Nature and Favorite Books of 2013

Below are several photos taken outdoors this morning and a few book reviews.

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These two go together. They're long. They're challenging. But wow. I knew that both had won Britain's Man Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012 which put both on my "to-read" list until I realized their relation to my spring 2013 "The Early Tudors: Literature and Reformation" course. Then, they were read and enjoyed immediately. Author Hilary Mantel traces the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry VIII's closest advisors. The writing is incredible. Both books required focus and close attention and it helped to be learning about the time period and the Tudors at the same time, as Mantel's wide research is evident and successful as she provides accuracy and close description in both. Wolf Hall begins the trilogy while Bring up the Bodies, which traces the fall of Anne Boleyn, is my favorite. I'm looking froward to the final installment in 2015, The Mirror and the Light. 

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I was assigned a few stories from this monstrous book in the fall of 2012 in my Creative Writing course. The first few I read were powerfully written and helped shape the remainder of the semester and my own writing. I soon set out to read the whole book. It took many months, but I finished it this past fall, finding that nearly every story in here is wonderfully written and like any good story, lingers for a few days.

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So, so good. A collection of Whitman's Civil War poetry, prose and letters, it's short and isn't the quickest read, but the language is powerfully realistic. I usually don't jump onto the bandwagon of classic literature, I have little to comment on Shakespeare, Austen or Dickens, but Whitman! He's another story. 

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I had read Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner a few years before, and was looking forward to this one. The first 80-100 pages were disappointing as I felt that all description and realistic writing was missing. It seemed too, that the male writer wasn't successful in writing through the eyes of a young woman. And then, suddenly, the story Hosseini told magnified and overshadowed. As the story widened, I realized Hosseini's talent lies in his ability to tell a story. He may not have had elaborate prose or weighty description, but the story of Afghanistan before and after the Taliban rule through the eyes of two young women and two families was triumphant, tragic and somehow, relatable. 

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I had enjoyed Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring a few years ago, and this was similar in depth, characters and exploration of a different culture. A mixture of American/British Quakers, westward migration and the fugitive slave law, The Last Runaway was powerful, engaging and exciting. :)