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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Read for the Alveus Book Club for Jan 2025, a fascinating study on grief and love while exploring falconry both in the present and the past. I learned a lot and will be haunted (positively) by a great many of the lines.
Some really beautiful descriptions and thoughts on grief and being human, but it just went on a bit too long for me. I did like how she tied in T.H. White's life and writing.
funny
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
It took me months to finish. Beautiful writing and the subject matter really moved me bc my brother recently passed away and this book is essentially about the author coming to terms with the death of her father. BUT, the type of book you can easily get tired of reading and have to put down and then forget about for a week.
Ugh. Reads like a pretentious master's thesis. Painful to slog through.
This book was absolutely phenomenal. I really connected a lot with the themes of loss and depression and how a connection to the natural world can providing healing. The writing is just exquisite and listening to it on audio read by the author gave a more intimate connection to the loss she experienced and what her relationship with her hawk really meant to her. Just beautiful.
"An hour later I'm walking down the street with a white paper bag in my hand. It weighs almost nothing. He says [the SSRIs] will make things better. Which is ridiculous. How can this grey and mortified world be washed away by little dots and lines? Then I start to worry that the drugs will make me ill. Even more absurdly, I panic that they'll stop me thinking clearly. That they'll stop me flying Mable. That whoever I'll become under their chemical influence will be so strange and alien she won't fly to me any more. The worries are a tedious avalanche but I put them to one side for long enough to swallow the drugs with water."
In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.
This book made me care about falconry in the way that Pat Conroy makes me care about basketball and The Citadel. I likely wouldn't have picked it up on subject matter alone, but I was lured by the promise that this book is also about grieving and loving, and, yes, rediscovering what it means to feel human. It is one of the most beautifully written memoirs I have ever read. Macdonald also parallels her story with that of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King and aspiring falconer himself. I kept thinking of this part of White's novel as I was drawn deeper into Macdonald's memoir:
And it seems to me that in this is a particularly fitting time and reason to read this book: to learn something, to fully immerse myself in a world completely unfamiliar to me, to believe that despite the horror and uncertainties of the world our ordinary lives can be works of artistry.
This book made me care about falconry in the way that Pat Conroy makes me care about basketball and The Citadel. I likely wouldn't have picked it up on subject matter alone, but I was lured by the promise that this book is also about grieving and loving, and, yes, rediscovering what it means to feel human. It is one of the most beautifully written memoirs I have ever read. Macdonald also parallels her story with that of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King and aspiring falconer himself. I kept thinking of this part of White's novel as I was drawn deeper into Macdonald's memoir:
“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
And it seems to me that in this is a particularly fitting time and reason to read this book: to learn something, to fully immerse myself in a world completely unfamiliar to me, to believe that despite the horror and uncertainties of the world our ordinary lives can be works of artistry.