In the Company of Trees

Posted on February 21, 2024 by smellincoffee

In the Company of Trees is a little volume of photos and reflections on trees, a pleasant mixture of science and cultural writing peppered with arboreal quotes — though not, curiously, the classic “I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a tree”. (That verse is partially appropriated for the title of one section, though.) A piece on the life of the strangler fig tree is followed by a history of Christmas trees, for instance, and connected by a bit of German verse hailing the trueness of Tannenbäume. The photos are often gorgeous, and despite having read full-length monographs on trees and forests, I still learned a few things: I’d never heard of the Wollemi evergreen, for instance, an ancient species considered a living fossil and now being actively propagated, nor of fig stranglers. The trees that feature here hail from every part of the globe, including Antarctica, which was once subtropical. This is a coffee-table kind of book, attractive and easy to dip in and out of. Those who want a hardier read would most enjoy Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, one of my favorite science books ever.

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The Littlest Library

Posted on February 21, 2024 by smellincoffee

Such is my mood for cozy village novels featuring libraries and bookstores that I read this even knowing it was a romance. And I liked it. Granted, it’s set in a cozy rural village in Devon and features a librarian, so even with the romance bit it’s playing straight to my tastes — and frankly, the romance bits aren’t that much numerous than I’ve found in Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe books. Instead of happening among battles and political plots, though, they emerge amid exciting village politics, like whether the red phone box should house a little library or a defibrillator machine. As the plot opens, our lead Jess Metcalfe is a librarian who has just lost her job and is planning on fleeing the house that reminds her all too much of her recently deceased grandmother, the woman who raised her. On a drive she takes a left turn and finds herself in a quaint but slightly decaying little village and is immediately distracted by a similarly quaint-but-decaying cottage within, and the grumpy guy with broad shoulders who lives next door and has an oh-so-adowable-and-precocious daughter. No points for guessing where the plot goes from there! Jess buys the cottage and discovers that she’s now responsible for the red phone box on the property, and decides to turn it into a little lending library that proves to be a newfound nucleus for the village to rally around, finding joy in arguing about books instead of slowly drowning themselves in wine. There are various little drama-strings that get all tied up at the end, so this is basically a Hallmark movie in a book — but frankly, right on the heels of a few grim SF reads, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Highlights:

“I haven’t accidentally moved into one of those Agatha Christie sets, where the body count climbs relentlessly but there’s always cucumber sandwiches for tea?”

“I appreciate there’s a lot of ‘accidentally getting pregnant,’ and I just want to reassure you we’ve worked out what causes it now, what with Rak being a doctor and all.”

Coming up: The Royal Society, air conditioners, this and that…

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The Downloaded

Posted on February 20, 2024 by smellincoffee

In the 26th century, two groups of humans are awakening. The first are a group of scientists who think they’re on a spaceship headed toward Proxima Centauri, there to begin Earth’s first colony. The second are criminals who were part of a experiment: a la DS9’s “Hard Time”, they’d serve their prison sentences virtually, living decades in their heads while only a short time passed for realsies. Both parties have their bodies frozen and their consciousnesses stored on a Quantum Computer. Only…..something’s gone wrong, for both parties, and instead of finding themselves colonizing space or going home to see their loved ones, both groups wake up in an Earth lab hundreds of years in the future where the only known living humans are Mennonites. Too bad they’re going to die because in addition to the civilization-ending Whatsit that happened, there’s a-coming a planet-busting asteroid known as Brimstone, so the humans’ only hope is to board the hundreds-of-years-old spaceship and get the hell out of Dodge. The result is a mixed bag, an audio drama with a solid ensemble cast and sound effects that is quite enjoyable to listen to when the voice actors aren’t being brought down by the author’s uninteresting political insertions (lecturing people on covid face-diapers? Really?) and the thoroughly depressing storyline. The mix of ‘interesting premise’ and ‘insufferable author’ is consistent with his Hominids trilogy, the first of which I liked well enough, but found just obnoxious enough not to bother continuing with — and that was before I’d completed my transition from ‘increasingly dispirited progressive’ into ‘thoroughly cranky libertarian’. If you’re really into Brendan Fraser and like audiodramas, this will probably be enjoyable, but I can’t imagine trying to finish the book without the strengths added by the cast.

