muddy21 tries a new group in 2012

Nice to find a group devoted to nonfiction...I read a bit of fiction but not much and often feel like a bit of a fish out of water in some of the more general groups. I am a member of the 75s with a thread here I see some familiar names here but also some new ones -- I'm looking forward to sharing our nonfiction adventures!

Welcome! I just starred your 75er thread because your reading interests overlap substantially with mine.

Well, I starred your 75 thread earlier this evening, but was afraid to leave a message to that effect, given all the stern warnings about dire consequences for anyone posting before January 1! ;o)

I still have responsibilities in 2011. Can't deal with two years at once. :-)

I have been doing a bit of reading - and so far all but one have been nonfiction...they've all been winners so far!

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser

A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell

Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

and I shall have some peace there: trading in the fast lane for my own dirt road by Margaret Roach

On Writing Well: the Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser

It was interesting to read Zinsser’s comments on developing one’s style as an author. He strongly encourages the use of first person, a big departure from research papers where any mention of “I” or “me” is strictly against the rules. Zinsser contends that one's writing should be aimed at an audience of one – oneself. The writer must focus on the writing as an act of personal expression and trust that there will be some readers who find that genuine expression of interest. Pouring oneself onto the page for an unknown critical reader is an intimidating prospect and attempting to write for that sort of audience is unnerving at best. In Zinsser's view, while personal vulnerability is one of the things that makes writing so difficult, it is also a crucial component of establishing the author’s style and making what they’ve written appealing to others.

Throughout the book Zinsser stresses the importance of consistency and personal integrity. Develop your own voice and stay with it. Let your readers know who you are and that they can depend on you to be honest and fair with them. Find a topic, fix your focus on some small piece of that topic, and then make some personal connection to it. Dive in and enjoy the process – be flexible enough to see where it takes you. Don’t try to picture the completed piece until you get to the ending, otherwise you’ll find yourself drifting up roadways that are not on your route, or even worse encountering a roadblock right at the start.

Definitely a book worth reading!

A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell

After many years of marriage and with their son grown and gone, Sue Hubbell and her husband gave up their careers in New England academia. A back-to-the-land dream took them to the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, where they bought a cabin with some land and began planning for their new-found freedom from the world of work. Soon after making the move to the hills an even greater change occurred as Hubbell’s marriage dissolved and she found herself alone and struggling to support herself. Her book, A Country Year: Living the Questions, is a collection of personal essays in which Hubbell shares her transition to a new life – her new home, her new livelihood as beekeeper, and her growing appreciation for the beauty of the natural world around her.

The essays are loosely grouped into five seasonal sections. The book begins in the spring, proceeds through the year and finishes the following spring. Most of the essays are short and to the point, but always with some connection between Hubbell’s Ozark hillside and the greater world beyond. The seasonal focus serves more as a frame to provide boundaries and a point of reference for the essays rather than as a structure upon which to attach them.

Few of the essays are season-specific: there may be an initiating event that starts the essay, such as the ones related to the working world of a commercial beekeeper, but Hubbell then makes seamless segues into the world at large, closing with appreciation for the timeless relevance of the natural world. In one summer essay, as Hubbell talks about a day spent cutting wood to provide fuel for winter’s fires, she moves easily from physical labor in the forest to ruminations on the roles people play in tinkering with nature.

Hubbell’s departing husband had the grace to leave her with a full set of tools and we walk alongside as she treads a path from abandoned and disoriented ex-wife to competent and capable independent woman grateful for the twists and turns of fate that led to her new life. She vacillates between appreciation for the skills and support of her mountain neighbors and her occasional difficulty in reconciling their mountain-born-and-bred views with her own, developed over years of life as a socially and environmentally responsible urbanite. However different their perspectives may be, though, she strives to appreciate each for who they are without judgment. “But in the very long run I’m not so sure, and as in most lofty matters…I suspect that all our opinions are simply an expression of a personal sense of what is fitting and proper.” (p.141)

Hubbell invites us along for company as she comes to know and better understand her fellow creatures and makes new trails for herself along the way. As the essays progress she gradually reveals to us her growing comfort with her new circumstances. We are there with her as she moves from resignation to acceptance to a full embrace of the changes that have brought her to a new life and a new understanding of her world.

Marilyn- Nice reviews, both! I am adding On Writing Well to the wishlist.

The Elements of Style (4th edition) by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White

I am indebted to a high school English teacher for my first reading of The Elements of Style in 1968. Each time I return to the book I find myself struck anew by the way such a small book has stayed relevant despite all the changes we’ve seen both in the world at large and in our society in particular.

One of the things I like best about this book is the Strunk's emphasis on an author’s responsibility to the reader; not to impress the reader with one’s skill but to make the material as easily understood as possible. In the introduction White says that "Will (Strunk) felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least to throw a rope." We don’t get the sense that Strunk felt the trouble was due to any lack of skill or knowledge on the reader’s part, but rather that the danger lay in the natural inclination of an author to write in ways that were unintelligible or incomprehensible to the average reader. Reading a piece aloud seems to be one approach to finding those stumbling points during the revision process.

