Welcome to Litsy!

… it seemed cruel that a bird should be punished for believing it could fly

101

The allure of really knowing something

99

Reading Maclear's little snippets of reflection this year has provided great moments of quietude for me. I really appreciate this book. And I read today's chapter out loud while my son was still sleeping, because it made the baby move, and I knew she was listening to my voice. After I read the Epilogue in December, I'll have to decide what to read a bit of each month next year!

#sorrynotsorry

The April chapter in this is about knowledge. There‘s a lot about books and reading but also about connection to place and how a deep knowledge of something or somewhere can inspire and teach us things we wouldn‘t learn otherwise.

22 hrs, 15 min toward #25inFive
I might just barely have enough time to squeeze in three more hours before bed!

I won't even try to review this objectively: it was precisely the book I needed to read now. It was a library book but I made so many notes and quotes on the first chapters that I've since bought a copy. Her observations are seedlings (fledglings?) rather than fully developed ideas, which some might find unsatisfying, but I plan to use them as starting points for my own contemplations in a re-read at a more leisurely pace. (I wolfed it down!)

"Something that would hold me and my wandering mind. Something... that would allow me to say: I am here, I am alive. I am doing more than calmly bracing myself." ?

“What makes waiting painful is the desire and goal to not be waiting.”

The March chapter is about waiting. There‘s a lot here that really strikes a chord with me.

I forgot to mention this before, but I‘m reading the tagged book for my monthly reflections this year. (Last year, I read A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, which I still need to review.) The theme of this month‘s chapter is smallness. Some interesting ideas and observations!

I absolutely loved this book, despite it being nothing like I assumed it would be! If you like the gentler side of nature, quiet observations, birds, books, creating (any kind), family, this book is for you. It does wander a LOT, but that might be its greatest charm. I tend to stay clear of memoirs these days, so glad I picked this one up at the library. Highly recommended.

Hard to pass up a book with three things I dearly love in its title. June Bug approves, however, quickly began snoring.

"The sound of birdsong reminded him to look outward at the world."

Started my Christmas shopping, almost entirely based on @Lindy 's recommendation from a few weeks back- and am a bit thrown by how close this is in theme to the book I'm currently reading. This is a very beautiful little book btw - the pic's a section-heading.

I like smallness. I like the perverse audacity of someone aiming tiny. Together we would make a symbolic pilgrimage to the wellspring of the minuscule.

I watch my cat, luxuriating on the floor in a rectangle of sunlight. She is happily watching nothing because there is nothing to watch. She does not appear worried about a dearth of events or the lack of a narrative dialectic. She does not seem to fear that if she stops moving the walls will collapse, that she will end up in bed and never again rouse herself to stand.

Out of 32 books this month, I gave 12 5-star ratings in Goodreads, and my 4 favourites include the tagged book plus Walking Through Turquoise (Laurie MacFayden); Reservoir 13 (Jon McGregor); and The Ghost Orchard (Helen Humphreys).

In May, I discovered that my younger son was eating books. He licked their covers and ripped off pieces and ate them. This new habit was revealed to me one night when, complaining of nausea, he vomited up a piece of blue paper—a page from The Complete Peanuts 1963-1964. When I laid down a rule against eating books, he immediately complied and went back to reading them instead.

A sketchbook of literary musings on creativity, anxiety and finding meaning in life. Beautiful book design, including art by the author and photographs by her birdwatching mentor. Beautiful prose, thoughtful and humble. I want to buy multiple copies to give as gifts. “If you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.”

“It‘s useless to pretend to know mushrooms. They escape your erudition,” wrote John Cage in For the Birds. Mushrooms are haphazard and anarchic, defying the classifying intellect. “I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.”

Asian women are not assumed to be particularly magisterial, with the exception of Yoko Ono, who is frequently and predictably belittled for her artistic hubris and over-the-top voice.
(Internet photo)

Susan Sontag, remarking in one of her journals on her inability to stop reading, even in the face of her terminal illness, wrote: “I can‘t stop reading …I‘m sucking on a thousand straws.” I know that feeling of bottomless hunger for words, even and especially during times of crisis.

