Books of 2024

I read 68 books in 2024. Yeah, kind of a lot of books! 

My name is Jane, and I am a reading addict. 

It's so easy to supply my reading habit: I always have an ebook on my phone and usually a regular one (or two) on the coffee table. I read every day, almost without thinking about it.

Also: my library card is my friend: if I had to buy all the books I read, I would be poor and my house would contain nothing but bookshelves. If you love books, I urge you to get yourself a library card! 

Anyway, I only know the number of books I've read because I keep track in a book journal like my mom did. My journal is a blank book where I write the title and author of the book, as well as a sentence or two about it, to jog my memory. 

My mom's reading journal, left, with three of mine and the kitty.

One thing learned from reading many many books in a year: there are lots of good books out there! Here is a list of 15 books I especially enjoyed and that I kept thinking about long after I read them. (Last year, I listed 10 in fiction and nonfiction. This year, I added a category...)

Fiction: 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: A pandemic sweeps through the world and civilization collapses. Traveling musicians and actors roam the post-apocalyptic world and fate brings people together. Harrowing!

North Woods by Daniel Mason: The stories of the inhabitants of a patch of western Massachusetts: families, apple trees, beetles. The last chapter is a moving meditation on the future.

James by Percival Everett: A retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. A much better book than Twain's. By the author of Erasure which became the movie American Fiction

Catch and Release by Laura Farmer: Two generations of a western Iowa family, plus a cat, nuns, and the exhilaration of both letting go and holding on. Written by a former student and current colleague.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey: Six astronauts during one day of their time in a space station orbiting the earth. They are a team, yet each is solitary. Ordinary tasks and awestruck reflections.

Nonfiction

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith: A writer visits places in America--Monticello, Angola Prison, New York City--where the history and ongoing effects of slavery can be found.

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib: Essays about travel and tourism, seen from the eyes of a native of India. Finding joy in an activity with roots in colonialism and capitalism. 

Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane: A journalist becomes an avid birder. She earns a Ph.D. in biology, fights for the well-being of urban wild space, and creates nature programs for children.

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel: An art-obsessed young man steals art in Europe by simply taking it off walls and out of vitrines in small art museums when no one is watching. 

Tits Up by Sarah Thornton: An ethnographic exploration of the role of tits in (mostly western) culture--sex workers, milk banks, plastic surgeons, bra designers, and spiritualists.

Light Reads:

(Here's the additional category I added this year: light reads. I love fun books--mysteries, comic reads, etc. Everyone needs a light read now and then! But they get squeezed out of end-o-the-year lists by the heavier ones. Here are some light reads that I enjoyed this year.)

A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson + 2 sequels: Mysteries that take place during the Cold War in rural England. Restrained, smart, and delightful.

You Are Here by David Nicholls: Two middle-aged, recently divorced people meet on a cross-England hike and fall in love. 

Once More from the Top by Emily Layden: A Taylor Swift-ish celebrity singer-songwriter returns to her hometown and contemplates the long-ago disappearance of the high school friend who got her started on music-writing.

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead: WASP family gets ready for a wedding and everyone misbehaves. Readers discover secrets.

Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire: Amusing tales of an apprentice in an antiquarian bookshop. 

Mandala

On a Saturday in November, we went to the woods, over next to Indian Creek Nature Center, where we usually gather for Terra Divina. This practice, similar to the ancient practice of lectio divina--the contemplative reading of texts--involves reading the natural world that we are part of. We begin by observing and experiencing the landscape, then we engage with what has called our attention. We respond in prayer or meditation, and finally rest in the connection we've found with the earth. 

We've been doing this practice monthly for more than a year now, led by Stephanie, but it always brings peace, new observations, and new insights.

As we arrive and sit at an outdoor table at the edge of the prairie, we greet one another, take a deep breath, and pause from our busy, chore-and-errand-filled Saturdays.

This week, in addition to walking slowly out into the prairies and woods for our usual terra divina practice, I am leading the group in making a mandala. I invite the other participants to notice natural objects that call to them to be picked up, held, and contemplated.  I encourage them to bring any of these objects back, and place them on the plywood board I've brought for our mandala creation.

After about 35 minutes of practice, we return to our gathering place and lay our offerings on the board. 

