bookconscious

A Long Obedience In the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson, What In Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade, and How Flowers Made Our World by David George Haskell

July 15, 2026 by Deb Baker

My last Hoopla audiobook was Eugene Peterson‘s A Long Obedience In the Same Direction: Discipleship In an Instant Society. You may know of him as the man whose bible paraphrase, The Message so many people love or hate, but Peterson was a pastor, professor, and prolific writer. This book was one of his earliest, and has been reissued a couple of times. Peterson says he wrote the book because he looked around at his congregation and saw that, “People submerged in a culture swarming with lies and malice feel as if they are drowning in it: they can trust nothing they hear, depend on no-one they meet. Such dissatisfaction with the world as it is is preparation for travelling in the way of Christian discipleship. The dissatisfaction, coupled with a longing for peace and truth, can set us on a pilgrim path of wholeness in God.” He noticed that there is a lot of helpful information about discipleship in the “Song of Ascents” which are Psalms 120-134 in the Christian bible, and he set about sharing what he felt might guide people.

Peterson tells readers these psalms were for pilgrims to sing on their way to Jerusalem to worship in ancient Israel. With chapters on what he gleaned from these songs, Peterson illuminates things like you might think of as part of discipleship like obedience, repentance, and perseverance, and also things you might not think of, like joy, security, blessing, and community. To engage with these topics, he says we should read scripture prayerfully — a topic he delved into more deeply in Eat This Book — and engage with community. For Peterson these two things are the heart of being Christian. Listening to it was good, but not ideal; I feel this book would be one to reflect on more slowly and return to.

Speaking of, I read What In Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade slowly, and not only because I have watched a great deal of soccer over the past several weeks. Last summer, when I read Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, which is about gardening, but also, among many other topics, reading Paradise Lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided I was going to read it, too. I went looking for what edition to get and came across Orlando Reade’s book, and bought both. Somewhere along the line I also came across a used copy of C.S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost, and then our older offspring also got me critical edition of Paradise Lost, so this summer I’ve begun my mini-study.

Reade’s book is also about reading Paradise Lost, and he looks at people who’ve read it throughout the centuries after it was written and the ways it informed the thoughts and politics of writers and thinkers. It’s wide ranging and heady stuff, covering people from Thomas Jefferson, Malcolm X, and Vastey (the Haitian revolutionary and writer, critic of the Enlightenment and colonialism you may not have heard of — I hadn’t) to the Wordsworth siblings to German philosophers, to white supremacists in Reconstruction Louisiana, to Virginia Woolf to a contemporary Canadian professor who compares using preferred pronouns to “totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.” This book is an intellectual whirlwind and made my head spin.

It was, however a good reminder that humans are going to be human. We all cling to our ideas and values and superimpose them onto the world and what we take in from it, including literature. Milton was overtly political, so there is no doubt for scholars today as to the things he stood for. Literature, of course isn’t always completely reflective of an author’s views, even though we’d like to make it so. But the fact that everyone from freedom fighting revolutionaries in Haiti who rejected racism and imperialism to white supremacists in New Orleans who tried to make carnival an exercise in demonizing nonwhites to followers of Ayn Rand to feminists who rejected society’s gender constrictions should all find fuel for their thoughts in Paradise Lost and Milton’s other work is fascinating.

Now I just have to read Paradise Lost itself, right? I feel like it requires focus. I’ll get there. Reade notes as he writes about the final lines of Milton’s great work, “This beautiful passage comes as a reward for the substantial work of reading Paradise Lost.” So you can see why I’m more or less girding myself to begin.

I am also nearly finished listening to How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries by David George Haskell. Haskell is a biologist, writer, and professor. Through eight flowering plants he describes the evolution of flowers and their importance to life on Earth. If you’ve ever considered flowers as simply showy or beautiful consider that without them, we wouldn’t eat, and neither would much of the web of life across the many diverse ecosystems on earth (and in the ocean! there’s a chapter on seagrass). Haskell even contends that without flowers, we wouldn’t exist – and he explains, clearly and beautifully, flowering plants’ importance to the evolutionary processes that resulted in our ancestors.

Even as he illuminates some ecological and human injustices related to the history of flowers, I’ve enjoyed listening. Haskell’s clarity, along with his delight in his subject shines through in this informative, entertaining, and interesting book. In his introduction, Haskell notes that humans have attributed the floral and flowery with things that are feminine, weak, fragile, or overly ornamental, citing terms like “shrinking violet” and “wallflower.” He tells readers, “In this book I aim to put flowers back where they belong, at the center of the story of how our world came to be. . . I will succeed if you look on flowers with awed gratitude.” I already thought they were awesome even when I barely understood flowers, How Flowers Made Our World has definitely expanded my understanding. I’m grateful for flowers, and also for great science writing.

It also gives me hope that flowers and poetry are both revolutionary. Long may they spark!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, book reviews, books, Christianity, David George Haskell, discipleship, English literature, Eugene Peterson, flowers, history, How Flowers Made Our World, literary criticism, literature, Milton, natural history, Orlando Reade, Paradise Lost, poetry, psalms, reading, science writing, Song of Ascents, writing | Leave a Comment »

Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson, Underland by Robert Macfarlane, and Native New Hampshire by Anita Fernandez

June 28, 2026 by Deb Baker

Bookconscious readers know that Is a River Alive? impressed me so much when I listened to it on Hoopla last summer that I went and bought the print edition at Gibson’s before I’d even finished listening to it. I decided one of my last listens on Hoopla before my library cancels it at the end of next week would be another book by Robert Macfarlane, Underland. One of the things that is fascinating to me about Macfarlane is that he’s not only a beautiful writer, but also a serious explorer. He takes on activities that require skill, fitness, and knowledge beyond the weekend hiker, climber, rower, or caver. In Underland he visits caves, mines, glaciers and the shafts forms by their melting, the catacombs of Paris, a forest understory and the “wood wide web,” a dark matter laboratory, and a storage facility for nuclear waste. traveling nearly the entire length of Europe from Italy to Norway and Greenland.

I cannot emphasize enough how lovely Macfarlane’s writing is. Check this out:

"Over a stile in a limestone wall and along a stream to a thicketed dip from which grows the ancient ash. Its crown flourishes skywards into weather. Its long boughs lean low around. Its roots reach far underground.
Swallows curve and dart, feathers flashing. Martins criss- cross the middle air. A swan flies high and south on creaking wings. This upper world is very beautiful. 
Near the ash’s base its trunk splits into a rough rift, just wide enough that a person might slip into the tree’s hollow heart – and there drop into the dark space that opens below.
The rift’s edges are smoothed to a shine by those who have gone this way before, passing through the old ash to enter the underland. 
Beneath the ash tree, a labyrinth unfurls. . . .
The passage is taken; the maze builds. Side-rifts curl off. Direction is difficult to keep. Space is behaving strangely – and so too is time. Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows."

I could read this kind of writing all day. When he's not squeezing through passages, scrambling over rocks and glaciers, meeting members of catacomb subculture, pondering deep time, etc., Macfarlane is recalling ancient stories of underland, reminding readers of bits of history they have forgotten or never knew, recollecting literary connections to underland, and always, pondering the situation we find ourselves in as we face up to the anthropocene effect on the earth. Underland is as far ranging as its author's mind and body, but never strays from this central theme.

Macfarlane is tart as well as poetic: “Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.” But love is really what shines through in his books. Macfarlane loves the earth and its inhabitants, those he knows well and those he’s just met, and this love is the light he shines on them, and shares with us through his writing. I got myself a couple of his other books the same day I bought Is a River Alive (it was the annual August sale at Gibson’s, so I went for it). I’ll have to pull those out of the to-read stacks and get to them soon!

Speaking of deep love for the earth and all its inhabitants, I am hoping to read Rachel Carson‘s sea trilogy this summer. You may recall that another book I listened to about deep time and earth science recently, Strata, highlighted Carson’s sea writing and inspired me to complete the trilogy and read them sooner than later. I just finished the first book, Under the Sea Wind: A Naturalist’s Picture of Ocean Life. My set is very mismatched because I got each of the three books in different editions.

