The last couple weeks, I have been flying through books…literally. When it came time to write this blog, I thought I would share with you my latest flights of fancy:
Andrea Barrett’s newest novel, Archangel, is constructed of short stories spanning the late 19th and early 20th century, each a diorama of the scientific atmosphere.
Henrietta Akins, a small-town school teacher, enrolled in a natural-science course off the coast of Massachusetts, collects barnacles and sea anemones and is introduced to Darwin’s new theory of evolution. Constantine Boyd, visits his eccentric uncle for the summer–a scientist knee deep in evolutionary experiments. Blind catfish propagate the pond, cross-pollinated and grafted plants march through the orchard, and from the neighbor’s farm, an airplane buzzes and tries to catch flight. As the stories progress, science and invention rupture the known reality–what is known, and what could be known are only one discovery away.
Thor Hanson’s Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle couldn’t be more perfect to pair with Archangel. Hanson describes everything you could ever want to know about feathers: from the first fossilized record (it’s pretty rare for delicate feathers to survive the heat and pressure of fossilization) to how exactly they keepan animal in the air.
I have a customer to thank for introducing me to Beryl Markham’s wild life in West with the Night. It is the stuff of a good story–raised in Kenya by her father in the early 20th century, she hunted wild boar with a spear (as a child, I might add), trained racing horses, flew elephant hunting reconnaissance as an African bush pilot, and was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic East to West. West with the Night was so good, I don’t even care if she made it all up.
The memoir is not a tell-all (none of her affairs or marriages or even her son make an appearance) rather Markham carefully pieced together a finely wrought coming-of-age story of a girl in the last days of a wild Eastern Africa.
The newest collection of British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry isn’t so much about bees, but about our own bee-ish nature. It is fair to say that there is a poem in here for everyone–a sonnet on an English examination in Shakespeare, a handful of haiku, and even bee Christmas carol. Carol Ann is beyond a doubt one of the wittiest poets–her lines always seem to have a bit of a sting.
Here are my bees,
brazen, burs on paper,
bessotted; buzzwords, dancing
their flawless, airy maps.Been deep, my poet bees,
in the parts of flowers,
in daffodil, thistle, rose, even
the golden lotus; so glide,
gilded, glad, golden, thus–wise–and know of us:
how your scent pervades
my shadowed, busy heart,
and honey is art.
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