For me, naming natural beings and objects helps me truly see them. So I briefly named the objects on the board. As I did so, a story took shape.

There were

signs of the end of the season:

• autumn leaves of brown, red, yellow
• stems of tall prairie grasses, burned black in places, from a prairie burning

signs of winter provisions for creatures who live here:

• the white oak acorn cap, deep and round, smooth inside. 
• tiny red rose hips that have been partially eaten already by birds, the white seeds inside visible
• the leaf of a greenbriar vine, whose berries are relished by birds

signs of invasive species and items not native to this area

• a few stems of Asian bittersweet--I could have brought back an armload of these
• bright yellow, perfectly spherical Carolina horsenettle (nightshade) berries, like small, yellow cherry tomatoes
• a bright red piece of plastic ("It looked like a heart to me," someone said)

signs of resilience and tenacity:

• a piece of shelf fungus from a dead log
• lichens on a dead branch

signs of future life:

• a locust tree pod
  
• three winged ash seeds
• frothy goldenrod seed heads
• an oak leaf with an oblong fuzzy gall on the back, filled with insect eggs that will overwinter and hatch in spring.

After we talked about our mandala, we talked about another type of mandalas, mandalas made of sand. In the Buddhist tradition, monks create beautiful and intricate mandalas of sand. And then, in a quiet ritual, they destroy the sand mandalas, pouring off the sand to symbolize the transitory nature of the material world. 

Although we are not Buddhists, we thought about the transitory nature of all the items on the board, of the seasons, of ourselves. Then we walked our mandala over to the edge of the prairie and gently tipped the natural items off into the tall grasses.

Although our mandala is gone--except in photos some of us took--the experience gave us something to contemplate as we prepare for wintering and our next practice of terra divina. 

Let us now praise the serviceberry

I don't remember coming across serviceberry trees or shrubs when I was growing up in northeastern Ohio. But I have come to love them more and more each year--the trees and their fruit--since moving to Iowa where I discovered them. 

We have three serviceberry trees on our property: 

• one about 20 feet tall alongside the alley--it was there when we moved in
• one about 10 feet tall in the front that the landscaper put in about 3 years ago
• a small one, about 6 feet tall behind the garden--it was a leftover from one of the many post-derecho free tree giveaways. I figured I could easily work another serviceberry tree in!

Normally understory and edge trees/shrubs, they have a beautiful open and airy growth pattern when pruned into trees. Here's our biggest one, along the west side of the house. 

You might be able to see the wren house hanging in the tree!

Here are some of the reasons I love serviceberry trees:

They are a native plant. Around here, we grow Amelanchier Arborea, the Downy Serviceberry, which is native to this area. In the wild, it forms a tall, multi-stemmed shrub, but it can be pruned into a one-stem tree. Various other species of serviceberries grow wild across the US, mostly in the north. They grow at the edges of woods, or as an understory tree/shrub. They don't need rich soil, and they do fine in sun or part shade. I like how they are not fussy. 

They bloom early. Small, white blossoms appear on the serviceberry tree really early. The flowers don't last long, and they're not particularly showy, but there are always a lot of them! 

When the petals fall off, they look like confetti

The berries attract lots of birds. Because they bloom early, they also fruit early, forming beautiful clusters on the trees that attract many birds at a time of year when there isn't much else in the way of fruit available to eat.

Almost all the berries are gone from our tree, but our neighbor's tree still has plenty!

Here's a list of the birds I've seen eating the fruits:

• Robins
• Catbirds
• Starlings
• House sparrows
• House finches
• Cedar Waxwings

I saw the Cedar Waxwings doing their courtship dance with the serviceberries this spring. This is how the dance went: they were sitting side by side on a branch, and one would pass the berry to the other. That bird would hop away on the branch, then hop back and pass the berry back. Then the first bird would hop away, hop back and pass the berry. This went on for several turns, just like in this video!

Although their house is in our serviceberry tree, wrens don't eat serviceberries; wrens are insect-eaters. Avian visitors to the tree don't bother the wrens too much, but when squirrels climb the trees to get berries (squirrels love them too!), the wrens scold and dive-bomb: "Stay away from our nest!"