My former library book copy of The Sea Around Us, a recent Better World Books purchase, is a large hardcover illustrated edition. Which is nice but harder to tote in my bag to work for lunchtime reading! As opposed to Under the Sea Wind, a nice compact “pocket” edition.

Anyway — I have known of Carson for a long time, but believe it or not am relatively new to her writing. I only just read Silent Spring in the last year or two. In fact, I must have read it during the time I took a break here because I can’t find a post about it on bookconscious. It’s a mind blowingly prescient book, and while it’s creative and asks readers to imagine what the evidence is telling her, it’s very methodical. Which makes sense. Carson was a scientist and worked in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is how she got her start writing short pieces for radio during the Depression that were meant to engage the public with marine biology. She began sending pieces to magazines, one of which which caught the eye of a publishing house and she then spent several years on Under the Sea Wind, which was published in 1941.

It’s a hard book to describe. Carson follows the marine ecosystem above and below the water and on the shore up and down the Atlantic coast from the barrier island off North Carolina to Nova Scotia over an entire year, season by season. Straightforward so far. But she tells this in a unique way, as life stories told from the perspective of three different creatures: a sanderling named Silverbar, a mackerel named Scomber, and an eel named Anguilla. Carson didn’t just tell people about the marine environment. She took them there, from sand bars to ocean depths, from ponds far upstream from the sea to the winds far above it. She describes the largest of elderly cod and lobster to the tiniest of plankton, lies spent in murky seaweed and dark hiding spots to those among the tiny phosphorescent beings on the sea’s surface.

And Carson doesn’t leave humankind out of her story; while she mentions some smaller scale fishing she highlights the ecological dangers of large scale fishing like trawling and gil netting, and the increase in boats pursuing fish to their winter grounds, which interferes with the natural cycles that keep populations in balance. That said, the main point of Under the Sea Wind is what goes on in all of these ecosystems, in all seasons and weather conditions, beyond our sight, in contrast to Silent Spring, where the main point is the damage we’re doing. Under the Sea Wind showcases all that is mysterious, beautiful, brutal, and miraculous in marine biology, brought to life on the page in vivid detail by Carson’s lively prose.

The last paragraph of the book even allows the sea itself some thoughts; Carson imagines that as the eels prepare to go ashore to the freshwater where they will grow up, “. . . the sea, too, lay restless” and imagines a future when “all the coast would be water again, and the places of its cities and towns would belong to the sea.” Telling of the sea from the point of view of its inhabitants and even the waters themself doesn’t feel anthropomorphized — particularly in light of the fact that we know creatures can feel, sense, and have relationships in ways we don’t, even decades after Carson was writing and studying, fully understand. She doesn’t give the creatures human attributes by naming them — she simply gives them agency as the fascinating, autonomous beings they are. And their voices, like hers, are matter of fact. She also doesn’t spare readers the fish eat fish world of the deep, nor overdramatize the struggle for survival. She just lays it all out. The end of my edition has a glossary with details about all the creatures she mentions and drawings of many of them.

Carson refers in that final paragraph of the book to sea levels rising in “geologic time” but she was also among the first science writers to document warming temperatures, particularly in the arctic, and rising sea levels. Several sources I consulted as I wrote this post noted that she didn’t, in her books, connect this warming to human activity, the way she connected pesticide use with species loss, the but she died in 1964, as evidence was mounting. I think had she lived longer she would have been among the first popular science writers to make the connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change, especially since much of the climate changer research being done in the 1960s and 1970s centered on the oceans.

Throughout her writing, Carson did highlight the impact of human activity on biodiversity and ecosystems. Which brings me to a lovely publication I got at NH Audubon’s McLane Center last December: Native New Hampshire: Create Your Own Wildlife Sanctuary by Anita Fernandez. The book is a guide to native plants and the creature that benefit from them, from pollinators to amphibians and reptiles to caterpillars and the birds who rely on them to raise their young. Much of the information in the book was not entirely new to me, but it is organised very nicely, includes lots of photos, and covers New Hampshire in particular, which is very useful. It provides simple steps to take towards providing shelter, food, and water so that your fellow creatures can thrive, whether you have a yard or just a small space for some pots and a dish of water.

The book affirmed that we’re on the way to welcoming our kin in creation as best we can to our small yard. I’ve been adding native plants or allowing them to grow where they spring up for a couple of years, ever since reading Nature’s Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy. I mow as little as possible, we have a nice wooded area where leaf litter can stay, and we leave leaves in the garden beds, too. I just added a lovely granite birdbath after last year setting up some pollinator watering stations (trays full of pebbles that I keep a little water in for butterflies, moths, bees, and wasps to visit). And we have some brush piles, at least until the neighbors take some away for their fire pits. Above all I don’t use pesticide or fertilizer on the “lawn” which is now a nice mix of all kinds of plants, some of which I identified using Native New Hampshire (I didn’t realize the orangey long stemmed dandelionish plant is hawkweed, for example).

I also have a few different plant ID apps on my phone, and I am a big fan of Wildr and Homegrown National Park. Check them out! I can think of no better way to celebrate our nation’s birthday this week than to recommit to the well being of its original plant, animal, and insect inhabitants, most of whom were here long before even the indigenous human inhabitants.

My efforts may be working because these are some of our visitors so far this spring:

One thing I read this week is to get outside every day and see what you notice, which appeals to my inner contemplative very much. In the bustle of weekdays I often only get outside for a 10-15 minute break at work, and I do walk past the same spot and try to notice the birds and plants there. But I often don’t take time to sit on the porch at home in the evening (in fairness until this last week I would have had to choke on vast clouds of pollen to do that, which I avoid), or walk around the yard. Most evenings when I get home, it’s time for dinner, a video chat with the Computer Scientist, an evening zoom, chores, or something to watch or read before it’s time for bed. I’m going to try to pause and take at least as much time at home in our small wild place as I do on that morning break.

If you’re renewing a place in your own neck of the woods with the species that naturally thrive there, let me know in the comments! What are your favorite books about nature?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anita Fernandez, anthropocene, audiobooks, book reviews, books, caverns, caves, climate change, glaciers, global warming, habitat renewal, Homegrown National Park, Hoopla, Is a River Alive?, libraries, library books, McLane Center, Native New Hampshire, native plants, native species, naturalists, NH Audubon, nonfiction, ocean, Rachel Carson, reading, rewilding, Robert Macfarlane, science writing, sea level rise, sealife, seas, Under the Sea Wind, Underland, wild spaces, wildlife | 5 Comments »

The Other Profile by Irene Graziosi and The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson

June 21, 2026 by Deb Baker

In an attempt to use Hoopla until it runs out, I listened to a Europa Editions novel this past week, The Other Profile by Italian author Irene Graziosi, translated by Lucy Rand. It’s Graziosi’s debut novel, and she’s not too much older than her protagonist, Maia. Having left grad school in Paris to move to Milan with an older professor, Filippo, who says he loves her but also seems tp tell her regularly that she’s a terrible person, Maia is languishing. Her idea of what is means to be a “good girlfriend” seems to revolve around preparing meals and being available. When she’s not trying to make Filippo comfortable, she has a part time waitressing job in a bar, gets high, and watches Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, finding comfort in the woman detective Olivia Benson. When a former college classmate happens to stop in the bar, she tells Maia about a job opportunity in “marketing.”

Maia soon begins working for Gloria, an eighteen year old influencer. It’s clear Maia is unimpressed with the entire concept, and also that she comes to admire Gloria nonetheless. The novel is about the ways the facade of Gloria’s life helps Maia finally face the facade of her own — she is dealing with the death by suicide of her sister, estrangement from her family, and a growing realization that her relationship is empty. She’s depressed and even once she is trying to expand Gloria’s reading horizons, she is bored.

