This week I rode my bike nearly 100km, the bulk of which was across two long journeys. The first we accidentally timed for the heat of the day, toiling against a headwind and regretting our skipped breakfast, and so when we repeated the journey heading home, we left early in the morning and were so thrilled by our own speed and pleasure in the ride that it felt as though we’d become totally different people, or as if the shadow of some major disaster had shifted away from us. Flying along German country roads, wildflowers on either side and the blue dip of the Baltic shifting back and forth into view. The landscape here is very wide and flat, yellows slipping into greens slipping into blues, and it’s nice to feel so close to the sky. If you’re also angling for space, here are some books for you.
Twenty pages into Tara June Winch’s THE YIELD I looked up nearly gasping: somehow I had forgotten about brolgas, for a time my favourite Australian bird. They are long-legged and -necked, crimson splashes across their peaked heads, and on the ground they look quite hilarious and in the sky they look magnificent. The Yield is full of birds — pink-grey flocks of galahs, quivering willie wagtails, yellow-tailed black cockatoos — but the brolgas show up again and again on the edge of death and life, like fierce-eyed and judgmental guardians, inviting and stern. I often struggle with Australian literature, as an Australian abroad unsure how to feel about or connect with the place I left, and so it was a relief to read Winch’s brave and lost heroine August, who leaves England to go home after the grandfather who raised her dies. Between August’s search to seek out her ghosts and grapple with that Australian disconnect is her grandfather Albert Gondiwindi’s dictionary of his Wiradjuri language, crammed with memory and belief and secrets. A book of throat-stripping sadness and hope, with dry faith and startling bursts of optimism.
(buy @ readings)THE SPARROW by Mary Doria Russell has a perfect opening conceit: when alien life is discovered, while the UN debates over whether or how they should attempt to make contact, the Society of Jesus promptly starts selling their collection of Old Masters and building a spaceship. My favourite part of the novel, though, is well before you get off the ground, when in the first third you’re introduced to its generous and thoughtful cast of Jesuit linguists and cheerful atheists and Sephardic Jewish programmers, who rove around each other like so many wary and flirty satellites. I’m going to be honest with you, the last quarter of this book is a let down—its fascinating Catholic universe is also its downfall—but the first three-quarters are worth it all on their own.
(buy @ betterworldbooks)Jessica Miller writes middle-grade fantasy with the light touch and wry eye of Diana Wynne Jones if she were an Australian goth, and THE REPUBLIC OF BIRDS is as charming as it is clever. In Stolitsa, the human tsardom and the Republic of Birds were once happily united, but no more. Now birds are enemy soldiers or darting spies or insurgents, and they’ve kidnapped the sister of our grumpy heroine, Olga. I feel like I could spend hours reeling off the things I love about this book—a home for elderly exiled ladies-in-waiting, a zombie cartographer, bathhouse spirits, Baba Yaga chicken-foot huts stalking the countryside, a great and dramatic film actress who just happens to be poor Olga’s stepmother—but perhaps it is enough to say that at one point, a military officer gravely informs another character that his men have been pecked to exhaustion while sadly wiggling his finger through a hole in his jacket. A magical and joyous time.
(buy directly from text)
In my Beowulf class, my professor once talked about this tendency with medieval literature to slab enormous periods together: 10th century literature, 12th century literature. We do this throughout history but it’s particularly notable when you come to the medieval, where we’re more likely to ascribe periods with a false sense of stability. Consider, for example, the difference between something like Beowulf having been written in 783, before the first Danish attacks on Britain, or in 803, when the Danes were coming year after year in ever-growing numbers. We ascribe a great deal of difference between a poem written in 1938 and a poem written in 1958, but less so the further back we go. Afia Atakora’s CONJURE WOMEN plays with this dynamic by setting up two timelines in her protagonist’s life, Rue-in-1854 and Rue-in-1867, two past decades, two nineteenth century decades easy to enfold in the great wash of history, except, of course, that in the later timeline slavery in the US has been abolished. Conjure Women lets the two decades slip into one another even as Atakora relentlessly pulls them apart; Rue is, as you’d expect, indelibly marked by her past, but her future also seems to infiltrate her childhood, setting up prizes for itself to claim. It is complex and shrewd and lush, full of compassion and horror, two love stories, two (or maybe three) witches, a book to spend a long night with. There is bird magic and horror in here, but I won’t spoil it for you.
(buy @ indiebound)
ALSO READ: the first moment when the Goldfinch appears, “a small picture, the smallest in the exhibition, and the simplest”; the cardinals and roosters in Beloved; the Raven King in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell; “And what the devil were Romeo and Juliet/About wasting their last moments/Listening to birds”; Roald Dahl’s short story “The Swan”, ignoring Dahl’s typically shitty class politics (how much more sense would this story make if the villains were, as they obviously should be, very posh) in favour of that shocking and magnificent final image; Bede’s sparrow in the hall, if you can bear it.
Hello! A question for you: I have been getting some new subscribers (hi! nice to see u!) and a few people have wondered where to view old issues of the newsletter. I’ve always kind of liked the idea of these newsletters disappearing into the void of our inboxes but: is this foolishness? Should I use the substack archive option? What would u prefer? lmk thanks!!!