The fruits are delicious. People can eat serviceberries, too! They are one of the first fruits that can be foraged in the spring. Lucky me, I can forage them in our yard! They can be picked as soon as they start to turn reddish-purple, but if you wait until they're deep blueish purple, they're super sweet. But if you wait too long, the birds will get them all!  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I usually make serviceberry muffins from them every year. (It's a blueberry muffin recipe; I swap in serviceberries.) And they are amazing on yogurt. 

Serviceberries and local strawberries on my yogurt

The berries have a few tiny seeds in them that give them a delicious texture. Chew those seeds well; they give the berries a slight almond flavor. 

Beautiful color in the fall. The serviceberry's elegant oval leaves turn bright orange in the fall, adding a pop of color to our yard--and anywhere they grow. Even when the leaves fall, the trees have handsome gray bark to add a bit of texture and color to the winter landscape.

They are tough trees. I found out the hard way that deer will eat serviceberry bark in winter: they peeled a long strip of bark off the front yard tree last winter before I got it protected with a fence. The alley tree has a bark injury, too: we think the paper delivery person ran into it with their car! 

But both trees are still doing fine. They seem to have created scar tissue over the injuries, and they carry on. You have to love that in a tree.

I hear that Robin Wall Kimmerer has a book coming out in November called The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. I look forward to reading it and finding out why she loves them!

The books and birds of 2023

 

I don't usually do end-of the-year retrospectives, but I decided to do a couple this year!

10 Books I loved in 2023

I read a lot: in 2023 I read 46 books, almost all signed out from the public library. I write down titles, authors in my reading journal, and I always include 1-2 sentences about them to jog my memory if I go back to look at the list. 

My mom's reading journal, on the far left, inspired me to start keeping one in 2003. I have filled 2 blank books and started on the third last year.

Here are the top 10 books I read and loved this year with my short descriptions. They’re not in any particular order.

1. Doomsday Book, Connie Willis (1992): a time-traveling Oxford history student mistakenly ends up visiting England during the Plague while her colleagues live through a pandemic in 2054. Gift from Lisa!

2. The Windfall Diksha Baku (2017): Indian couple moves from a crowded apartment building where they’ve lived for years to the posh side of town. Delightful comedy of manners.

3. Matrix, Lauren Groff (2021): a fictionalized account of 12th c. Matrix (abbess) Marie de France, her visions and her building of a famous abbey in England.

4. Nothing to see Here, Kevin Wilson (2019): Disillusioned young woman is asked to care for two children who burst into flames when agitated. Funny, and also about the power of parenting and love.

5. Lost Journals of Sacajawea, Debra Magpie Earling (2023): Sacajawea tells her own story in lyrical language. Wonder, community, nature, loss and resilience. 

6. The Librarianist, Patrick DeWitt (2023): A kind, retired introvert encounters a woman with dementia and begins volunteering at the retirement home where she lives. Later, he is surprised to find out who she is.

Nonfiction

7. Fatherland, Burkhart Bilger (2023): A journalist researches what his grandfather did as a Nazi school teacher during the war, and reflects on how it affected his family.

8. Butts: a Backstory, Heather Radtke (2022): intelligent and witty critique of how our culture has viewed women’s backsides over the centuries. 

9. A Line in the World, Dorothe Nors (2022): Danish woman explores the wild western coast of Denmark, reflecting on personal and national history. Gift from Bruce!

10. The Wager, David Grann (2023): Shipwreck after a harrowing voyage leads to castaways trying to survive on an island. They eventually travel in 2 separate groups to where they are rescued, but whose version of the story is true?

Top 5 bird sightings

I also like to walk around and look at birds–and I’ve recently been reporting what I see using the ebird app–I’m doing citizen science! Ebird says I saw 129 species this year.

Top 100 birders in Linn County: I have birded with most of the 10 ahead of me!

Here are my top 5 sightings:

1. Magnolia Warbler: in bushes along the Sac and Fox trail during spring migration

2. Peregrine pair at Cedar Lake: scaring the pigeons, then bathing.

3. Canada Warbler: at Wanatee Park, hanging out with chickadees during fall migration.

4. A common loon at Palo Lake (Pleasant Creek SRA). A loon in Linn County, Iowa!

5. The kingfisher pair that I almost always see along the Sac and Fox trail.

Photos swiped from ebird.org.

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