But, despite an ending that readers see coming that unfolds in a surprisingly emotionless way, there is little resolution to any of this. Maia doesn’t really come to terms with her grief, and although she moves on from the relationship with Filippo it’s he who breaks it off because of abuse of Maia by his best friend. There is a small victory where she decides not to be with a man who would treat her that way. Graziosi’s critique of the influencer world was slightly interesting — it’s not just about how vacuous and stupid it all is, and how brands fall over themselves trying to get influencers’ attention. She also shows that Gloria’s fame and “influence” is based on her being an ideal that she can’t live up to because she doesn’t have any idea who she is or what she thinks.

It was all very sad. I’m not on social media except trying to learn things and stream church on YouTube. I don’t get influencer culture at all. But I didn’t know anything about Only Fans when I read Margo’s Got Money Troubles and I really enjoyed that book. The Other Profile is probably not supposed to be enjoyable, nor to have a feel good ending. The point is the bleakness, pointlessness, and probably also the pervasive, almost overwhelming misogyny that takes down Maia’s sister, Maia, and several other young women in the book, and insidiously weaves itself into the minds of male and female characters alike in this book. Between the vacuousness and the misogyny I came away thinking we’d be better off in this world if there was no social media. Although the men who own the bar and Filipo and his friend demean and objectify women on their own, no social media required.

On the other hand, there is a great deal of suffering in the family history of the main character in The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson and yet it felt like a much less bleak story I got this in print on interlibrary loan because I saw it is one of the BTS Center’s summer fiction discussion picks. I can’t make it to the discussions because of my work schedule but I loved the book. Wilson tells the story of Rosalie Iron Wing, a Dakota woman who marries a white farmer as she ages out of the foster care system. John, her husband is kind, and they recognize their mutual loneliness. Still Rosalie feels she is just looking for a safe place to live and expects to leave, until she has a son.

The book opens with Rosalie, recently widowed, returning to the cabin where she lived with her father when she was young in the middle of a Minnesota winter. A younger woman, Ida, helps her get through the hard months, and Rosalie reflects on her life and her family’s. Through this structure, Wilson tells readers about the continuing bitterness between the descendents of Dakota and settler people, the war of 1862 that still looms in the cultural memory of farmers and resulted in the removal of Dakota people from their land, dispossession from their culture, and breaking apart of their families as people were separated, killed or died of hunger and illness, and children were sent to boarding schools.

Wilson really works in so much history, but naturally in the course of the story. Rosalie is taken from her home when her father dies with no effort made to place her with extended family because the Indian Child Welfare Act, which requires states to place children in their own communities, hasn’t yet passed. The brother of her friend Gaby gets involved with AIM, the American Indian Movement. John has to mortgage the family farm after becoming indebted to a multinational seed and pesticide company that makes farmers sign contracts and threatens to sue them if their patented seeds aren’t grown according to their specifications. The land becomes infertile without fertilizer treatments, and the drainage ditches farmers dig drain the chemicals into the rivers. All of this is our recent history.

Rosalie processes all of this as she processes the end of the life she has known with John and their son, and she reconnects with her family and culture. All the time on the farm, she has gardened and felt an affinity, even a spiritual connection, with the seeds. As the story unfolds readers learn that women have kept seeds for generations, feeding their families and ensuring the future of their traditions. The way Rosalie grows into this awareness and connects her own life to the stories of love and perseverance as well as tragedy and trauma is told with empathy and grace.

Wilson doesn’t shy away from showing racism, ignorance, greed, and a range of mistreatment from disinterest to outright cruelty. But she also shows the power of culture, community, and faith. Rosalie recognizes all the plants and animals around her cabin as neighbors, just as she recognizes her human neighbors in the farm community where she tried to be a good wife, mother, and friend. Her humanity remains intact even after all that has happened to her, and although there is estrangement with her son, readers are left with a sense that history is not repeating itself, and hope that their rift might be healed. John is also given grace in Wilson’s hands — he too is a victim of inherited trauma including the death of his brother, who was expected to inherit the farm, in Vietnam.

What’s bleak in The Seed Keeper is the death-dealing force of sin — the systems and powers that harm everyone involved, the generational trauma caused to Native Americans and the inherited moral injury that casts a shadow over settler descendents. The oppression of finance based capitalism and its disregard and callous misuse of both human and more than human life. But in this story, that’s not the end. The movement in this book comes from the spirit — the souls — of the people who manage to overcome these things. None of the characters does this solely by taking a stand or making a grand gesture or brave act. In the end, healing happens, and hope is prevails, when people love their neighbors — human, creature, air, water, land, and seeds — as themselves.

That is what transforms bleakness in a story, and in life. That is what heals and allows reconciliation and reparation to take hold. That is what we need more of, in literature and in the world.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged book reviews, book-review, books, Dakota history, Dakota writers, Diane Wilson, Europa Editions, farming in fiction, fiction, historical fiction, influencers, Irene Graziosi, Italian writers, Minnesota fiction, misogyny, Native American fiction, The Other Profile, The Seed Keeper | Leave a Comment »

Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green, Bird School by Adam Nicolson and Watch and Wonder by Ragan Sutterfield

June 14, 2026 by Deb Baker

First a note of aggravation and disappointment: you all know I listen to a lot of audio books from my library and a good many of them come from the Hoopla app. Over the last few years I have also read a number of ebooks there and the4y have many theological or spiritual practice books and lots of literary fiction, including in the past, Europa Editions, that are not on Libby, which is mostly a source of current best sellers. My library announced they’re dropping Hoopla because of budget constraints. So irritating! In the “Live Free or Die” state literature along with education and many other public goods don’t get funded because we’re so attached to not having any taxes except property tax. The libraries here are funded town by town, and my town just announced a revaluation to raise property taxes — while they are simultaneously cutting services. I’m not lacking for things to read but it’s really disappointing that a source of more varied materials and no waiting audio books (much of what I want to listen to on Libby I have to place on hold — more popular books may have a months long waiting list) is gone at the end of June.

The most recent thing I listened to on Hoopla was Bird School: A Beginner In the Wood by Adam Nicolson which I finished last week. Nicholson is a writer and member of the House of Lords and also the grandson of Vita Sackville West. It turns out I read another of his books years ago: God’s Secretaries about the making of the King James Bible. Bird School is about his efforts to learn more about the birds on the land around his home in Sussex. He immersed himself, literally, in their habitat by building am “absorbatory” — a shed with nesting boxes and feeders nearby.

The book gets into what threatens birds, including feeding them. I knew from reading Amy Tan’s recent book about immersing herself in the life of birds around her house that humans can inadvertently help spread disease by feeding birds. Nicolson points out that also feeding birds promotes aggressive common species that can then crowd out other species. He also writes about the loss of habitat caused by industrialized agriculture in England, destruction of hedgerows, etc. But the book isn’t all gloom — there is a fascinating chapter on the development of the Merlin bird app. Another chapter covers robin territories (especially interesting as there’s a robin on her nest under our deck right now), and another gets into ravens and other blackbirds, which I love — believe it or not, Beethoven wove blackbird song into at least one of his compositions. Throughout, Nicolson weaves in science, cultural history, literature, and his own experiences and learning. There’s a fascinating section on “repairing” versus “rewilding,” a kind of way forward for coexisting with birds.

Which is a big piece of Ragan Sutterfield’s approach in his own yard, where he has added native plants to provide food and shelter for birds. A birder since childhood and an Episcopal priest, Sutterfield’s Watch and Wonder: Birding as Spiritual Practice features a kind of double structure: he takes us through a year of birding month by month, and each month also delves into a connection between birding and spirituality, including practices that you may not think of as spiritual (but of course are, or can be), like friendship and listening. The breadth of his experience as a birder really shines through. I had no idea so many different kinds of birds pass through Arkansas, including all kinds of water and shore birds.

