Karen

This is essentially a story about someone in a precarious spot in life finally catching a break and moving on to more stability. Casey has overwhelming student debt that she can barely afford to make payments on, she's been dumped by her boyfriend, she's not making progress on the novel she's been working on for 6 years, and she is grieving the sudden death of her mother. She works as a waitress at a high end restaurant and lives in what used to be a garden shed attached to the back of a nice house in Somerville. With all the financial pressure and grief, it's not surprising that Casey has anxiety attacks.

Casey's friend Muriel offers to read her novel draft, and from there things start to move. Muriel likes the draft and suggests some changes, which gives Casey new energy to work on it. She finishes the novel and sends it out to publishers to see if she can get a book deal.

In the meantime, she is developing relationships with two different men: Silas, a struggling writer like herself who comes on strong and then disappears repeatedly, and Oscar, an established writer and widower with two young sons, who is a bit overbearing. Neither of these men seem that great to me, but it's clear that Casey will end up with one of them by the end of the book.

I wasn't satisfied with the story this book told, but I did like the details in King's writing. The scenes of waiting tables in the restaurant, of Casey's panic attacks, of babysitting Oscar's kids–all of these were precise, full, and wonderful to read.

The Wake is the story of one man's experience of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and its aftermath. Unfortunately, that one man is Buccmaster of Holland, a rageful bully, obsessed with his own status as an independent landowner in the Lincolnshire fens and with the pre-Christian gods of England. I say “unfortunately” because the major barrier to reading the book, for me, was intense dislike of this character. However, it was clear that Buccmaster's unlikeability was deliberate, so I kept reading.

Buccmaster and a ragtag band of survivors of the war set out to drive the French out of England. They hear rumors of other, similar groups of “green men” fighting the French, and they tell themselves that soon the whole country will rise up together and drive the French out. Buccmaster, as the leader of his little war band, is driven by visions of the old gods of England. One of the central tensions of the book, for me, was the beauty of Buccmaster's visions, the sympathy I could feel for those visions, contrasted with the brutality and ugliness of Buccmaster himself.

I expected to find the language of The Wake a bigger barrier than it was. The author, Paul Kingsnorth, created a not-quite Old English, with a pre-Norman vocabulary and spellings that would enable the reader to enter more fully into that past world. There is a helpful glossary for words that are likely to be completely unfamiliar, and, after a few repetitions, some words' meanings become obvious. Many other words look unfamiliar at first because of their spelling, but saying them aloud makes it clear what they are. After about 5 pages I understood the spelling conventions, recognized the most frequently used words and could find the glossary quickly when I needed it.

At the end of the book I didn't like Buccmaster any better, but I had a better understanding of him–and a conviction that this story was worth pondering. I'd love to discuss this book with someone, so if you read it, let me know.

“I dig up a lot of awful history when I kneel in my garden. But, my god, a lot of beauty grows out of this soil as well.”

This wonderful book is about the garden in Ft. Collins, CO that Camille T. Dungy, a professor at Colorado State University, cultivates. It is also about the history of nature writing in the US, and the historical relationship Black people have with land and gardens here. It's about ecology, understanding ecosystems and trying to work with them instead of dominating the landscape. There is a lot in this book that is not specifically about gardens, but bears directly on the garden that Dr. Dungy is building. I loved it and I think it's an important contribution to the nature writing genre.

This is a slender, quick to read book about a man, Edward Buckmaster, who has apparently left his wife and child to live alone in an abandoned stone house on the moors in the west of England. As the book begins, he's standing in a river for hours, letting his legs go numb. “ I climbed into the river in the early morning and I stood there until the sun was highest in the sky. I let the water take my body away from me so I could see what was beyond my body. I let the river numb me and I understood that I had always been numb. The sky opened a crack, but only a crack. There was still something beyond that I could not touch.” Buckmaster is in search of something, but he doesn't know what it is, or how he will know if he finds it. We get some hints that the people he left behind tried to dissuade him from doing this. He compares himself to ancient hermits and saints who left civilization behind to live in the wild, closer to God.

Things take a disturbing turn when Buckmaster tries to fix a hole in his roof during a storm and is apparently blown off the roof. The narrative breaks and then picks up again in the middle of a sentence. He's severely injured, but doesn't know how it happened. Although his body begins to heal, he becomes disoriented. The landscape seems empty of other living beings, until he catches a glimpse of a large black beast. He becomes obsessed with finding the beast, and at the same time stops eating. Punctuation becomes more sparse in the narrative. It's hard to know whether what's happening in the story is real or a hallucination.

I liked this book a lot. I'm a fan of Paul Kingsnorth's essays, and his novels ( this is his 2nd) add another dimension to his writing about living in the Anthropocene.

I was disappointed. Characters were either good guys or bad guys (or, in the case of women, all good, strong, highly competent, independent–fighting off rapists while becoming successful businesswomen). Hints of a mystery pop up here and there, then fade away for another 150 pages, until the mystery is solved anticlimactically near the end of the book. No attempt is made to give the characters the sensibilities of their own time–Philip, as the prior of the monastery, probably comes the closest, simply because being the prior of a monastery is a rather medieval thing to be. And at 900 pages, the book is flabby. A lot happens in that 900 pages, but not all of it is interesting or significant. I was expecting something gorgeous, like Edith Pargeter's The Heaven Tree (which some web sites recommend to people who liked Pillars of the Earth), a story about moral conflict and being true to oneself. Instead, I thought this book was more like a novel you'd buy at the supermarket.