Book Pile
Every time I finish a book I want to include here I put it into a pile. Now the pile has toppled. I hardly know where to start except with the first that comes to mind. The Thing With Feathers by Noah Strycker, subtitled and subdescribed, as every nonfiction book is these days: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human. I cannot get this disturbing bit of information out of my head: The Pentagon has been researching a hummingbird-like Nano Drone. This remotely controlled fake hummingbird spyware would be painted like a real one and mimic darting movements. Fortunately, there is a difficult issue to surmount -- the drone's battery life is eight minutes. Basically, Strycker says, hummingbirds burn fuel like fighter jets. We would have to eat two hundred pounds of hamburger between breakfast and dinner to match a hummer's intake. "In terms of energy, hummingbirds live at the edge of physical possibility." This book is packed with marvelous bits of information and I'm going to give it to my father.
Per Petterson's new novel, I Refuse, is unnervingly terse and starkly beautiful. It is a small porthole window that provides glimpses of damaged unassailable love. I don't think Petterson uses a single adverb -- stunningly stunning. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, uses quite a few. They are in keeping with the Victorianesque text. This novel was perfectly deserving of the Man Booker Prize. Wendell Berry's novel, Hannah Coulter, seems a quiet novel. For many of its pages it is the story of a woman's not unusual life, if you remember that many people made their lives on farms. It is at the end in the description of the Okinawan people and the battlefield their land became, that this novels delivers its power whole into the reader's hands. I am still reading Elena Ferrante's addictive trilogy which begins with My Brilliant Friend.
When there isn't a book I can get involved with close to hand, I pick up old favorites. Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell, always moves me with its simplicity. The ruin of a decent but oblivious man by careless distant relatives gives each page an implacable weight. Yet the novel itself so light on the surface, so precise in every spare scene and nimble word. I read The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. Also an implacable story, told with keen relish for conversation and description of life during the brazen boom years of the mid-1980's in the UK, when AIDS was a set of wild rumors which became devastating truth.
In the end, the only book that matters in light of today's announcement by the U.N. that we are at the cliff's edge, maybe plunging over, into a broken climate that could knock out our species, is This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. Please read this book.