And now, a Fraser-related palate-cleanser:

Ah-ah! Eee-eee! Tooki-tooki!
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Tuesday Teasing

Posted on February 20, 2024 by smellincoffee

I was starting to get the feeling there was a lot Sloane hadn’t told me. Blood pressure cuffs. Enchiladas. Tall, strange men who weren’t her fiancé. This was turning into a very intriguing book club.

The Lonely Hearts Book Club, Lucy Gilmore

Irish folk songs, as far as I can tell, have mainly to do with drinking, pretty girls, missing your homeland, beating up British soldiers, and taking somebody else’s things.

The Lies of Our Time, Anthony Esolen

Turkeys have been known to attack and seriously injure grown men, and once, down by the road, one of them attacked our dog (a dog who was no longer living when I began to feed deer), as we learned when we heard her screaming as if she’d been hit by a car. We ran to her aid and found her cowering under some bushes. In a nearby tree a big tom turkey was looking down at her with his feathers all fluffed.

The Hidden Life of Deer, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
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404

Posted on February 18, 2024 by smellincoffee
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The Hidden Life of Deer

Posted on February 17, 2024 by smellincoffee

There’s a buck mounted in my living room, but it’s not a head: it’s a large photograph of one standing at a stream in the woods, dawn light softly illuminating the morning mist. I find deer, second to horses, utterly beautiful creatures – -at least, provided they aren’t standing alongside the road on dark winter nights, threatening to bolt at a moment’s notice and destroy whatever vehicle is passing along. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas shares that admiration for deer, and makes a habit of feeding the population that lives in the New Hampshire woods near her house. Her interest in them, though, goes beyond merely giving them something to eat in exchange for the joy of watching them as she might a group of hummingbirds: instead, she’s intently curious about them, a genuine student who pokes through their winter stools to gauge their health, and yearns to know the land as intimately as they do. She identifies four distinct groups in the population around her, which she labels Alpha, Beta, Epsilon, and Tau, and most of her study is on social dynamics: the four groups all have interior hierarchies, with clearly dominant females who guide the feeding. Curiously, lower-class females in a group will stop eating and move with the group as soon as the dominant female decides it’s time to move on, even if they haven’t had their fill. Amusingly, though, some lower-status deer will use alarm signals to spook the group into hiding so they can scarf some food down before joining their mates: I’ve read of similar behavior among primates who use predator alarms to frighten their troopmates away from choice fruit. Thomas’ observations aren’t strictly organized the way Leonard Rue’s Whitetail Savvy was (the only book on deer behavior I can find that’s not hunting-oriented) , but she covers the basics: how deer change through the seasons, their methods of communicating, etc. The back half of the book is less about deer and more general nature observations. Thomas identifies as a tree-hugger, and her approach is a quirky mix of serious scientific approaches (poring through scat) and references to Gaia ‘setting forth a path’ and ‘telling deer’ what to do. I enjoyed the volume as a reflection on nature, but for more serious content Rue is still the go-to source — and he’s referred to consistently.

Related:
Giant Whitetails and Whitetail Savvy. The first is bowhunting stories; the second is a more comprehensive study of deer intelligence, behavior, etc.

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The Lonely Hearts Book Club

Posted on February 14, 2024 by smellincoffee
This world was a terrible place. It gave you people to love and then took them away before you stopped loving them. It made you mean and angry and cruel to those who needed you most. It ground you down until it was all
you could do to get through the day. But most of all, it tried to convince you that you were alone in your suffering.

Sloane is a librarian in her late twenties, idly drifting into a contented if wholly nondescript and unsatisfying life. One of the few things she genuinely looks forward to are visits by an old crank, Arthur, a verbose curmudgeon whose erudite insults and cantankerous attitude frighten most of the library staff. Sloane gives back as good as she gets, and the sparring brings a little excitement into her day: he’s also one of the few people who genuinely says what’s on his mind, and as someone who lives within a shell of politeness, surrounded by people who are similarly polite and artificial, it’s a breath of fresh air, however artic. Then, Arthur begins failing to show up, and a concerned Sloane investigates. She will find him bedridden and attended to by nurses, having endured a recent fall, and invite herself further into his life. Despite his protests, the old man not only tolerates but enjoys her company, and around these two will grow a little collection of drifting souls who bond over their arguments with books and searches for something else in their lives — including Arthur’s estranged grandson, his neighbor who is struggling with her own daughter, and one of Sloane’s coworkers.  The result is an utterly sweet story of friendships blooming, lives changed, and love manifesting itself beyond romance.

