Breathing Just a Little

(NB: Helen MacDonald is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, which I have therefore used throughout this review). This is a memoir about grief, and coming to terms with mortality. This is the story of a falconer and their hunting bird, a person and a goshawk and the delicate, savage, complex relationship between them. This is a fascinating kind of shadow biography of TH White, best known as the author of The Once and Future King, and himself a falconer who trained a goshawk and wrote a book about it. This is a reflection on the nature of wildness and humanity's relationship with it, the ever-changing realities of landscape and place and animal movements. Importantly, this is also a book that asks us to interrogate the danger of constructing a narrative that reifies a fictive "return to nature", and assigns "the wild" a moral weight and power by denying the realities of human ontology. The catalyst for everything that happens in the book is the sudden death of...

I have been sadly neglecting this blog, and I'm aware of it! I intend to get back into semi-regular posting soon, and I thought the best way to kick off was with a triple book review :-) It's been another hectic month between surgical recovery, work, and family stuff, but I have squeezed in four more new books since the three life-writing texts I reviewed back on 13 July. Here's a review of three of them. None were tough reads, which helps! Also none were stinkers, but neither were they perfect books. There were a lot of things I really liked about this book. The atmospheric portrayal of humanity's last years, the complex and nuanced unpacking of what true artificial intelligence in an embodied form might be like, and the exploration of the darker shades of human entitlement were all on point, and executed very well. The premise of the book is a future world that is very literally dying, or perhaps more accurately, becoming unsurvivable for humans. Into this world, huma...

I have recently read three very different books that can all be described as "life writing". One is an old-school "straight" biography, that tracks its subject from birth to death in a linear fashion; one is a memoir which is primarily focused on a particular formative experience / period in the writer's life; and the third is a combination social commentary / non-fiction told through the lens of the writer's relationship with her grandson and the sport he plays.  I don't often read life writing - I'm much more of a fiction person - so finishing three in July was a definite aberration for me (to be fair, I have been slowly picking away at the biography since February, but I did complete it this month). For that reason, I thought a comparative three-way review might be a good thing to do! I enjoyed all three texts in entirely different ways, with one stand-out that I would describe as exceptional. Each gave me room for thought about what makes truly g...