Category Archives: Books

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About The Sex Life of Trees

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Yes, there is plenty of talk about sex in The Global Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a book I read recently which is obviously a labour of love and carries a message that needs to be truly heard: the planet vitally needs trees; human beings need trees to survive, animal life needs trees to exist; we must stop killing the trees before it’s too late—and proceeds to tell us why in a series of essays which come straight from the heart.

The Global Forest
by Diana Beresford-Kroeger ★★★½

There is no question that Beresford-Kroeger, a botanist and medical biochemist who is an expert on the medicinal, environmental, and nutritional properties of trees set out with all the right intentions with this series of essays on the many reasons—both known and obscure—as to why trees are essential to the planet and to humanity. With essay titles like A Suit for Sustainability; The Paranormal; The Forest, the Fairy, and the Child; Two-Tier Agriculture; Medicinal Wood, and Green Sex and the Affairs of the Heart (yes, this one graphically depicts the sex life of trees), two things become clear: that this woman is passionate about trees, and that while she makes sound scientific and climactic arguments, her more esoteric ideas can’t be an easy sale for the average reader. Which might explain why this book hasn’t made any best-seller lists, even though it carries an important message. It might have worked better with stronger editing to structure Beresford-Krogerer’s ideas; I found that some notions kept being repeated from one essay to the other, while others were a bit too far-fetched for me, even though I have claimed in the past to be a Forest Fairy myself… But there was interesting information about the habits of the First Nations people, who depended on trees and forests for sustenance and to avoid starvation. I badly wanted to love this book, because I too passionately love trees (my name means “tree” in Hebrew, and I’ve often felt myself to be one too). Also, this book was a gift from a beloved aunt whose opinions matter to me (and who took the time to have the author dedicate it in my name). But really, it left me feeling mostly quite dejected. I can’t fault the author for that, but like most other appeals for conservancy, one can’t help but root for the cause while knowing there are more powerful capitalist interests killing animal and plant life on a daily basis who aren’t going to be stopping anytime soon. This doesn’t keep me from trying to make responsible choices and supporting the good fight,  but sometimes my lack of optimism gets in the way and I feel like my only real contribution is the guilt of the world I carry on my shoulders.

Obviously, I’m not alone in feeling this way. When I posted this review on LibraryThing, a member responded by providing a link to an article in The Guardian about how the pessimism on environmental topics sparked a movement called the Dark Mountain Project which posits that we’ve done too little too late to avert “Ecocide”.

What do you think? Too little too late, or are there still reasons to hope for a positive outcome after more than fifty years of environmental activism?

Photo by Smiler

On Books

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I just read the following quote from  A Passion for Books, posted by a LibraryThing pal (thanks Donna!). This book of essays is by Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), who was an American Congregational minister, author, and lecturer.

“Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows. No man has the right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge in a young mind is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Let us pity these poor rich men who live barrenly in great bookless houses! Let us congratulate the poor that, in our day, books are so cheap that a man may every year add a hundred volumes to his library for the price which his tobacco and his beer would cost him. Among the earliest ambitions…among all that are struggling up in life from nothing to something, is that of forming and continually adding to a library of good books. A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man’s history. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.”

As Donna said, the language here is dated and sexist, but the thinking behind it is worth sharing.

A good day is a day without pain

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No connection to this post, but a preview of something I've been working on for a good long while—that's my dad visiting at last year's student show.

My latest bout of the blues was set off by a night spent fighting the bedclothes, and insomnia always leaves me feeling very sick the next day. So I took a “sick day” today and slept till I could sleep no more and feel better for it now. This means I missed my art class, but I don’t even feel badly about it, though I should, I guess. All I know is I didn’t want to be in the same room as that irritating woman. My bruises from last week have gone from blue to greenish-yellow and cover a good portion of my upper and lower right arm as graphic reminders of just how badly I handle stress. Continue reading →

The Stolen Child

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I suppose if I’m going to start somewhere, then W. B. Yeats isn’t a bad place to begin gaining an appreciation for poetry. No thanks to whoever my English and French teachers were in high school (there were lots of schools, lots of teachers), poetry seemed like something mostly technical  which required lots of memorizing, both things I’ve never had an interest in, and which left me unwilling to dwell into verse any longer than was strictly necessary. A shame really, though of course it’s never too late to begin again.

Yeats was unknown to me before, other than by name and reputation, until I picked up a couple of great little audiobooks featuring some of his most beloved poems accompanied with biographical comments putting them into context. Hearing poetry read aloud by talented readers is probably one surefire way to gain a new appreciation for it. Then I found a lovely little book, W. B. Yeats: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney, part of Faber and Faber’s 80th Anniversary Collection published in 2009. The following poem will no doubt end up on my list of all-time favourite poems one day:

The Stolen Child by W. B. Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. Continue reading →

I Spy a Murder Or Two

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Call for the Dead by John Le Carré ★★★½
This is the first novel in the George Smiley series, which introduces the MI6 intelligence officer. Middle-aged, self-effacing, bespectacled, short and fat, a bad dresser and sometimes described as frog-like, Smiley presents a more realistic character and the opposite to the fantasy that is James Bond. The first chapter gives us Smiley’s professional background and how he came to be involved with intelligence work, but also presents his current personal situation. Smiley is recovering from heartbreak following his separation from his wife Lady Ann Sercombe, a beautiful and promiscuous aristocrat who has left him for a Cuban racecar driver. The presentations over, Smiler is called in by his superior, Maston, who informs him that a Foreign Office civil servant named Samuel Fennan has just committed suicide following a routine security check performed by Smiley and that he, Smiley is accused of inducing the man to kill himself. It appears that Fennan claimed in his suicide note that he felt his reputation was marred and his career at an end. Smiley is distraught, especially since he remembers the interview, which followed an anonymous accusation, being a particularly pleasant one, and that he had all but guaranteed to Fennan that he was in the clear. Continue reading →

(More Than) Skin Deep?