I instantly love curmudgeons, the more cantankerous the better: I want to be one when I grow up, and am constantly practicing my harrumphing and scowling at everything from cellphones to what passes for slang among the Z-types. Naturally, then, I took to Arthur and Sloane’s curious friendship from the start, and it only got better once Arthur’s curious neighbor entered the picture. Each of the book club’s members are struggling with different life issues: Mateo, for instance, is stuck living in the shadow of his mother; Arthur’s neighbor has a daughter who regards her contemptuously and is planning on moving across the country with her father; and of course Sloane is trying to ignore the fact that as comfortable as her life could be with her fiance, it would also be empty. She is drawn to Arthur for the same reason that some people find clay inexplicably tasty: he provides something she is missing. His shocking perspective, wakes her up to her own life,  dispelling the cozy cloud of empty comfort that had steadily grown around her. Each of the characters plays a part in the growth of the other. What I liked most about the book, beyond its crank and the people who turned his home into a book club, was how Gilbert explores different aspects of love beyond romance and eros: indeed, all the different aspects of love that the Greeks had words for (agape, eros, storge, filia, and even xenia) are present here as Gilbert explores bonds of all kinds, and even mocks the way romance is overemphasized — through Arthur, of course. This is especially interesting and amusing given that Gilmore appears to be an author of ‘contemporary romance’.

I wasn’t looking for a “Valentine’s Day” book, but this one found me and I loved it. I must say, nonfiction is going to have to get its pants on and get moving this year if it wants to maintain its usual dominance..

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Valens is courage, not lust

Posted on February 13, 2024 by smellincoffee
“Do you ever wonder….what your life would be like, if you …if you never met your wife?”
“If I wonder if I’d be better off without her?”
“No, I didn’t mean –“
“No, it’s all right. It’s an an important question. Because you’ll have bad times. But that will always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to.”
“And you don’t regret….meeting your wife.”
“Why? Because of the pain I feel now? No. I’ve got regrets, Will, but I don’t regret a single day I spent with her.”
“So….like, when did you know what she was the One for you?”
“October 21st, 1975.”
“Jesus Christ, you know the day?”
“Oh, yeah. Game six of the world series. Biggest game in Red Sox history. My friends and I slept out all night to get tickets. Day of the game, we”re sittin’ in a bar, and in walks this girl. Amazing game. Bottom of the eighth, Carbo ties it up with 6-6. Went to 12. Bottom of the 12th, in steps Carlton Fisk. Old Pudge. Steps up to the plate — he’s got that weird stance — and then, BOOM! He clocks it, hard, foul ball up the left field line! — 35,000 people on their feet, Fisk is yelling at the ball like a madman, and 35,000 fans, they rush the field —“
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU HAD TICKETS TO THAT GAME!!! DID YOU RUSH THE FIELD?!?!?”
“What? No. I wasn’t there. I was in a bar, having drinks with my future wife.”
“YOU MISSED PUDGE FISK’S HOME RUN TO HAVE SOME DRINK WITH A GIRL?!”
“You should have seen her. She was a stunner.”
“I DON’T CARE IF SHE WAS HELEN OF TROY — your friends let you GET AWAY WITH THIS?!”
“They had to. Just slid my ticket across the tablet, and said — sorry guys, I gotta see about a girl.”
“You gotta see about a girl?! You’re kiddin’ me.”
“No, I’m not kiddin’ you. That’s why I’m not talkin’ right now about some girl I saw at a bar twenty years ago and how I always regretted never talkin’ to her. I don’t regret the 18 years I was married to Nancy. I don’t regret the six years I had to give up counseling when she got sick, and I don’t regret the last years when she got REALLY sick. And I sure as hell don’t regret missin’ a damn game. That’s regret.”
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Top Ten Tuesday: Things in Stories I Love

Posted on February 13, 2024 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is a love freebie. But first, teases!

“The Camptown ladies sing this song, doo dah, doo dah. Camptown racetrack’s five miles long, oh, doo dah day.”
“Shut up, Kurtis. Do you hear me inflicting my perverted folk fetish on you?”
“Perverted Folk Fetish would be a good name for a band,” said Theo’s voice.

The Eighth Continent

She kept the peacock only out of a superstitious fear of annoying the Judge in his grave. He had liked to see them walking around the place for he said they made him feel rich.

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Flannery O’Connor

And now, ’love’. Let’s go with ‘elements in books that tend to make me love it’.

