Wednesday, January 03, 2007

McPolack Recommends

So I've been having amazing luck with books lately, finding ones I love practically one after another when normally I might get that stellar read maybe twice in a year.

I tried writing up reviews that might make you consider reading the following three, but then I realized that the qualities that make you love a certain book so much that you want to sip slowly every word even as you stay up past your bedtime reading it are different for everyone. Well mostly different, except for this: It makes you feel less alone.

These books have done that for me:

Drinking the Rain by Alix Kates Shulman, who also this essay, considered very controversial for its time. Partly why I love this book is because she lives in a wee cabin by the sea and teaches herself how to get almost all of her food from the water and land that surrounds her but it's also about so much more than that.

Here and Nowhere Else by Jane Brox. Reminds me of the years I spent wandering the farm near the NH Seacoast that my paternal grandmother occupied for some 50 years. It makes me happy to know there are other people out there who've had the opportunity to run free through fields and forests, and to really know a piece of land through seasons and years, and feel it and smell it and play on it and eat and drink from it, which is an experience, I have realized as I grow older, that not many people are blessed with.

Red House by Sarah Messer. I grew up in old houses with low-ceilinged cellars and broad beams and stories. Messer writes about the old house she grew up in, which was continuously occupied by members of the same family (before her family bought it) from the 17th century up until the 20th. And she writes about her own family and her life and she weaves it all together beautifully.

1 Comments:

Blogger K said...

Those sound really good!

11:32 AM, January 05, 2007

 

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