First novel by Abi Andrews - The Word for Woman is Wilderness

Picked this book the old-fashioned way -- just browsing at the local bookstore. I had never heard of it, but it sounded intriguing. I love nature writing and there was something about it that put me in mind of Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is one of my favorite books.

The story is told in the first person by a 19-year-old English woman named Erin, who embarks on a journey to the wilderness of Alaska alone. She is testing herself, and seeking to find a woman's perspective on the "mountain man-adventurer" tradition that has shut out women for most of history.

It is a feminist quest and an investigation of what it means to leave everything behind and live in solitude. She asks the  deeper questions of what "wilderness" means and what is the boundary between wild and not-wild. Where does the human element -- male or female -- fit into nature?

Along the journey, Erin engages with the voices that have inspired, goaded, confused, or just pissed her off. Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Thoreau, Isaac Newton, Einstein, and the astronauts who first went into space and to the Moon.

The ghost of Chris McCandless (Into the Wild) hovers over her journey as both cautionary tale and inspiration. The specter of the Doomsday Clock is also there. How long before we make the planet uninhabitable? Is there a way to avoid it? What has driven us to the brink of potential extinction when we have the means to save ourselves?

This is a thinking-person's novel -- it makes you engage with Erin's questions and her ruminations on serious topics, whether you agree with what she's saying or not. As an adventure tale alone, it is pretty gripping. The trek takes Erin from Iceland and Greenland across all of Canada, carpooling, couch-surfing, and hitchhiking. One of the things the novel does is show that just being a woman traveling alone is a harrowing adventure all on its own.

Andrews sprinkles in a lot of science and history fact and her nature descriptions are beautifully done. It's a unique novel and one that I think will stick with me for a long while. It's a great choice to kick off a summer of reading.

Plant-based beginning - Baked rigatoni

I’ve thought about eating vegetarian for awhile but instead of going cold turkey, I’m moving slowly into it. I decided to move away from meat for several reasons: I hate the idea of factory farms and miserable animals. I don't think it's sustainable, especially in the current state of the environment. I don't know what's in the meat, and I think that meatless is healthier overall. Actually, I do feel better, even after only about a month on the new program. And by "program" I mean only the one I'm making up for myself as I go along. In any case, I’ll be cooking vegetarian a lot of the time. Tonight, I made a roasted vegetable baked rigatoni. It was good and easy too.

You can choose any vegetables, but I used a mix of cauliflower, red pepper, onion, zucchini, carrot, and portobello mushrooms tossed in olive oil, pepper, salt - enough for a full sheet pan. Bake at 375 for around 30-40 minutes. I chopped up chard and basil into 16 oz of cottage cheese, one egg, a sprinkle of nutmeg, salt, and ground pepper.

 


Meanwhile , cook the pasta just to al dente and pour most of a 24-28 oz marinara sauce into it. I love the spicy marinara from our local Italian grocery, but any sauce you like will work. Even homemade! Fold the veggies into the pasta and sauce.

Then you just layer like you would a lasagna - pasta sauce mix with the cheese mix, and a last layer of sauce and mozzarella on top. Bake at 375 for about 35 minutes.

Very yummy! You can do a lot with roasted vegetables to take the place of meats -- particularly in pasta dishes. 

Code Girls by Liza Mundy

This is a wonderfully researched book that brings well-deserved recognition to the American women who worked on breaking enemy codes during World War 2. Because it was so secret and remained so many years after the war, their work went largely unacknowledged until recently.

The Navy largely recruited from northern women's colleges like Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith, looking for young women studying languages and math. The Army competed for talent by going to rural towns in the South, and found many young schoolteachers. The sociological aspect is fascinating on its own: all these young women leaving their homes, colleges, and families to live in Washington D.C. for war work that they couldn't discuss with anyone. They had to tell people they were secretaries, sharpening pencils and emptying trashcans.

The prewar work of exceptional women who pioneered the field of cryptology and cryptanalysis forms the background for what came after, and Mundy describes the methods of both code-makers and code-breakers for those who can follow the puzzling craft.

Mundy's writing is very engaging, and her epilogue at the end, telling what happened to many of the featured women in the book is very moving. She interviewed as many of the women as she could find, many of whom still found it difficult to talk about their work because secrecy was so ingrained in their experience.

