A thoughtful, modest essay by the prolific British author.
A slim, essay-length book celebrates the connection between writer and reader.
In 1926, Woolf (1882-1941) shared some thoughts about reading with the girls of the Hayes Court Common school, in Kent, England. Included as the final essay in The Common Reader: Second Series (1932), the piece now appears on its own, bracketed by commentary by Sheila Heti, former interviews editor at the Believer and a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism, who offers an admiring, empathetic response to Woolf’s perspective. “I think,” writes Heti, “the essay came from Woolf’s displeasure in having to pass through the critics in order to reach her readers.” Woolf encouraged her listeners to read with openness and generosity and to come to literary works without preconceptions about their merit. “To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read,” Woolf said, “is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.” Reading widely—even books relegated to the “rubbish-heap” of literature—helps one develop discernment and appreciation. “Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing,” Woolf suggested, “is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words.” Rather than impose other readers’ standards, Woolf advised becoming an author’s “fellow worker and accomplice.” All readers, the girls in her audience included, exert influence on the creative spirit of the time: “The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work.” Heti agrees, sharing ways in which her writing has been shaped by early readers of works in progress. Art is not made by lone artists, Heti writes, but “always made in a community of peers.”
A thoughtful, modest essay by the prolific British author.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78627-752-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Laurence King
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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