Dirty, rambunctious, disruptive, funny, intense, committed: it sounds like an excellent rugby teammate, but actually that's how I'd describe Kira Jane Buxton's novel Hollow Kingdom. Clearly, it's not for everyone. I've got lots of readers in my life who I wouldn't direct toward a zombie apocalypse novel, and more I wouldn't direct toward a novel where the main character has much to say about farts, testicles, and masturbation. This novel is both of those, and it's a treat. As Effin' Birds might say, Hollow Kingdom is a goddamned delight, and their t-shirt for that slogan features precisely the ..read more

 I'm conflicted in kinds of ways about this lovely book Orchard: A Year in England's Eden, by naturalists and wildlife documentarians Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates. (And yes, I'm calling it off the top "this lovely book," so I'm favourably inclined, and yet I have complaints! Always with the complaints. I should try being happier.) Nature writing is very much my jam, as the kids used to say. It's rare that a month goes by without my reading a book of nature writing, and as it happens, I came to Orchard after having just finished the celebrated Roger Deakin's Wildwood. To be ..read more

There was a time when I would've thrilled to almost everything about Roger Deakin's 2007 book Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. It's truly a remarkable book, and it's made more poignant by the simple fact that at only 63, four months after completing Wildwood, Roger Deakin passed away from cancer that had been diagnosed shortly after he'd finished writing. Predictably, the Guardian review on the occasion of the book's initial publication does a great job of articulating the likely response from readers. The book's British sections are incredible for being so closely observed, so intimate ..read more

My memory of reading Iain Banks, which so far unaccountably is only The Hydrgen Sonata, has long told me that I really like him as a writer. When I revisited this morning my own review from many years ago, however, I was surprised to see that I was misremembering, so maybe I'll have to read more of his Culture novels. In the meantime, I've now also read his nonfiction Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram, and came away both enthralled (especially at first) and let down (though only toward book's end, really), which I think wouldn't trouble him even a whit. At the height of Banks' su ..read more

Book club gets me reading outside my lane, which is great. The various gentlemen of Beer & Books make each other read things we'd never read otherwise, and as someone whose career is built on making other people read things, it's just good practice to have the shoe be on the other foot at times. Honestly, the Beer & Books dudes are incredibly important to me (unless any of them are reading this. Jerks). They've been a rock for me these last 17 years (wait, I'm HOW old?!?!?). Everyone should belong to a book club, and for all kinds of reasons, but for me, I find it such a privilege that ..read more

(No posts in March 2024: lots of reading, but too much non-blog writing for the energy to be left over for blogging. I'll catch up soon. In theory.) The book club is reading David Grann's The Wager this month (breathlessly subtitled A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder), in the same cycle for some reason as Campbell & Chellel's Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy. Are we looking to shift our activities away from books to boats? Not likely to go well, based on these selections, even if we do have a ship's engineer in the group, but who k ..read more

 Two refrains run through Theresa Kishkan’s intimate novel Sisters of Grass, two little phrases that keep reverberating across the pages and that ought to keep the reader reflecting on the passage of time, both inside the novel and in their own lives: “I have dreamed of a girl,” and versions of “In such ways is the world remembered.” It’s a novel of imagination, Sisters of Grass, a novel of memory, that dramatizes in small ways and small lives the ways that readers and writers conjure up whole worlds out of nothing—except that somehow, and to the surprise of no one who’s ever read Theresa ..read more

Tl;dr: this sensibly proportioned little volume does exactly the job Lewis wants it to, even if it’s not the job I wanted it to do, and readers looking for a small story about trees (and/or someone who comes to really, really appreciate trees) should be very happy with Tracking Giants. Dear reader, I promise that I’ll get to Amanda Lewis’s Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest eventually in this … essay? perambulation? tangle? Whatever it is that I’ve ended up writing, and it's the longest post to date among the 700-plus here at Book Addiction HQ, it was m ..read more

I picked up Bruce Burrows’ The River Killers several years ago, though I’m no longer sure where or when. The “why,” though, is clear: it’s hardcore West Coast writing, by a writer who’s so West Coast that he probably … well, make up your own proverb. But I didn’t start reading it at the time, partly because it would’ve arrived during a years-long busy cycle for me, but also because I saw warning signs. For some readers, ones with fishing backgrounds, the ones that Burrows would actually want as readers, they might be badges of honour, but….. “To the hardworking, dedicated people at DFO [Cana ..read more

It’s not what I expected, Chip Zdarsky’s Public Domain: Volume One, but I don’t read enough graphica for my expectations to be at all trustworthy. Reviewers have generally been enthusiastic about this graphic novel, but readers (if one judges from Reddit) have been more equivocal. Who to trust? Superficially, Public Domain is about the long after-effects of cartoonist / artist Syd Dallas’ career drawing the comics for the world’s most popular character, Domain, now at the centre of multiple movies. (They’re from Singular Comics, so naturally the movies take place in the SCU, the current one be ..read more