Book Review: Of Mice and Men

My second John Steinbeck novel. The Pearl was first, an assigned reading in high school. The Pearl is a tragic story and so is this. Not sure I want to go through another Steinbeck again but he's such a good writer so maybe Grapes of Wrath next. As a final note, Of Mice and Men reads like a good story for a play.

#steinbeck #ofmiceandmen #bookreview

Book Review: H is for Hawk

Among my first purchase from my favorite second hand bookstore, Dignity Mama Stall, is this book H is for Hawk. I got it after reading a good review about the book. I repost this short review I made a few years ago. 

The story revolves around one woman's struggle to deal with the death of her father. Her way was to go back to a childhood dream of taming a wild bird. She proceeded to get a goshawk and there is where the story begins.

It was a pretty tough read when I ventured into the book. It took me months to finish the way a Russian classic would. Two paragraphs I loved though, on page 265, read like this:

“They are only safe for us. The fields where I fly Mabel back in Cambridge are farmed organically, and they are teeming with life. These are not. The big animals are here, it is true: the deer, the foxes, the rabbits; the fields look the same, and the trees, too, but look more carefully and this land is empty. There are few plants other than crops, and few bees, or butterflies, for the soil is dressed and sprayed with chemicals that kill. Ten years ago there were turtle doves on this land. Thirty years ago there were corn buntings and enormous flocks of lapwings. Seventy years ago there were red-backed shrikes, wrynecks and snipe. Two hundred years ago, ravens and black grouse. All of them are gone.

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”

Happy to lend to anyone interested. 

#bookreview #HisforHawk #secondhandbook