In The Common Reader Virginia Woolf, the great modernist, the great acerbic, the great snob, wrote affectionate, traditional, old-fashioned belles lettres. She is constantly fresh, always surprising us. Who expects her to be an admirer of Moll Flanders? Everyone knows she called Middlemarch “perhaps the only novel written for grown-ups” (one of her few patently incorrect pronouncements), but she also wrote, “The compositions of Addison will live as long as the English language.” We know about her knowing (or not knowing) Greek, but she also knew enough to compare the lesser known Elizabethan and Victorian dramatists. Her friend Lytton Strachey did not care for Mrs Dalloway, but he thought The Common Reader was “divine, a classic.” It is un-put-down-able.
Then, a few weeks shy of my one-year work anniversary, I discovered that I was on a list of employees the publisher planned to lay off. I took it as a sign to finally listen to the voice inside me that had increasingly demanded I get out of the city. My friend Max, a skilled cook who worked seasonal stints in kitchens from Germany to Antarctica, referred me to Camp Denali, a family-owned, off-grid wilderness lodge in Denali National Park, Alaska, where I was hired as a baker for the summer. I bought a pair of hiking pants, packed a summer’s worth of underwear into a duffel, and hightailed it to Alaska.
In this quietly devastating account of life after the death by suicide of both of her sons, Yiyun Li refuses to use “mourning” or “grieving” because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” she writes, and words can only “fall short”.
She begins by laying out the facts. And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering: Vincent died in 2017, aged 16. James died in 2024, aged 19. Vincent, we learn, loved baking and knitting, and did not live long enough to graduate high school. James, a brilliant linguist studying at Princeton, where Li teaches creative writing, took his last Japanese class on a Friday. “Facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to,” she writes. Things in Nature Merely Grow is by necessity profoundly sad, but in the act of sharing details of the “abyss” she now inhabits, Li has created something both inclusive and humane.
When life is shaped too forcefully into an argument, its real texture is lost. On Breathing has retained that texture, that strangeness. My mind wandered into new plains as I was reading, partly because a lot of the material in On Breathing felt unexpected. But also partly, I think, because Webster’s curious, generous tone and method of approach invite an expansiveness of thought from the reader. I wouldn’t expect a book to offer more.
Reading “Lessons From My Teachers” feels like listening to a good friend share a few confidences on the fly, though Ruhl has taken care in the crafting of these essays. In an epilogue, she mentions “sending what I wrote to all the teachers I wrote about, the ones who are still living.” This is obviously an author who wanted to get things just right.
From smartphones to food, our daily lives leave a bitter trail of harm. Some become painfully preoccupied with these realisations; others, avoidant and numb – an even more psychologically injurious strategy. I oscillate somewhere between these two positions, which is to say, I am in dire need of some moral first aid. In No Straight Road Takes You There, a constellation of essays with interlinked themes, Solnit provides just that.
Is a River Alive? is Macfarlane’s attempt to imagine, beyond skull and skin, the overlapping fates of mind and matter, to tap out a new language in which wood and word and bird, brain and river and flame, might reveal themselves as equal sharers in a single source of being.