While Sutterfield also offers practical advice about attracting and protecting birds like Nicolson does, the thing I enjoyed most about this book is the contemplative nature of birding, a way to practice being attentive, and appreciating a “long loving look at the real” as Fr. Father William McNamara described contemplation. Yes, Sutterfield, like Nicolson, shares the loss of birds and the impacts of human encroachment on their habitat, as well as climate change. But also like Nicolson, he shares how close observation or even just presence with birds is a balm. He also weaves in science, philosophy, theology and personal observations, and warnings about some of the human made dangers birds face (like window strikes), aand what to do about them.

If you are wondering how making your windows safer for birds or planting some native plants can make a difference in a world where we have millions fewer birds and where at least one enormous country is actively attempting to undermine progress on climate change, Sutterfield has some wise words: “By turning our yard towards reconciliation and welcome for wild creatures, we are keeping open the possibility of a different future. . . joining together in an act of resistance rather than capitulating to the aesthetics of the golf course. Hospitality is more than resistance, however; it is also a sacramental practice — a way by which we learn to recognize the holy in the wild lives around us.” Amen. Do a little bit, and it adds up along with everyone else’s little bit, AND you will see the world with awe. How can you not? It’s amazing.

Which brings me to John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis. One of the things I enjoy about John Green is his capacity for amazement. I listened to this one on audio, too, and loved it. Greene illuminates all the social determinants of health that make tuberculosis a deadly disease in some parts of the world and manageable or rare in others. Racism, economic inequity, and the indifference of the wealthier portions of the world towards the poorer, for starters. Green tells the history of tuberculosis, or consumption as it was once known, addresses the scientific, medical and cultural history of the disease (including consumption fashion), stigma and stereotype. He also shares the story of a young man from Sierra Leone names Henry who Green meets and stays in touch with.

It’s that combination of nerdy facts, interesting historical anecdote, and personal observation and reflection that made me a fan of Green’s podcast (and later book), the Anthropocene Reviewed. Green is thoughtful and humane, and he isn’t afraid to become deeply, personally engaged with is subjects. Also one of my favorite books of all time is Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and apparently it’s one of Green’s favorites too, as he explains in the afterword — he traveled to Sierra Leone with Partners in Health, the organization founded by Paul Farmer that Kidder writes about. It’s always fun when a write I admire admires a book I admire.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Adam Nicolson, Anthropocene Reviewed, Bird School, birding, birdng, birds, birdwatching, book reviews, books, contemplation, Everything Is Tuberculosis, John Green, Merlin bird app, nature, nonfiction, Partners in Health, Ragan Sutterfield, reading, science, spiritual practices, spirtuality, tuberculosis, Watch and Wonder, wildlife | 4 Comments »

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Clown Town by Mick Herron

June 6, 2026 by Deb Baker

It’s been a time around the bookconscious household, with two members of the family — one here and one far away — having surgery in the last couple of weeks. As I’ve mentioned before, my grandmother always said a mystery is the thing when life is stressful. I don’t usually write about sequels, and Clown Town is Mick Herron‘s ninth “Slow Horses” book. But I will recommend the series and say that this was the ticket — absorbing and at the same time not too taxing, intriguing and also familiar.

I also want to point out that I think New York Times critic A. O. Scott might be mistaken about Diana Taverner. I loved his breaking down of a scene from the new book, but I have been pondering this opinion: “Jackson and Diana seem to share a cynical, self-serving outlook, but what really unites them is that they care enough about the job to do it right.” I think Jackson is only self-serving on the surface but underneath that cares deeply about his slow horses and his work; conversely, Diana doesn’t care about doing anything right unless it consolidates her power, and if you’ve read the whole series you’ll know that she most definitely does some things that are quite wrong in order to do so. One could argue that there is a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing, and she does wrong things well, I suppose. Anyway, check out this author interview in the New York Times book review, which may give you a sense of Mick Herron’s sensibilities, if not his characters’.

I had been wanting to read/listen to Raising Hare since late last fall when I first started hearing the buzz about this wonderful debut by Chloe Dalton. My library only had a large print copy, so finally I reached out and asked if they could get any other formats. I was impressed that I heard back same day, and was happily listening to the audiobook on the library’s app.

I absolutely loved this book; it was one of those times where the book lived up to all the hype. It’s a kind of hybrid memoir/natural history, one of my favorite types of book, about the author’s coming across a leveret — a baby hare — on a walk, leaving it for its mother to find it, realizing it was still there many hours later, and determining that she wanted to help it. I listened to an audio extra, which I don’t usually do, which was a conversation between Chloe Dalton and Louise Brealey, the actress who narrated the audiobook, and Dalton said she didn’t really realize she was going to write about the hare, which makes the book even more extraordinary to me.

The hare, which Dalton never named, came into her life while the pandemic had interrupted normal activities and she had more time and space to pay attention. And that’s what makes Raising Hare special — the way Dalton takes readers along on this intensifying attentiveness and all that it leads to, including a growing appreciation for and commitment to the wild inhabitants of the land surrounding her home. Even though she goes to great lengths to ensure that she treats the hare as just that — wild — and steels herself from the start for the inevitable end of their time together, Dalton clearly loves the hare, and conveys a sense that the affection and esteem are mutual.

Besides learning a great deal about hares and admiring the beauty of the writing and the threads of history, culture, and science that Dalton draws together in her narrative, I really appreciate how Dalton was open to the hare’s changing her and her life. Even when the world opens up as the pandemic wanes, she realizes she is drawn to staying close to home where she can observe the hare and eventually her offspring.“Through the leveret, I had rediscovered the pleasure of attachment to a place and the contentment that can be derived from exploring it fully, rather than constantly seeking ways to leave it and believing that satisfaction can only lie in novel experiences,” she writes.

By the end of the book she is actively working to manage the landscape to benefit hares and other creatures, and is planting and planning to lay a hedgerow. As you can see on her author website, she also worked hard to advocate on behalf of hares, and helped to get a law passed limiting the season they can be hunted. You get a real sense of her transformation as the book unfolds, and her willingness to learn from the hare. Dalton notes, “Under the subtle influence of the hare, my own wants have simplified. To be dependable in love and friendship more than in work. To leave the land in a more natural state than I found it. And to take better care of what is to hand, seeing beauty and value in the ordinary.”

Which is a major theme of the other book I finished this week, What If We Get It Right by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Like All We Can Save, the anthology Johnson edited with Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, this is a collection. There are poems and short essays but the heart of What If We Get It Right are interviews. Johnson talks with all kinds of people working towards a future where we got things right about what is happening to our planet about what is possible, and how we get there. Together with these people — who are not only experts, but clearly people Johnson delights in speaking with — she explores climate science, finance, policy, culture and the possibilities ahead. The final section is called “Transformation.”

In that section, Johnson addresses the everpresent handwringing in our culture over “hope.” Like me, she appreciates Rebecca Solnit’s views on hope (“Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an axe you break down doors with, in an emergency,” from Solnit’s Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story From Despair to Possibility). And like Solnit, Johnson notes that things can be bad and at the same time, we can be joyful even as we resolve unflinchingly to do something.

Johnson writes: “For who are we to give up on this planet or one another? We simply do not get to quit. Also, how do we keep moving forward despite the intimidating odds? . . . . Here’s the thing: Octopuses and rainbows and music and dinner parties and love and snow flurries and the aurora borealis all exist! The world is full of delights even as it may also be spiraling toward conflagration and deluge. So when people perceive me as hopeful, I think what they are actually seeing is that I am joyful. And thank goodness for the human ability to decouple hope from joy.”

For me there is a growing sense that this is not only a human ability. I think what Chloe Dalton discovered as she got to know the hare, and what Robert Macfarlane saw when he researched Is a River Alive, what Amy Tan writes about as she observes the more than human visitors in her yard in The Backyard Bird Chronicles, what Daniel Cooperrider explores in Speak With the Earth and It Will Teach You, Zoë Schlanger illuminates in The Light Eaters and Suzanne Simard, Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Peter Wohlleben have written about, and long before them, Wendell Berry and actually even farther back, the Psalmist(s) explore, is that the more than human world, our kin in creation as theologian Ellen Davis calls them, are also joyful.

