Among people who watch birds, it’s often the case that a first bird love, the so-called “spark bird,” draws them forever down the bright and rambling path of birding. For Aimee, it was the peacocks in her grandmother’s backyard in southern India. For Kerri, it was a whooper swan above Inch Island, Donegal, the year the peace process began. For Windhorse, it was the Baltimore orioles flitting about in the high branches of poplars at his grandfather’s house up north on the lake. For Meera, it was the red-winged blackbird, there at the feeder, when she was small. Her mom told her the name and it all clicked into place—black bird, red wings—as she learned the game of language and how we match it to the world around us.
But even as it became extremely boring, tracking took on an indispensable role in my life, because with no one around to witness my existence and tell me I was doing OK, I had to persuade myself that the ways I filled my days mattered. Obviously, TRAVEL, THEATER, and DATING took a big hit. So I added new categories to my annual activity Google Doc, like ONLINE EXERCISE CLASSES and VIRTUAL SOCIALIZING AND COMMUNITY—every Zoom trivia night, virtual gathering with my meditation group, and phone call with a friend got typed in. After the science made it clear that the virus was unlikely to spread outdoors, I added WALKS AND BIKE RIDES WITH FRIENDS, activities that wouldn’t have felt important enough to even write down a few months earlier, before the world closed.
Like the best fiction, it both articulated and deepened what were for me previously unspeakable, but urgent mysteries, including why feminine and/or feminist utopias are always half-beautiful, half-grotesque; how the world ends; and where American class aspiration and the quest for freedom meet, which is to say, what a Jewish girl from the suburbs who wants out is chasing, what she’s fleeing, and how far she can really get.
It begins with a photograph posted to the “Humans of Syria” Facebook account in 2015 – an image of two young men (one in a hoodie, one in a baseball cap) standing in a windowless room, surrounded by stacks of books. The caption reads: “The secret library of Daraya”. When she encounters it, Istanbul-based journalist Delphine Minoui is transfixed by the sight of this “fragile parenthesis in the midst of war”. Who were these young men? What is it that they were seeking?
The Booker-shortlisted Elmet established her as a writer of wildness, at home in the most remote of rural settings, whose characters lived off the land. The switch to an urban location is decisive, but she’s brought her dispossessed cast along with her.
Is “The Scapegoat,” Sara Davis’s debut novel, in fact a “propulsive and destabilizing literary mystery,” per its back-cover blurb? It is — and then some. Reading this bizarre, arresting tale, you may not always feel clear about what you are tracking — but you’ll absolutely want to track it.
It’s a unique, if common, cruelty to transplant a child who is just putting down roots. For those pulled and relocated, there’s a thirstiness — and a little guarded ring of bark — that those with stable childhoods lack. In “The Recent East,” a wonderful, immersive debut novel from the writer and teacher Thomas Grattan, we’re given an intimate look at these wood cuttings, as seen through three generations of one family, each moved across an ocean just before blooming.
But, The Last Bookshop also captures the wonderful moments between bookseller and reader, reminding those spending time among its pages of why we love bookshops – personalised recommendations, special orders and researching hard to find items, remembering details about your life and asking after your health.
Sometimes entering another time and place in a book is the best way to clear your mind, or in this case, to fill it with delight.