My mother-in-law and I are in our very own, two-person Book Club. We average about one book a month. Because she lives across the country, we pick a date after we’ve both finished reading, and then we have marathon conversations over the phone. We use sticky notes to mark the passages we love, and we end up favoring the same words. Our books make us laugh, think, and cry. Some books take us over, leaving us almost speechless.
We tend to gravitate toward writers who charm us with great characters, vivid descriptions, tasty sentences, and unique approaches to telling the story. Below is a list of some of the books we read in 2015. I’ve included favorite impressions of each one. Enjoy!
The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall…One of the best passages in this book occurs in the beginning. The main character has a flashback to when she was a little girl living on a wolf reserve. She walks along a fence line in the dark, and she can sense the presence of a wolf walking on the other side, in step with her. She is fascinated and flattered that the wolf wants to be with her in this way. What follows is a story about her work as part of a team to reintroduce wolves into northern England. The author draws parallels between wolf and human behavior, and her descriptions of the landscape made us both want to go to northern England and Scotland.
The Transcriptionist by Amy Roland…The premise of this novel is fantastic! The main character, Lena, works as a transcriptionist for a big city newspaper. She meets a blind woman on a bus. They converse, and Lena feels eerily like this woman understands both her sense of invisibility and her love of words. Soon after their meeting, Lena transcribes an article where she learns that this same woman has committed suicide by walking into a lion’s den. The woman’s remains become a focus for Lena as they have been both literally and figuratively ‘lost.’ Amy Roland crafts quite the story, where Lena’s search for the blind woman’s body and background simultaneously teaches her about herself and forces her to change her life for the better.
Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay…This book is set in a small, remote Canadian town, and the plot focuses on the people who work at the town’s only radio station. Elizabeth Hay’s characters are well-developed and memorable, and we loved how much attention was paid to how voices over radio waves are powerful and connective. There is one extended passage toward the latter part of the book where the main characters set off on a hike that takes them into a dangerously cold region. This passage was all at once beautiful, terrifying, and sad. It resonated with us as was one of the strongest parts of the work.
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver…Beautiful, terrifying, and sad are adjectives that could describe much of Barbara Kingsolver’s work. In the past, my mom-in-law and I have read The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna. Like Flight Behavior, both of these share the same vivid, haunting settings and characters that feel like they could walk beside you. Because Barbara is a biologist, there is always a theme of environmental awareness in her work, a deep respect for nature. Flight Behavior knocked us out. We couldn’t put sticky notes on anything, because we would have marked every page. Her writing is that good.
And speaking of writing that astounded us…
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was our favorite work of 2015. My mom-in-law described the process of reading Helen’s work perfectly…it was a “feast of language.” She writes a memoir poetically. She writes about hawks with profound love. I loved birds of prey before I read this book, but now every time I see them, I am so much more enamored. H is for Hawk is about how being with an animal can heal you, teach you about your own humanity. It is about a gorgeous, fierce hawk… how she behaves, how she hunts. It is about a woman trying to cope with the grief of losing her father, how she loses her mind and finds it again. H is for Hawk is about nature, in all its tender beauty and rawness.
Being in Book Club restores my love of English. It motivates me to keep writing, to aspire to the levels of the authors I admire. I think if I might “speak” for my book buddy, Book Club connects her to family, and it exercises her brain, keeps her sharp and witty. Plus, it’s just fun. We love it, and we look forward to the pages we will cover in 2016 and beyond!