Do I literally mean that leverets and hares and trees and birds and plants and rivers and insects and boulders and the very earth feel joy? I think I do. I think we can recognize this, when we feel a connection in the natural world in a way that makes our hearts beat faster. I think we observe it, when we see behavior that appears playful in other species, or hear the sound of water rippling over stones in a creekbed. I don’t think it’s anthropomorphizing — I think the rest of the created world feel and express joy in their own ways that are mostly beyond human perception, But to think we’re the only ones who get this? Inconceivable to me. Theologically, because I believe that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that’s in it” and that God delights in, and is reflected in, all creation. But also practically, since joy has all kinds of physical and mental benefits, why would it only develop in us and not in other creatures?

Anyway, get yourself What If We Get It Right, which is a joy to read, and don’t miss Raising Hare, also a delight.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged All We Can Save, book reviews, books, Chloe Dalton, Clown Town, creative nonfiction, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, fiction, joy, Louise Brealey, memoir, Mick Herron, nonfiction, novels, Raising Hare, reading, Rebecca Solnit, science, spy novels, What If We Get It Right | Leave a Comment »

Strata by Laura Poppick and Mary Magdalene by Adriana Valerio, translated by Wendy Wheatley

May 24, 2026 by Deb Baker

A few weeks ago the Computer Scientist and I met our elder offspring in Cambridge for the St. John’s Day celebration at the Society of St. John the Evangelist monastery. I also managed to finagle a quick stop at Harvard Book Store, which is not the college bookstore but an indie with a lovely used and remaindered section downstairs. Much like the old Dartmouth Bookstore, before it was taken over by Barnes & Noble and then closed.

Among my finds there was a little book translated from Italian called Mary Magdalene: Women, the Church and the Great Deception, written by Italian theologian Adriana Valerio and translated by Wendy Wheatley. It’s part of the Europa Editions nonfiction imprint Compass. It’s a fascinating look at Mary Magdalene from Jesus’s time through the modern era, in scripture, noncanonical books, art, and culture.

I appreciated how Valerio dismantles misunderstandings of Mary Magdalene as repentant sinner or prostitute, and misidentification as the protagonist of various bible stories that are not in fact about her. For Valerio, and it turns out also not only for other feminist bible scholars but some of the earliest church writers as well, Mary Magdalene is considered the first witness to the Resurrection and “apostle to the apostles.” Notably Paul’s letters exclude her entirely and many noncanonical early church works elude to a conflict in leadership between Mary Magdalene and Peter.

One intriguing role of Mary Magdalene is as the first woman preacher (although I have heard this attributed to St. Photina, better known as the Woman at the Well).Valerio notes that” Margaret Fell, one of the founders of the Quaker movement” (1600s) and African American woman preacher, Jarena Lee (1800s), both cited Mary Magdalene as evidence that women had preached when Christianity began. The Dominican order takes Mary Magdalene as their patron saint because of her preaching, their particular charism. It’s interesting to read the history of thought on this topic and the ways it has impacted church policy on women’s leadership and participation.

The second to last chapter includes dozens of references to the ways Mary Magdalene is portrayed in art (many examples reference the misidentifications Valerio covered in earlier chapters). She’s the only woman in Disputation on the Trinity, painted in 1517 by Andrea Del Sarto. Valerio describes her as “shouting in grief over the death of Jesus” in Titian’s Pieta. I’d like to take soem time to look up the rest of the art she references. A really interesting read, especially if you enjoy considering how there is so much more to history than what we’ve been taught by the dominant sources.

I listened to an audiobook as well last week, Strata: Stories from Deep Time by Laura Poppick. When I was thinking about what to listen to next, I realized I hadn’t looked at the end of the year lists of best science writing last December, which I usually do. Strata was on a lot of those lists. I can’t improve on the book blurb, so here it is:

“The epic stories of our planet’s 4.54-billion-year history are written in strata―ages-old remnants of ancient seafloors, desert dunes, and riverbeds striping landscapes around the world. In this debut work, science writer Laura Poppick decodes strata to lead us on a journey through four global transformations that made our lives on Earth possible: the first accumulations of oxygen in the atmosphere; the deep freezes of “Snowball Earth”; the rise of mud on land and accompanying proliferation of plants; and the dinosaurs’ reign on a hothouse planet.”

The rise of mud? I definitely never learned about that or why it was important to earth’s history when I was in school! The other topics were slightly more familiar but not areas I have ree or thought about in depth. This book is fascinating, and I especially appreciate the way Poppick helps readers understand the connections between scientific research in these areas and what is happening on earth right now. And I loved how she draws Rachel Carson’s work into the story, in particular The Sea Around Us, which was a bestseller and National Book Award winner a decade before Silent Spring. Turns out in 1951, when Carson published The Sea Around Us, she wrote about the changes in the arctic and attributed them to global warming. Strata reminded me of my goal to read Carson’s entire sea trilogy.

Poppick traveled extensively for the book and writes warmly about the scientists she visits as well as contextualizing their work for the nonscientist reader. Her respect for their work and her own awe in visiting, seeing, touching, and even tasting (there is a very interesting bit about how paleontologists tell when they’ve found a fossilized bone and not just another rock) the things they study makes this book a delight. She also shares a bit of her story from fieldwork to science writing. If you want to get a taste of her writing, there are links to many of her articles on her website. She’s a compelling story teller, and makes complex science topics easy for the lay reader to grasp.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Adriana Valerio, audiobooks, bible, books, books in translation, church history, environmental science, Europa Editions, faith, feminist theology, geology, Harvard Book Store, historical geology, history, Italian literature, Laura Poppick, Mary Magdalene, nonfiction, paleontology, planetary science, science history, science writing, Strata, theology, Wendy Wheatley, women's history | 1 Comment »

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

May 18, 2026 by Deb Baker

I recently came across my bookconscious review of The Help. I remembered how I stayed up late into the night to read it. I re-experienced that last week with Kathryn Stockett‘s new book, The Calamity Club. Granted I had other things going on that were contributing to my not sleeping well.

The Calamity Club is set in Mississippi in the 1930s. It follows two heroines, one a woman in her twenties named Birdie who is bookkeeper and lives with her widowed mom and grandma (Mama and Meemaw) and works at the local store. The other is an 11 year old, Meg, who lives at the Orphan in Oxford, a home run by a woman named Garnett whose ambition is to be president of the Anti-Vice League. Birdie and Meg meet when Birdie visits her sister, Frances, in Oxford, and Frances ingratiates herself with Garnett by offering Birdie’s accounting services.

Birdie quickly figures out that it’s not only the books that are questionable at this orphanage, and she takes it upon herself to clean mold off the walls and paint room the older girls spend time in. She gets to know Meg and realizes she is smart and capable and also somehow the target of much of Garnett’s ire, and then convinces her sister to help ensure Meg is adopted at the next View Day. Which she is, by a couple straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who come to the Orphan and choose Meg so they can keep the money his wealthy family gave them to adopt a baby. While Meg does have an easier time at their fancy home, further drama ensues as her new parents continue to screw up.

Meanwhile, back in Oxford, Birdie gets to know her sister’s mother in law, Mrs. Tartt, widow of a banker, whose home seems a bit down at the heels. France’s husband Rory, the only child, works at the bank as well, but it turns out he’s terrible with money and business, and also a tortured soul. One day while the women are out shopping he absconds with his wife’s and mother’s jewels and other valuables and disappears.

The rest of the book is about how Birdie steps into the breach to try to help her sister, Meg, and eventually, Meg’s biological mother, Charlie, who did not in fact abandon her, but was a victim of Garnett’s hypocritical anti-vice zeal. Birdie gets to know the formidable Mrs. Tartt and learns she is actually practical and large hearted beneath her formal exterior. And she helps start a “dance club” that is really a brothel in Mrs. Tartt’s home, in order to pay the debts the family has run up, pay off the mortgage Rory took out, provide a stable future for Mrs. Tartt and Frances, make it possible for Charlie to get Meg back, and send money home to Mama and Meemaw who are themselves in danger of losing their home because of back taxes.