That night my sons embarked on some grebe research. “Oh. This is epic,” [the younger one] said. “It says here the fossil record shows that grebes were around when dinosaurs roamed the earth!”
In the quiet that followed, I believe each of us imagined some version of a grebe and triceratops meet-and-greet.

I am no longer very good with long movies or big books. The Sunday New York Times makes me anxious. Long ago, I sat through Shoah & read doorstoppers & listened to CD box sets, but at some point a culturally acquired laziness set in. I still love ample stories & long winding sentences & characters that have psychological bulk & emotional mass. But I would prefer to read Teju Cole‘s Open City over Marcel Proust‘s À la recherche du temps perdu.

The nest was a solid but messy mound built of twigs, reeds and water plants, but also a plastic shopping bag and an old ice cream container. Like most modern homes, it was a work in progress. Every now and then the female grebe delivered a few new weedy bits to her mate, which he arranged according to some sloppy vision of home betterment.
(Image credit: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-necked_Grebe/id )

I had grown solitary as an only child of two aging immigrants who had fled their respective homelands for a continent devoid of family, who had drawn a strike-line through their histories, who sat on the land like two potted plants rather than trees in soil.

Perhaps I lack the sheer egoism that George Orwell described as a writerly necessity in ‘Why I Write.‘ But then what does sheer egoism look like to the Asian female writer? In response to Orwell, Deborah Levy writes: ‘Even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.‘

“I feared that if I looked away, I would not be prepared for the loss to come and it would flatten me. I had inherited from my father (a former war reporter / professional pessimist) the belief that an expectancy of the worst could provide in its own way a ring of protection. We followed the creed of protective anxiety.”

Photo: this memoir has gorgeous #endpapers

#TBRtemptation post 2! A memoir about connecting with nature. A companion piece to "H is For Hawk", this takes the core lessons from birding and applies them to aspects of art and life. This is Maclear's year-long study of birds in the urban coastal environment, and shares insights from the birds during migrations and the lulls in between. Sounds eye-opening! #blameLitsy #blameMrBook ?

Summer office hours. #researchreads #charliewaffles

So I just posted a review about this yesterday, but because it's my new favorite nonfiction book, here I am with it again. It's the contemplative and meaningful sketchbook-like memoir about bird watching and all the little things that make life worth living that I didn't know I needed. I recommend it to anyone, especially if you're facing loss. #5555giveaway

This book found me (we found each other) at the exact right time. It's not my usual fare, but it was what I needed, offering the words for things I hadn't articulated, offering the safe spaces in which to slow down, to be. It's beautifully and lovingly crafted, and I'm definitely going to get my own copy to return to in the future.

What do you regret?

The line between freedom from fear and freedom from danger is not always easy to discern.

"Books have given me great stores of happiness, but if I am honest with myself I can see they have also taken something away. I glimpsed the real world between paragraphs of novels. I traced words when I might have touched the ground."

This little book of thoughts and observations has such lovely writing.

Beautifully written memoir. We follow Maclear during a year of her life when she is feeling stuck in life and in a creativity rut. She makes a new friend who "guides" her into the birdwatching world. Honest and open, I found this book to be lovely and thought provoking. | full review: https://thebookcoverjudge.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/review-birds-art-life-a-year-...

#TBRtemptation post! A memoir on the shorter side, this sounds like a fascinating work of writing and reflection! Considered a related companion piece to "H is For Hawk", this book is more than about birding (in an urban landscape, no less), but rather uses the activity to reflect on love, regrets, endings, art, etc. For you city-dwellers, you may come to appreciate your surroundings in a whole new light ?. #blameLitsy #blameMrBook ?

Last year, I realized how many #BooksAboutNature were on my shelves, so when I had a little time to kill, I created a new nature shelf on GR. Here's a sampling of my TBR, nature memoir edition. Now I wish I could sit on my butt all day and read these. What have you read? #ReadJanuary

I love (LOVE!) Kyo Maclear so much, so was thrilled to see her again today AND score an ARC of her upcoming memoir (and a little Penguin swag too). Thanks to #PRHCFallPreview. Also loved seeing my friend @Penny_LiteraryHoarders for a few hours!!