I still have my earlier edition of The Elements of Style and have reread it many times since my initial introduction. Recently I splurged and bought myself a new copy of the most current edition. I didn’t sit down to compare the two editions side by side so I can’t say much about the changes that have been made to the text of the book. I can say that I recognized many of the techniques I have internalized over the years and that it was interesting to see how many of the rules and principles I follow, particularly in my revisions. This is one book that will never go out of style.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard reflects on her outdoor experiences throughout the seasons of a year in the woods and waterways around her home in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The natural world follows a cycle that includes death and decay as surely as it does birth and new growth. Dillard exults in the beauty of nature but acknowledges that, just as beauty lies in the perception of the observer, so does the ugliness that rests on the other side of the coin. The author takes a two-pronged approach, sharing her observations on the natural world but then consistently attempting to interpret the things she sees in terms of human experience and her own interpretation of God the Creator.

Dillard is an accomplished writer so it’s no stretch to assume that the word “pilgrim” in the title was chosen with careful deliberation, forewarning as it does the religious aspects of her work. In Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, pilgrim is defined as “a person who passes through life as if in exile from a heavenly homeland or in search of it or of some high goal.”

In my observations of nature I have always been fascinated to find that the more we know, the more we can learn from what we see; that our familiarity, far from breeding contempt, allows us to be ever more distinctly aware of what we’re seeing. Dillard’s comments about observations in nature quickly drew me in. Unfortunately, Dillard’s word choices led away from nature to a human-centric judgment of the natural world – "gruesome", "grotesque", “its hideous horizontal, multijointed mouthparts”, “senseless and horrifying”, “…the meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures”, “yard after yard of some unthinkable parasite he had just found”. It started sounding downright Lovecraftian at times.

If I was more interested in theology and religion I would perhaps have appreciated this book more than I did. As it was, though, I went through most of it thinking how much more I would have liked it if Dillard’s focus had been more upon the world and less upon its Creator.

I would also like very much to have further information about one particular statement she made,
"It is a fact that the men and women all over the northern hemisphere who dream up new plans for a perpetual motion machine conceive their best ideas in the spring." Is this according to the men and women themselves? Or the dates of applications made to the US Patent Office? But it says “northern hemisphere,” not US. Best ideas relative to what? Best by what measure? I would have been delighted if she had replaced a paragraph or two about the ugliness and degradation of nature to provide a little more information about these perpetual motion machines! But perhaps her intention was for us to think of nature as the ultimate perpetual motion machine?

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau shares a collection of essays drawn from the journals he kept over a period of two years that he lived in a rough cabin in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts at the edge of Walden Pond. Thoreau’s great experiment in living was an attempt to simplify his life in a quest to ascertain the true value of a life freed from social expectations and obligations.

Thoreau built the cabin with his own hands out of materials procured inexpensively by a variety of means. His diet was plain, consisting largely of what he could produce himself. He lived a mile in every direction from his nearest neighbors and took great delight in spending his time in the company of the natural world rather than that of men and society.

One of Thoreau’s basic tenets was that one cannot really know a thing until one has experienced it and he put himself to the test. There were tales of interesting experiments he made during his time in the woods. One elaborate winter project involved a painstaking mapping of the bottom of Walden Pond by means of innumerable soundings taken through holes in its frozen surface. Another was shared in his account of dining on woodchuck, specifically, a particular woodchuck that had been eating the beans in Thoreau’s garden and whose “transmigration” had occurred at Thoreau’s hand.

Thoreau considered the inheritance of property to be one of the greatest burdens a man could be asked to endure and that efforts to earn a livelihood often resulted in a spiritual death. He speculated that society would be much better served, and young men would learn far more, if they were put to work on the construction of buildings rather than paying vast sums of money to live at university in buildings built by others. Learned investigation and contemplation were far more likely to be productive when conducted by society’s elders who had already learned what life had to offer, in Thoreau’s estimation.

These ideals were admirable but there jarring inconsistencies throughout the book. There was great discussion about how degrading it was to work for a living or to shoulder one’s financial responsibilities but he was equally condescending about the men he met who were cheerfully content with a much simpler lot in life. Thoreau shares his observations about a local woodcutter who lived simply, never unwilling to delay his daily labors in order to stop to observe and appreciate the world around him or to harvest ingredients for his next meal. But while Thoreau considers those activities noble in his own experiment in living, he portrays the woodcutter who behaves similarly as a simpleton, an overgrown child, “But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant.”

For all his talk about the importance of being contented with a simple life and how clever he had been to manage his self-sufficient living, Thoreau mentions in only the briefest words, that his cabin was built on land where he was a squatter. He then goes on to add, “But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it (p. 60).” A convenient sentiment when another man was shouldering the responsibility of paying the property taxes and bearing the initial investment of purchasing the property. Thoreau also glosses over the many dinners he ate as a guest at other people’s tables or about taking his laundry home to mother.

There are many, many familiar phrases in this book – phrases that have become a part of our national consciousness…
"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
"Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails."

And my own personal touchstone, one that my mother quoted years ago in her response to a teacher’s harsh report card comments about the learning style of my brother with ADD, and one that has become my mantra in supporting my son with ADD…
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

For giving us this one phrase alone I am more than willing to overlook the many inconsistencies that made Henry David Thoreau as clearly human as the rest of us.

I read Walden a few years ago, on a backpacking trip, and really loved it. Thoreau was quite a character.