If that sounds improbable, it is. The book is full of vain, silly social climbers and society women, not one but two overbearing but soft hearted matriarchs, all manner of bumbling of conniving men (also not one but two sons who cannot satisfy their aforementioned overbearing mamas, leading each to devastating and violent actions), and also a passel of plucky prostitutes. Everyone is either poor or rich. And even though everyone knows everyone else’s business in this relatively small town, huge secrets manage to be kept for unlikely lengths of time (for example, the running of a brothel in a late banker’s home).

In addition to exploring the laws that allowed government officials to arrest and/or sterilize women they thought were promiscuous and to sterilize anyone they declared an “imbecile” — usually poor and often female — Stockett covers antigay sentiments and conversion therapy, 30’s style; racism; classism; anti miscegenation laws; cruelty to orphans and inadequate oversight of their care; misogyny in academia and in the working world; and government policies during the depression that made poverty worse, like kicking people out of their homes for owing back taxes and firing or banning the hiring of married women so men could get jobs. There are also subplots about Birdie’s love life and Meg’s new parents’ previous wild life in New York and their family drama, and about an aspiring women doctor, plus all the details you could ever want to know about running brothel in the South in the 1930s. And so many good food scenes — this is a book you will want to have snacks handy for.

In short it’s a lot for one book. But as I said, it kept me reading late into the night. Stockett tells these many stories in a compelling way and her attention to detail is admirable. It’s clear she did a lot of research. I feel like the book was a little long, but nothing felt really like padding, more like Stockett had a lot to say and honestly, why shouldn’t she get to say it? These are not actually topics a lot of people are trying to work into their novels, and Stockett’s examination of attitudes about women, particularly poor women and those who don’t meet a certain societal standard of propriety, seem like an important areas of inquiry in these hypermasculine times.

I could imagine many scenes on the big screen, and I would not at all be surprised if there aren’t already plans to adapt it. I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed not waiting on hold for it — I read the profile of Stockett in the New York Times, which was interesting and engaging, by the way, and looked to see if the library had an ebook or audio book of The Calamity Club. When I didn’t see either listed in the catalog, I went to the Libby app and lo and behold, both were available immediately — because they weren’t in the catalog, I guess. I was tempted by the audiobook, but opted for the ebook. The better to stay up late at night, reading.

Book clubs should have a good time with this — there is so much to discuss and/or argue about! And of course, there is a readymade reading group guide from the publisher (but why, oh why, are there four, possibly five fonts used in that guide, three or four of which are on the cover?).

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 1930s, book club books, book reviews, book-review, books, books set during the Great Depression, books set in the South, fiction, fictionalized brothels, historical fiction, Kathryn Stockett, Mississippi writers, prostitutes in fiction, reading, reading group guides, southern literature, The Calamity Club, The Help | Leave a Comment »

A Heart on Fire by Annika Spalde and Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny

May 11, 2026 by Deb Baker

I listened to Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon this past week. I first heard about this book by Melissa Sevigny a couple of winters ago when we were visiting the Computer Scientist’s parents, who at the time lived in Prescott Valley, Arizona. They took us to the Highland Center, and I saw a sign about an author talk and noted down the title. See, those “to be read” lists really do get checked off, eventually!

Brave the Wild River is about botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, who cataloged plants in the Grand Canyon on a river expedition down the Colorado River . . . in 1938. There are certain books I read and I think, even though she’s been gone for many years, “Oh, I have to tell grandmother about this book, she’d love it.” This was one of those. My grandmother gave me an almanac of notable women when I was probably about ten or twelve. She would have really enjoyed reading about Clover and Jotter.

In 1938, lots of people, including some involved with the expedition, doubted women should even attempt such a trip, and when they went anyway, it was more or less expected they should do the cooking and cleaning up. But the list they made of over 400 species, including some new to science at the time, was the standard reference for scientists who came after them and a key record of the ecology of the canyon before the river was dammed. And both Clover and Jotter went on to have careers in botany, at a time when it was actually illegal to hire married women (one married, one didn’t, they both continued to be scientists). While Jotter (later Jotter Cutter) took time off to raise her kids, she had a long career as a professor, and ten years after she retired, in 1994, when she was 80 years old, she went back and traveled on the river again, on an expedition aimed at restoring the Grand Canyon’s ecosystem. Legend.

Clover too was a legend, already Dr. Clover in 1938, having earned her doctorate studying the plants of the Rio Grande Valley — she was a big fan of cacti. She and Jotter not only put up with condescending men, sensationalist press, and personality conflicts among the expedition members, but also with the challenges of being academics and researchers at a time when few women were supported or affirmed in that work. Sevigny’s admiration shows in the book, and she tells the story of the expedition in a very engaging way.

It is notable that these women, who were underestimated on the expedition, later described themselves as the first white women to successfully traverse the Colorado River to the Grand Canyon — because they recognized the Native American women who had come before them. And they loved botany and the river. As Sevigny writes: “Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs. They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake.” I think they would have been amazing people to meet and learn from. Sevigny’s writing makes the story come alive and I will definitely look for her other work.

I also finished a small print book, A Heart On Fire: Living as a mystic in today’s world by Annika Spalde, from Wild Goose Publications, the publisher associated with the Iona Community. She’s a Swedish peace activist and a deacon, and her book is a combination of theology — focused on the ideas of God in us and God in creation as expressed by mystics, as well as “ethics of mysticism” — spiritual exercises, and memoir. It’s an interesting read, in accessible language, and includes many practical suggestions for developing compassion, taking action for justice, and fostering humility. She’s also a fan of the Rule of Benedict, which is where some of her exercises come from, as well as the focus on humility.

I found A Heart On Fire to be unique; it ranges over a lot of topics in a short number of pages and is an interesting mix of story, tradition, and application. Themes in mysticism like wonder, joy, connectedness, and simplicity are connected to both spiritual tradition and modern life; for example she connects simplicity with the “prison of consumerism.” Spalde even touches briefly on the “dark night” experience and offers encouragement in that regard.

This would be a very interesting book to read and practice with a group, and Spalde offers a year-long plan for engaging with the exercises she shares. It seems to me that while it’s not the most in depth book on the mystic tradition, it would be very appealing for someone new to mysticism, and to groups wanting something to both do and discuss together. If your view of mysticism and contemplation is of a person sitting in silence or receiving visions, Spalde will be refreshing: “We need more silence in our churches, but the fullness of the contemplative approach will only be attained when it is combined with a mystical ethic and involvement in the world.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged A Heart On Fire, activism, Annika Spalde, book reviews, books, botanists, botany, Brave the Wild River, Colorado River, consumerism, contemplation, dark night, Elzada Clover, Grand Canyon, HIghland Center, Lois Jotter, Melissa Sevigny, mysticism, nonfiction, peace activists, Prescott Valley, reading, silence, spiritual practices, spirituality, Swedish authors | Leave a Comment »

Many books . . . hopefully not too many

May 1, 2026 by Deb Baker

I went to see my mom for a few days, which means I read a stack of books, plus I finished a couple of audiobooks last week as well, and an APS Together read. I finished some reading for a couple of classes, too. All of which to say, I haven’t written here in a bit and have many books to tell you about.

Here’s the rundown:

APS Together finished V.S. Naipaul‘s The Enigma of Arrival. Unfortunately the virtual discussion was on a night I had to work, so I missed it. While there are passages that are lovely, I am not sure I really enjoyed this book. It’s an autofictional work about his time living in Wiltshire, England in a rented cottage on a down at the heels estate, as a Trinidadian of Indian origin. Naipaul also looks back at his earliest time in England and reflects on bits of his childhood and returning to Trinidad as an adult. This was one of those books people call a masterpiece that I just didn’t love.