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Like countless other readers, I’ve been a lifelong fan of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and it’s safe to assume that this person has been too. Then again, it’s perfectly fine if (s)he chose to have John Tenniel’s illustrations inked in just for the look of it; I wouldn’t have necessarily taken my fondness that far, but Tenniel’s version of the story is a classic for good reason. To view more work by Berlin tattoo artist Sara B. Bolen, click here. To see Alice’s adventures interpreted by other artists, visit here.

Photo found on Le Blog de Shige. 

In the Beginning Was the Word

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Unlike so many churches around the world that have ignominiously fallen to the wrecking ball, a group of booksellers in Maastricht, The Netherlands, chose a beautiful 13th century church as the site of a bookstore called Selexyz Dominicanen. This magnificent Gothic church, consecrated in 1294, had been in the hands of the Dominicans, who were later driven out by Napoleon in 1794. After a brief stint as a parish church, it was sadly turned into a warehouse and was used as nothing more than an interior bike pound until the end of 2007. The bookshop installations were created by Dutch architects Merkx + Girod, who among other projects, have remodelled several historic buildings in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum. The dominant new element in the church is the high-rise bookshelf structure which reaches up to the stone vaults. Popular books are accessible on lower shelves, while academic, esoteric and theological works are kept closer to the heavens. There is a café offering cappuccino and red wine, the central element of which is a long table in the shape of a crucifix, which might have been seen as blasphemous in days of old, but nowadays only seems fitting enough. Here is one book chain concept that I would be all too happy to see grow on a global scale.

Photographed by Roos Aldershoff. This post inspired by an article on Pure Green Magazine. My text largely lifted from this article from The Guardian, UK.

On Discovering Stefan Zweig

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Austrian author Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) was a novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer who, at the height of his literary career in the 1920s and 1930s, was one of the most famous writers in the world. While he’s still widely read in Europe, he’s fallen into relative obscurity in North America, though there are publishers who have been actively making efforts to get him back in print in the English language. I’d heard of Zweig before because of several readers who had a lot of good things to say about his posthumously published novel The Post Office Girl. That book went on my wishlist some time in 2011, where it sits among hundreds of others, so I may very well have left it at that for a good long while. Then, less than a month ago, while I was surfing around the net, I saw that there were recently issued audiobooks of his work in French translation. I decide to check the library catalogue and sure enough, found a whole treasure trove of Stefan Zweig recordings, free! Usually when I haven’t read anything by a specific author, I start with one book to get a feeling for his or her writing, but since Zweig mostly wrote short stories, I went ahead and borrowed all they had on audio, and ended up with just over half a dozen titles, including a biography on Marie-Antoinette. I had a feeling I would like him very much and decided to listen to the books in the original publication order. Last night I started with Letter From an Unknown Woman (originally published in 1922 under the title Brief einer Unbekannten, or Lettre dune inconnue in French, read by Léa Drucker), in which a woman who’s child has died moments ago, admits to a lifelong obsession to a famous writer. It’s safe to say I LOVED my first Zweig and was very affected by it. I thought I’d best take a break between his stories, no matter how short, because of the sheer potency of the emotions he evokes. But today I went ahead and listened to the next novel in line, 1925′s Fear, which was read by the French actress Fanny Ardant and which I finished a couple of hours ago… I’m thankful I was in the quiet of my own home at that moment because the ending made such a strong impression on me that I shed a few tears. What a wonderful writer. I’m very glad I’ve finally discovered him. Next up will be either Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. von D., which were originally published together, along with a third story, in 1927. I’ll be sure to share my reviews on all these once I’ve gotten around to writing them, though the only thing I can think of to say about those two I’ve listened to already is: you must discover this author as soon as you get a chance.

A Not So Common Reader

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Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman ★★★★

Author Anne Fadiman has book love well anchored in her genetic pool. A cursory glance at wikipedia tells us she is the daughter of the renowned literary, radio and television personality Clifton Fadiman, who among other things, was in charge of The New Yorker’s book review section between 1933 and 1943, while her mother is author and former World War II correspondent Annalee Jacoby Fadiman. She  also attended Harvard University, graduating in 1975 from Radcliffe College. I would say therefore, that I have one major grudge with this book: that the title “Confession of a Common Reader” is quite misleading, if the word is taken to mean  “ordinary”. But my grudge won’t hold. True to her scholarly and literary background, Fadiman’s title pays homage to Virginia Woolf’s essays written under the title The Common Reader.  A 1925 review of Woolf’s Common Reader in The New York Times stated: “Anything that Virginia Woolf may have to say about letters is of more than ordinary interest, for her peculiar intelligence and informed attitude set her somewhat apart.” and also: “Mrs. Woolf is no common reader, try as she may to be one.” These words could equally be applied to Anne Fadiman. Continue reading →

Book Porn

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This is the kind of image that really gets me going on a Monday morning.
I know—I need help. :-)

Reblogged from here and here.

Edit: things aren’t always what they seem. To find out more about the stunning architecture image above, have a look at the following: Olivier Charles creates his vision of the Stockholm Public Library.