cream. 

“Delicious Monster” (2002). Another piece that expertly weaves together the domestic and the cosmic. Jerry grew up with a distant, angry, unhappy father, and is resentful now that his dad Carlos has become a better version of himself, happy with his partner Sudharshan in a way he had never been during Jerry’s childhood. But a solar eclipse marks the arrival of something new. Another outstanding piece.

“Snow Day” (2005). While out shoveling snow, our narrator meets a raccoon and discovers, to their mutual distaste, that they can get inside each other’s minds. But that’s only the beginning, as other animals converge upon the city and the minds of its people. And then spaceships land. Charming.

“Flying Lessons” (2015). A beautifully written fable that shields the horrifying trauma beneath. 

“Whose Upward Flight I Love” (2000). Marvelous imagery highlights this microfic of trees caged in the city, and the fall storms that sometimes set them free. Gorgeous and succinct.

“Blushing” (2009). A contemporary fairy tale with Gothic overtones. A new bride gets the keys to every room in the tastefully updated Victorian, except one. Naturally, I loved the meticulous geological details of where the stone façades and surfaces were sourced. I didn’t expect the twist ending. Brief but unsettling.

“Ours Is the Prettiest” (2011). Long ago, flush with the discovery of Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, I attempted to read her novel Finder, set in the Borderland shared universe. It never clicked for me; I abandoned it a few pages in, and never tried to get into anything else from the setting afterward. This story comes from a much more recent Bordertown revival. Like anything from a shared universe, the backstory is somewhat opaque, but Hopkinson’s deft hand with exposition made it easy to sink into its rhythms. Pure ’90s urban fantasy, but updated and reinvigorated, “Prettiest” is vivid and queer and boisterous, once again mixing character drama with a rich and magical backdrop. I’m not necessarily intrigued to read more Borderland stories after this, but I’d love to read more like this from Nalo Hopkinson. Another new favorite.

“Men Sell Not Such in Any Town” (2015). It’s odd how I never heard of Goblin Market until last year, and now that I know about it and have read it, I keep noticing references to it in unexpected places. Hopkinson cites Market as the inspiration for her novel Sister Mine, but says this brief story takes only its title (and its tempting fruits) from the poem. Atmospheric like a hothouse, this little tale. Voluptuous and sensual.

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And that’s it for this collection! It was a delight start to finish, perhaps the most consistently excellent single-author collection I’ve read so far.

2024 read #34: Smith of Wootton Major by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Smith of Wootton Major by J. R. R. Tolkien

Illustrations by Pauline Diana Baynes

59 pages

Published 1967

Read March 6

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Is this a Christ allegory? Is it about philology? Or is it plain old faery fantasy? Wikipedia doesn’t know! Personally, I read it as a meditation on growing old, mortality, and entrusting the next generation.

This is a brief and fairly conventional midcentury fantasy, largely pleasant and unremarkable. A cook, full of unearned confidence, chucks a fay-star into a special cake for the children. The fay-star gets swallowed by a boy (later named Smith), and attaches itself to his forehead, permitting him long walks into Faery and blessing his skill at the forge.

Unsurprisingly, the best parts of this morsel were Tolkien’s thumbnail descriptions of the wonders of Faery, such as the Vale of Evermorn. The worst part of it is how it ends with a prolonged fat joke, equating the old cook’s negative qualities with his fatness. You could have ended this tale ten pages early and not lost anything of substance, which is a lot in a story this brief.