A New Garbology Manifesto by Leila Papoli-Yazdi, an archeologist and founder of Garbonomix, whose “mission is to drive sustainability and economic resilience for households, businesses, and organizations.” She’s Iranian, but was forced out of academia there and eventually left the country, and has since worked and taught in Europe. What is garbology? It’s the study of waste, particularly “post-consumer” trash, and a field of archeology. Papoli-Yazdi also incorporates environmental science and sociology to examine how and why people discard things. She writes about her own experiences in Iran, including some garbology research projects, as well as her displacement not only in terms of relocating from her home and culture, but also in her academic field. “I have buried many of my dreams,” she writes. And yet, she has offered the world her vision of more sustainable, resilient communities where people can exercise self-determination “even a little bit” in a world where globalism and capitalism direct a lot of our choices. This is a fascinating book, and I only found it because it was displayed on a table at Print bookstore in Portland, Maine, when I visited the store in January. Go to your local indie bookstore. You’ll find something you didn’t know you were looking for!

I also read two theology books: Materiality As Resistance by Walter Brueggemann and Intercessory Prayer: Praying for Friends and Enemies by Jane Vennard. When I travel I choose books based on size and weight. Both of these were thinner paperbacks, and not too dense/heavy. And both are really designed for discussion, but I enjoyed them on my own for now and will hang onto them in case the opportunity arises to discuss in a group later on.

As a student in the two year continuing education course at Episcopal Divinity School a few years ago, Social Justice in the Anglican Tradition, I was privileged to hear Walter Brueggemann in conversation with Kelly Brown Douglas. I’ve bought a number of his books (thank you, Better World Books) in the past few years, but this one turned up on the “free books” shelf at church; I am usually not a fan of books someone else has written in (I know, lots of people love marginalia, and I’ve tried) but I made an exception for this one because it seemed so interesting (and free) and it did not disappoint. As the book’s subtitle explains, in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World. Brueggemann examines material matters, specifically money, food, the body, time and place, in scripture and theology, from the early church to the present. But it’s not a heavy or taxing read; in fact it may only whet your appetite for more reading in each area.

In making the case for the church to “re engage” with and form people in a “mature materiality” Brueggemann suggests that what is needed is “the practice of justice, righteousness, steadfast love, mercy and faithfulness” with regard to these matters, and that both the goodness of creation and the witness of Jesus’s incarnate life, full of material action that illustrate God’s desire for people and communities to thrive, show us how God relates to materiality. Discussion questions at the end of each section are fascinating and Brueggemann quotes not only all kinds of other biblical scholars but also people like Barbara Ehrenreich, Carl Honore, and Ta-Nehisi Coates — hence my reading list grows whenever I read Bruggeman! And, I learned today, Materiality As Resistance was made into a film series, so my watch list has also grown this time.

Jane Vennard’s book Intercessory Prayer: Praying for Friends and Enemies is on the resources list for the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. It’s both a theology book and a nuts and bolts guide to this form of prayer, which is one of the charisms of the Companions – we commit to daily thanksgiving and intercession. Vennard starts out with theology — why pray for others (I like to think of it as with, but that’s a story for another time), how does our image of God and what we know about God from scripture inform this practice, what are we called to do as we pray? Then she gets into how it works, what the process is, what happens, and the burning question from the title — can we do this for people we feel good about as well as those we don’t? She even gets into some specifics kinds of intercessory prayer, like prayer chains and services, praying for the deceased, and more.

Like Brueggemann, Vennard provides questions and activities for a group or individual to use at the end of each chapter. This is one of those books that didn’t cover ground I didn’t already know, but pointed out new things along the way that I either hadn’t thought about in quite the same way or hadn’t noticed because they were so familiar. One interesting question for me, since not everyone in my family are church goers, Vennard brings from philosopher Douglas Steere: whether “intercessory prayer could infringe on the freedom of the people for whom we pray.” Vennard notes that Steere decides that it does not. Prayer, Steere notes, can “lower the threshold,” for “the besieging love of God.” I’m curious about this. Would the other person need to know you were praying to be susceptible to this besieging love? Or might the threshold lower simply because our prayer opens the way for God?

Vennard says intercession “also lowers our threshold,” allowing more of what we’re praying for “to enter our hearts.” She says this transforms the one praying: “Our prayers are no longer simply motivated by compassion. They become the very beat of the compassionate heart.” I’d say as someone who has practiced this daily for several years now that it does become more second nature; throughout the day prayers just surface as I work, read news, talk to people, go about my day. I like the metaphor of prayer becoming our heartbeat. Vennard also poses interesting questions to reflect on that I can see would be helpful for someone thinking about how they pray, for groups, or in spiritual direction.

Lest you think all I did when I traveled was think big thoughts, I also took some lighter reading! And if you’re wondering why I read so much if I was visiting someone — I usually finish a book (or more) during the actual travel, although I had hardly any layover on the way there so didn’t. Also, my mom loves to read and between checking off things on the list of whatever she wants me to do and enjoying various take out treats, we often sit companionably reading together.

More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby was on the bargain shelf at Print and it was a blast from the past for me. I enjoy Nick Hornby’s writing, in particular High Fidelity, About a Boy, and How to Be Good — I’m realizing that I haven’t read his more recent books. The Computer Scientist and our older offspring both enjoyed Fever Pitch, about being a football (the kind that’s actually played with the feet) fan. More Baths is apparently one of a series of books collecting his monthly Stuff I’ve been Reading column from The Believer. Which he has apparently been writing since 2003, although the collection I read alludes to a break. Longtime bookconscious readers can imagine: this resonates with me. I started writing about stuff I’ve been reading here in 2007 and also took a break.

Anyway, this collection covers 2010-2011, and Hornby and I read many of the same books. American Rust, and Out Stealing Horses, for example and also Sarah Vowell’s book about the U.S. conquest of Hawaii, Unfamiliar Fishes. It was fun to read his admiration of these and remember my own enjoyment at the time. During my tenure as the first ever events coordinator at Gibson’s we had an event for Sarah Vowell and I remember meeting her. We hosted her at Red River Theatres because the old store was too small for the anticipated crowd, and we chatted backstage. I told her how much I admired 826NYC (which she helped found; it offers writing programs for kids) and that I was chatting with folks from a similar organization, Mighty Writers and even dreaming of whether I could bring such a thing to our town. She asked me, drily, why I would wish such a thing on myself and said something kind about that, along with working for an indie bookstore, reflecting well on me. Anyway, revisiting these memories and books was great fun, and Hornby also digresses on topics as wide ranging as becoming a closet Celine Dion fan and enjoying a particular scent of Body Shop shower gel. This book was what my dad refers to as a palate cleanser.

At one of the Indianapolis indie bookstores we frequented when the elder offspring lived there, Golden Hour Books, I had purchased The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk. I’d actually been saving it for a trip because it fits my travel book size rule. I admit rather sheepishly that I haven’t read Cusk’s other, quite widely acclaimed books, but this one caught my eye because I have always had a soft spot for what I would call “extended travel” narratives, where someone moves, even temporarily, to another country. In fact one of my first published pieces of writing was an essay on how I managed to get through the long, dark, incredibly dreary winters of Seattle by escaping through this genre. Cusk writes about spending three months traveling to and around Italy.

I was utterly absorbed. First of all the idea of escaping daily life for such an extended time is enchanting. And I loved reading about places that interest me, like Pompeii, and the Piero della Francesca trail, and learning what Cusk learned. She also just writes beautifully, as in this passage about her kids: “Tizania tells them if they catch a firefly, they will find a coin beneath their pillows in the morning. One night we walk back from the village as darkness is falling, and they find the garden full of white lights. Their motion is strange and beautiful: it is descriptive, choral, a kind of silent music. The children dart through the darkness with cupped hands. The fireflies scatter in drifts, like embers. Finally they catch one. For a moment it swims dreamily in the cave of my daughter’s fingers: she is lit up, electrified. Then it swims away. She gets another, stealthy as a leopard. I watch her swift body, knitted with the darkness.”

