The Nature of Things

I had been looking forward to the publication of this book since I first read about it a few weeks ago. I had preordered it on my Kindle. When it was delivered this week, as luck would have it, I had just finished reading another book and so I pounced on it. I read Weather essentially in one sitting, something I almost never do. True, it is a short book, just over 200 pages and it was raining outside that day and so my other preferred activities were limited. But the main reason for the quick read is that the writing is propulsive. Each paragraph or section leads one inexorably to the next.  The format of the narrative is somewhat like a diary. Each entry could almost be seen as discrete, standing on its own, and yet each entry also encourages the reader to read on, to see what is coming next. The narrator of the novel is Lizzie Benson, who abandoned her graduate studies to take care of her drug-addicted and depressed brother. She never returned to those studies, but with the inte...

Mexico is my next-door neighbor. I live in an area that is made immeasurably richer culturally by Mexican immigrants and people of Mexican heritage. My neighbors, friends, and, yes, employees are some of those people. For those reasons, I was particularly interested to hear about this book. And then shortly after I first heard of it, it seemed the book world exploded along a strict dichotomy of opinions; either it was a "new American classic" or it was a rank example of cultural appropriation and whitewashing. At that point, I tried to distance myself from all the hoopla about the book. I wanted to read it myself and make up my own mind. By now it seems that the plot of the novel is perhaps too well known to have to recount it here, but briefly:  Lydia Quixano Pérez  is a bookstore owner with a comfortable life in Acapulco, living with her husband who is a journalist and her beloved son, Luca. One day a man comes into her bookstore and purchases some books that are among her ...

I laughed out loud when I read this poem last week. It sounds so familiar. It's just like some of the conversations my husband and I have. Does anyone else have conversations like this? Where’s that thing? by John Kenney Where’s that thing? you ask me looking in the cabinet above the stove. The new one or old one, I reply, fairly sure you know what I mean. Old one. Under the sink. It’s not there. Just look. I’m looking. Look under that stuff. It’s not here. The other stuff. Nope. Wait. You mean the green one? No. Blue. I think it’s blue. Oh. That’s in the drawer. I checked the drawer. Did you check behind the plastic thing? We’re talking about the same thing, right, the one with the    weird top? Of course. Wait. Here it is.

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : It's bluebird season. This female Eastern Bluebird is checking out a potential nesting site. Pairs are already nesting or they are searching for a place to raise their chicks. They and the Carolina Wrens and Carolina Chickadees like to get an early start on nesting. Early birds get more caterpillars to feed their families. *~*~*~* Coming off the warmest January on record, Antarctica is now breaking heat records as well. On Thursday a temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded, making it the hottest day on record for the continent.  *~*~*~* More sad news from the Monarch butterfly sanctuary in Mexico: A second activist has been found dead there. He had disappeared on January 27 and his body was found on top of a hill this week. He was covered in bruises and had a serious wound to his head. The illegal loggers in the area are suspected of being implicated in this death as well as the earlier one. *~*~*~* The ...

"A long petal of the sea" is a phrase that Pablo Neruda employed in a poem describing his homeland, Chile. Isabel Allende appropriated it for the title of her book and she heads each chapter of it with a quote from one of Neruda's poems. Neruda even appears as a character in this historical fiction novel. At times, he seems to overwhelm the story. At the heart of the narrative though is the story of Victor Dalmau and Roser Bruguera and it begins in Spain in 1939. In the 1930s the Spanish Civil War is raging. Victor lives in Barcelona with his parents and brother, Guillem, and with Roser who is a poor child who was a piano student of Victor's father. She showed great promise and when she was abused by her family, the Dalmaus took her in. In time, Roser fell in love with Guillem, and by the time he joined the republican forces fighting against Franco, she was pregnant with his child. Victor was not inclined to join the fight. Instead, he was studying to be a doctor. But...

After reading a long and challenging book, I needed a quick and easy read so I turned to Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police series. I generally enjoy these visits to the Perigord region of France with all the references to French history and the landscape of the region, plus, of course, the descriptions of all the delicious meals that Bruno cooks for his friends. But Walker lost me early on in this one and I was so irritated that I found myself nitpicking my way through the book. And I found a lot of nits to pick. It was all because of the cat. Claudia, a young American art student, is in the area to work with an aging art scholar who has a fabulous collection of paintings. In researching the paintings and their provenance, Claudia comes to suspect that some of the paintings have been falsely attributed by the scholar.  And then Claudia ends up dead in a well. Her body is found in the water at the bottom of the well and standing on top of her body is a kitten. Claudia was a cat...

Barbara Crooker imagines a perfect day. A day when "For twenty-four hours, all politicians will be silent." And we might add that no postings to Twitter will be allowed. Yes, it does sound like the perfect day. Let us dream that it could happen. Tomorrow.  Tomorrow by Barbara Crooker there will be sun, scalloped by clouds, ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong. It will be a temperate seventy-five, low humidity. For twenty-four hours, all politicians will be silent. Reality programs will vanish from TV, replaced by the “snow” that used to decorate our screens when reception wasn’t working. Soldiers will toss their weapons in the grass. The oceans will stop their inexorable rise. No one will have to sit on a committee. When twilight falls, the aurora borealis will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet. We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek, decorate our hair with fireflies, spin until we’re dizzy, collapse on the dew-decked lawn and look up, perhaps for the first time, ...