Trees grow throughout children’s books. From “Peter Pan” to “A Monster Calls,” “The Lord of the Rings” to “Harry Potter,” trees are refuges, prisons and symbols of nature’s potency. They can be a friendly home, like the Hundred Acre Wood in “Winnie-the-Pooh,” or give a sense of menace, like the snowy forest in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” They can also be symbolic, like the cement-filled dying tree in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The writers I loved when I was a child were similarly inspired by magical landscapes and nature: Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Robert Louis Stevenson, T.H. White — and so many others.
Today, children have much less unsupervised access to the countryside. I worry that they may never know the magic of the wilderness, the power of trees and the thrilling excitement of exploring nature without an adult hovering behind them. And so I write books for children who will never know what the freedom of my childhood was like.
“I became interested in why I wasn’t more interested,” Offill says, considering the question of why she chose to focus a novel around a subject many people find too vast and frightening to contemplate. In other words, she was curious how it was possible to be intellectually aware of an unfolding disaster without feeling emotionally connected or moved to action. The novel follows Lizzie as she moves from “a state of twilight knowing” to a more conscious awareness of the crisis. At its core, the story asks: what happens after we start to pay attention?
In reality, the rigor of math simply isn’t possible when it comes to the everyday questions that we grapple with. When we talk about hard problems like what effective schooling should look like, or how much governance should be imposed on communities, we don’t simply “prove” what the answer is. We can no longer assume a controlled environment and well-defined scope. Progress on real problems is inherently nonlinear and undecidable. People throw their ideas and reasons haphazardly into the ring, we end up with ten different schools of thought, and yet it seems like the answer is still more complex and nuanced than anything we can come up with.
Philosophy is a way to address these questions more systematically — it takes our fuzzy concepts and intuitions and makes them rigorous. It isn’t meant to provide answers, but the primitives, frameworks, and abstractions that we can use to structure the world.
So, when Mikhail Khudi, a reindeer herder, is hungry, he likes to take a bit of raw, frozen fish or reindeer meat from his sled-top pantry and dunk it in mustard before it disappears, chewy then creamy, in his mouth.
Travel thousands of miles across Arctic Siberia — from the oil-and-gas heartland on the Yamal Peninsula just east of the Ural Mountains, to the nickel smelters of the lonely city of Norilsk, to the Gulag-haunted banks of the Kolyma River as you approach Alaska — and you will encounter Mr. Khudi’s snack: stroganina.
Rachel, a librarian in Brooklyn, hasn't had the best luck with men. "I'd dated inadvisably before," she admits, "the long-distance architect, the married whiskey distiller, the homeless freegan." But when she sees a beautiful young man lingering at her bus stop, she's hopeful he might be the one to reverse her string of bad luck. Thomas, it turns out, is her perfect match — or he would be, if only he weren't dead.
That's the setup for The Regrets, the dazzling debut novel from Georgia author Amy Bonnaffons. Wildly inventive and daring, her novel is a reflection on the limits of love that's both hilarious and heartbreaking.