Cusk goes on to write of how at first, when they left England, the child was miserable away from her friends. Cusk worried she “was not, myself, sufficiently adult to have imposed my destiny on another. But she is my daughter: our destinies are better off intertwined. And I see, in this moment, that she has become more unified, more fully herself, that she will remember this time forever. It is a revelation by firefly-light, fragile and delicate, difficult to grasp.”

Needless to say I will be hunting down more of Cusk’s work!

Since I’ve been back, I read You’d Better Be Lightning, by Andrea Gibson, which I bought at Peregrine Book Co.when we visited my in-laws. They have since moved away from Prescott, so it’s less likely I’ll make it back there, but I was delighted that the folks at Peregrine welcomed me back when I said I had been there before but not in a while, and it is a great store with a pretty large poetry section. Gibson is a poet I’d read or heard snippets of (they were well known for their spoken word performances) online, but really learned more about from the Oscar nominated documentary about their life and final struggle with cancer, Come and See Me in the Good Light. Watch with tissues handy.

Maybe because I had only heard snippets, I didn’t realize how long most of Gibson’s poems are, which makes their performing them live even more impressive. You’d Better Be Lightning came out the same year Gibson was diagnosed with cancer, but the collection ranges over a whole landscape of ideas and memories and places and emotions. I appreciate the poems that tell a story in this book, like “Neighbors,” as well as the ones that are a call to action, like “Homesick: a Plea for Our Planet.” I like the way Gibson looks at something ordinary and observes: “Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year/ just from forgetting where they left/ their acorns. If we aimed to be half as good/ as one of earth’s mistakes,/ we could turn so much around.”

Finally, I finished a couple of audio books over the last couple weeks. I’d seen Amy Tan‘s The Backyard Bird Chronicles at several bookshops, but never picked it up and thumbed through it. I wish I had. I would not really recommend the audio, because it there are so many references to the drawings of birds that Tan made and that are in the print edition. That said, I enjoyed the book. Tan became an earnest birder in 2016 when she was upset by the state of the world. Do you remember? Things seemed bad back then! If only we’d known that was just the beginning. Anyway, birding was a thing she could immerse herself in. And this book is a tour through what she learned. She’s humble about her knowledge, often referring to herself as just a novice, but it’s clear she’s very observant and curious about her feathered neighbors and she really works at ensuring their safety and well being in her yard. I liked feeding and watching birds when the kids were young and they did too, and this book reminded me of those days, although we really were novices compared with Tan!

And finally, this week I listened to Nicked by M.T. Anderson, a novel set in the middle ages about a monk, Nicephorus, who has a dream of St. Nicholas which the religious and civic leaders of his city, Bari, Italy, determine is a call to “liberate” the saint’s bones from Myra, in order to end an outbreak of “pox.” Nicephorus leaves his cloistered life and sails away on the expedition along with a relic hunter named Tyun, who thinks it’s the perfect time to fetch the saint, as various factions struggle to control Myra. The trouble is, an expedition from Venice has the same idea. The book is based on historical accounts — Nicholas’s bones really were removed from Myra to Bari in the year 1087, and Venetians really were were rumoured to be plotting to steal them. In fact, Bari celebrates the swashbuckling adventure on May 8-9 each year. Anderson has fun speculating as to the details in this story. Nicked is different than my usual reading, and I’m not a big fan of swashbuckling, but it was entertaining.

Ok, I promise that’s it and I will try to get back to telling you about one at a time!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 826NYC, A New Garbology Manifesto, Amy Tan, Andrea Gibson, APS Together, autofiction, Bari, birds, birdwatching, Come and See Me in the Good Light, faith, garbology, Garbonomix, genre fiction, Golden Hour Books, historical fiction, Intercessory Prayer: Praying for Friends and Enemies, Iranian scholars, Iranian writers, Italy, Jane Vennard, Leila Papoli-Yazdi, M.T. Anderson, Materiality As Resistance, Mighty Writers, More Baths Less Talking, Myra, Nick Hornby, Nicked, Nobel prize in literature, nonfiction, novels, ornithology, Peregrine Book Co, Piero della Francesca, poetry, Pompeii, prayer, Print, Rachel Cusk, Sarah Vowell, St. Nicholas, Stuff I've been Reading, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, The Believer, The Enigma of Arrival, The Last Supper, travel, V.S. Naipaul, You'd Better Be Lightning | 2 Comments »

Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards

April 14, 2026 by Deb Baker

I finished listening to Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards in part because I spent four hours in the car this past weekend. It’s a fascinating historical novel set in Brugge in the late 13th century, and follows the fate of Aleys, a teenager searching for meaning after her mom dies in childbirth. When she works on learning Latin to better read the illustrated psalter that belonged to her mother, she makes a friend in Finn, who she begins to imagine she could marry. When he tells her he’s entering a monastery, and her kind but desperate father tells her she’s to marry a wool merchant to improve the family’s fortunes, Aleys takes matters into her own hands. Drawn to the Franciscans’ preaching in the street, she approaches Brother Lukas and asks to become a Franciscan sister.

Lukas, it turns out, is the younger brother of the corrupt bishop Jann, and he accepts Aleys’s call as legitimate — noticing how her passion for God basically makes her glow with fervor. He arranges for her to live with the Beguines, a community of religious women who aren’t nuns, since she can’t live with his brother monks. He tells her she can become a full Franciscan when she recruits more women. He imagines glory for himself and a kind of Francis and Clare type partnership. Aleys isn’t so sure about his plan, and she and some of the Beguines are mutually suspicious of each other at first, but their leader, called a magistra, warmly welcomes her. So far, pretty basic historical fiction with more or less predictable tensions.

But then Aleys starts working in the local hospital. And strange things start happening, healings that people attribute to her. She has some very mystical experiences and believes God and Mary work through her, but then sometimes she feels nothing. That caught my interest. It matches what I’ve read of actual mystics’ experiences, that their life is not all visions and answered prayers, but includes doubt and ordinary disappointment, too.

Anyway, the rest of the book traces what happens when the town, the Beguines, Lukas, Jann, and the officials of the church all interpret what Aleys is feeling and receiving, how they might benefit, or how they might buffer themselves from her. Jann has visions of glory as well, and when the healings cause a disruption in Aleys’s life in the Beguine community, Jann and Lukas devise a plan for Aleys to become an anchoress, locked into a cell attched to the cathedral (like Julian of Norwich, maybe the most famous anchoress in Christian history), where people from the town can come to speak with her. One of the Beguines, Marte, is assigned to serve her, bringing food, taking away chamber pot and laundry, and when a rat nibbles Aleys’s precious psalter, bringing her a cat. In return, Aleys teaches Marte to read and write, with unintended consequences.

The rich details of Aley’s “funeral” before she is “buried” in her cell, her prayer life, her visions and “showings,” the way the crowds view her as a saint but overwhelm her, and the way her miracles and teachings about God’s unfathomable love cannot protect her or the Beguines are all fascinating. The story is set against the real historical backdrop of Pope Bonaventure’s attempts to prevent the bible from being translated into people’s vernacular language — Jann is worried that Dutch scriptures are being sold in the marketplace which could impact his chances at becoming a cardinal — and the way the priests, bishop, and papal officials are suspicious and disdainful of women. The power of the church over people’s lives is very palpable in the story too.

Which makes the Beguines, who seem to have defied expectations and structures so interesting. Their part in the story certainly makes it richer. They were a strange kind of religious community, women who were married and even mothers, but who were still vowed religious (although informally) and interacted with the town, rather than being closed away in a nunnery. I also really appreciated that Edwards, who started the book with some fairly unsurprising plot points, was more creative with the ending, leaving a bit of mystery for readers to interpret.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 13th century, anchorites, Beguines, Belguim, bishops, book reviews, books, Brugge, Canticle, cathedrals, church, Dutch, faith, fiction, Flanders, Franciscans, friars, historical fiction, historical novels, history, Janet RIch Edwards, Marguerite Porete, novels, Pope Bonaventure, reading | Leave a Comment »

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