(1) Small town settings.  I’m a sucker for them regardless of medium. I love Vicar of Dibley and Little Mosque on the Prairie for the same reason I go for Wendell Berry’s Port William and John Grisham’s Clanton, Mississippi stories. (And, presumably, the same reason Stardew Valley has been the only ‘new’ PC game I’ve gotten into in recent years.) It’s not just the setting itself, but the repeated use of it that really makes it an element to love: when I “know” characters from multiple novels — when I begin seeing them in 3D, with different stories showing different aspects of their personalities – the story really comes alive for me. (I’m currently trying to compose a collection of short stories set in a fictional southern town exploring different aspects of hyperlocal living — petty church politics, the tension between wanting to chase success or meaning, etc.)

(2) The redemption trope. I prefer stories to end in grace regardless, but I especially love when someone who has gone down a dark road — selfishness, depression, hatred, vice, whatever – finds their way back to the light again, growing in humility and resolving to fight harder against their own weaknesses.

(3) ”Love” in relationships that is not confused with romance/sex/etc. One element of modern ‘storytelling’ that I hate-hate-hate-double-hate-loathe entirely is the reduction of so many relationships to romance-pairings. I can forgive this if the story is good otherwise: With Love from London was telegraphing one obvious pairing well before it ended, but the daughter’s discovering of her mother’s side of the story in the main plot made it tolerable. (Stories about relationships that are frayed or broken and then becoming whole again are always attractive.) A story is more interesting to me when strong bonds exist outside that predictable pairing: mentor bonds, for instance, or a case of unrequited love that matures beyond adolescent pining into genuine agape for the other person, wanting what’s best for them regardless. This is one of the reasons Jayber Crow is one of my favorite novels.

(4) A strong sense of Place. This is partially related to the small town trope, but I like when characters are not just nondescripts on a flat stage, but people whose lives are strongly influenced by Place — a building in their town, the town itself. 

(5) Eccentrics. I like characters who are weird. Not characters who are weird for weirdness’ sake, for whom Being Weird!!! is their whole identity, but characters whose self-confidence or focus is such that they don’t care about being regarded poorly by society at large. These can be artists, intellectuals, or ordinary cranks.

(6) Art in story. This one is a little more difficult to articulate, but I really like it when some piece of music or art intersects with the story and even drives it a bit, so it’s inspiring characters or themes in the story, and the reader’s enjoyment of it is magnified if it inspires them to look at the art or listen to the music themselves. 

(7) Man vs…whatever. I like stories about a singular hero raging against the State, against a corporate dictatorship, fighting for survival in a disaster, etc. 

(8) Unusual travel. I like reading stories (fiction or non) about people going across the country on trains, horses, bicycles, etc.

(9) Extremely immersive historical fiction. (Looking at you, Bernard Cornwell.)

(10) Great dialogue. (Again, looking at Cornwell..)

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A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Posted on February 13, 2024 by smellincoffee

I was introduced to Flannery O’Connor perhaps twenty years ago when taking English 101 & English 102 at the community college, and I have never quite forgotten the two stories we discussed — “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”.  Or rather, there are startling elements within those stories that seared themselves into my head, even I’ve forgotten the plots in detail. As it turns out, Flannery O’Connor is good at that — provoking, shocking, horrifying. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories collects ten of O’Connor’s stories, a third of her work in that area of literature. The collection is saturated with race and religion: at least two characters masquerade as figures connected to religion (a Bible salesman, say), and if you made a drinking game out of racial epithets then I hope your will is current, because if you survive the alcohol poisoning your liver won’t be long for this world. O’Connor’s stories are filled with characters rendered in strange and frequently ugly detail – sometimes both at the same time. Horror of varying degrees is present throughout, but especially in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, as the reader realizes what is happening far more quickly than the grandmother who features so prominently: as one progresses further into the collection and sees the sorts of things that happen, then tension starts mounting the moment a stranger shows up. There’s no obviousness to what will happen in any story, though. The most interesting new-to-me story was “The Displaced Person” in which an aging widow takes on a Polish refugee and his family as a farmhand: his work ethic, either natural or need-driven, immediately leads to tension with the widow’s other help (poor whites and blacks), and the widow is torn between benefiting from his work and her desire to keep her ‘people’ content. Violence makes its face known in this story and in many others. This is a collection to return to, in part because there’s more substance to them than mere plot-happenings, and in part because I’m still recovering from an illness and not thinking all too clearly.

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