My Year in Books, or How I Stayed Sane in 2018

A year of absurdity, cruelty, stupidity, violence, and barbarism must be countered with what poor means we have, even if it's only the intermittent escape into the imagination of a storyteller, the craft of the poet, or the fresh perspective of a historian. I was apparently too anxious, distracted, and generally discombobulated to actually write in detail about any of the books I read last year, so I offer up this summary and hope to do better in 2019.

I rang out 2017 with Emily Dickinson, accompanied by the brilliant commentary of Helen Vendler, and came away with new appreciation and even awe for the unpredictable genius of Amherst. I also loved that beautiful movie with Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson. Highly recommended! I enjoyed the Vendler so much, I also ordered her book on Shakespeare's Sonnets but I haven't finished working my way through it. I expect I'll spend some time with it this winter for bedtime reading.

In January 2018 I was finishing Ron Chernow's Grant. If ever one was in need of an actual American hero, this was the time. A flawed man who was greater than his flaws, Grant embodied courage -- both physical and mental -- quiet stoicism, loyalty, intelligence, toughness. He was an honest man surrounded by liars and cheats and rogues in the White House -- not quite an inversion of the present moment since the current resident heartily approves of the liars, cheats, and rogues surrounding the black hole of amorality that sucks in the weak and witless. But I digress.

Contemplating Grant's life, the catastrophe of the Civil War, and the nasty politics of the post-war period from the vantage point of 2018 events was often depressing, actually. So as much as I admired Chernow's writing and erudition and enjoyed my immersion in Grantland, I ran away immediately into the fabled and mystical world of early Britain. Finally, I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which turns the Arthurian legend into the Morganan legend.

I read books and authors long on my list like Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; my first Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers; Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and Aphra Behn's Orooknoko. I expect there's a lot more Murdoch to come. Muriel Spark's sharp and quirky Ghost Stories was a fun Halloween read.

There were also contemporary authors. Tommy Orange's There, There about modern Native American life in Oakland deserved all its accolades. It brings the shameful history of America's treatment of Native American's into the present with all its consequences. By turns funny, heartbreaking, endearing, and fierce, Orange has created something that will stand for a long time. Rachel Cusk's Trilogy (Outline, Transit, Kudos) is a subtle, melancholy expression of one woman's losses through the seemingly random interactions and conversations she has with both strangers and intimates.

One of the most creative and unique novels of the year, Sergio de la Pava's page-turning and almost uncategorizable Lost Empress dabbles playfully and intelligently in  many novel genres -- alternative history/time travel, heist, prison escape, sports triumph, thriller, romance, legal, and comic. De La Pava is a working public defender in New York, so how he finds time to write such a tour de force is beyond me. For sheer ambition and narrative scale, he reminds me of China Miéville.

I finished the year with a new favorite, The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry. I loved the cast of characters and the setting in late Victorian England. A mythical sea dragon seems to be haunting the inhabitants of a rural Essex town, forcing them to consider their sins and shortcomings as signs that a legendary monster is coming for them.

Two notable non-fiction books of the year were Jennifer Ackerman's The Genius of Birds, an entertaining exploration of the particular intelligence of several birds species, including crows, chickadees, and sparrows, among other more exotic feathered creatures. Susan Orlean tells the story of the epic LA Public Library fire in 1986, which despite it's historic destruction, was overshadowed by the events at Chernobyl. It is a mystery, a history, and a love letter to libraries, making a case for the importance and significance of libraries in American life and culture.

It was also a year of revisiting some of my literary heroes: A.S. Byatt's The Game, Cormac McCarthy's The Outer Dark, Rebecca West's Cousin Rosamund, Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, and William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow. I also spent some time rereading a good bit of Spenser's Faerie Queen and Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella.

I only read two non-English speaking authors: The Summer Book by Finn Tove Jansson and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend.

I'm feeling the pull of classics in 2019 - I'll probably drop back into Trollope and Dickens' Victorian England. Maybe Woolf, although there's not much I haven't already read. I hear they are republishing a Rose Macaulay novel, which I'll probably get my hands on too. Maybe I'll re-read Middlemarch or Adam Bede (or Daniel Deronda...). I can't get enough of Eliot. She's good for the brain and the heart, and always so startlingly insightful about what motivates people.