Books in My House: An Introduction

Like many book readers, I have a hoard of unread books. Many birthdays and Christmases of requesting only books from my loved ones, plus years of used book fairs, plus my irrepressible need to visit any used book shop I pass on my travels (back when there was traveling), all adds up. I have more than 100 books in my house that I haven't read. Relatedly, I am out of bookshelf space.

And these are books I was excited about! 90% of these books are in my house because I looked at them and felt that delightful spark of potential when one sees a new book for the first time. At some point, I wanted to read these! (Most of them, anyway. With many apologies to my godmother, the odds of me reading "Killing Jesus" by Bill O'Reilly are...slim.)

So this is a blog of books in my house. I hope to motivate myself to read more of the books I already own. I will also document the inevitable library acquisitions and book purchases along the way. Perhaps this blog's only purpose will be so I can one day laugh at my naiveté, thinking that this might get me to read books at a faster rate than acquiring them. Time will tell.

Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald

Genre: Nonfiction, nature essays
How it got in my house: Gift
Do I recommend it: Yes

Vesper Flights is a book of essays about nature and our place in it with gorgeous prose. And here's the thing: with that description, you already know if this is a book for you or not. I think you know what you're going to get, with a well-written nature book, right? You'll learn lots of amazing things about fish and mushrooms and birds and insects and this wonderful teeming planet around us, you'll read some sentences that make you go "oh" as the world cracks open for you in a new way, and you'll also be reminded (again and again) how it's all dying out.

Nature books are always a bit like Tolkien's elves, in that way. A glorious, grand thing is fading away before our eyes. And elves are much less interesting than real-world animals. No offense to Tolkien, but elves aren't bioluminescent, are they? Do elves spend years at a time flying? Can elves navigate by Middle-Earth's magnetic field? Does Middle-Earth have a magnetic field? Anyway, elves are great, but they can't hold a candle to peregrine falcons or wild boar or the whole scope of this infinitely varied world.

Vesper Flights also criticizes the malarkey companies feed us about individual consumer purchases somehow solving the systematic problem, which is nice. It doesn't offer any practical guidance on taking down the system, but I can't fault the book for that; that's a bit outside its scope. But if anyone does know of nature books that also have some practical anticapitalism tips in them, hit me up.

So this review is more of a confirmation, than anything. If you like nature books, you'll probably like this one! Give it a try! If you don't like nature books, or if you're not up for being sad about the loss of so much wonder in the world, give this a pass.