This Week, I'm Reading...
North Woods, by Daniel Mason
A couple of you recommended North Woods, and now I know why. I’m loving this novel for so many reasons. It takes its time to tell a story, with well-crafted sentences and interesting characters. It’s embedded in a particular time and place. It keeps surprising me, and it makes me believe things I shouldn’t be able to believe. It’s inventive in form—but not so inventive that it stops making sense. When I wrote last year about my top 10 favorite novels, I noted that the list told me my taste favors “slow, luxurious storytelling and psychological nuance and history.” Here comes North Woods to join the club. The “North Woods” of the title is somewhere in Massachusetts not far from Springfield—but isolated enough to become a refuge for any number of characters over time, beginning with a couple of lovers escaping the rigid mores of their Puritan colony. I’m not quite halfway through, but I can tell you that the individual stories of those who find their way to a particular house in the North Woods are all interrelated, not just by the place but also over the course of time. I like what the front cover blurb by Maggie O’Farrell calls it: “a monumental achievement of polyphony and humanity.” Extra points for using “polyphony” in a blurb, Maggie! It’s fitting.
What are you reading this week? Let us know in the comment section below!
Tonight I finished Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things. This one doesn’t get a recommendation from me. Most of the chapters meander in thought instead of following the premise stated at the beginning with a logical progression of cohesive support. Now that I’ve finished it, I’ll be returning to Diamant’s The Red Tent. Poetry this week is from The Well Speaks It’s Own Poison by Maggie Smith.
North Woods is sitting on my want to read shelf, on loan from my daughter. She enjoyed it last year and said it is a “slow down” book because of the descriptive language. Your joint descriptions make it very appealing.
This sounds like a good novel, Kathy! I'm reading Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, one of your recs!