Learnin'

I hadn’t planned on it happening, but here we are my peoples. Maybe I had read so many fantasies and sci-fi books one after another and had figured “Hey, maybe I should start learning something.” Mind you, when you are reading Brandon Sanderson and N.K. Jemisin you feel like you are learning. If anything, how to be a writer. Or just bleeding green envy with every page turned.

It is typical of me to read some type of nonfiction along with a fiction title, giving equal time to each. But lately I’ve found that I want to sit down and spend time with cows and wolves and writers talking about writing. We readers go through phases, and this is just one of mine. We love when these phases happen because they shake things up and make us interested in things we may have only had passive interests in in the past. 

John Connell’s The Farmer’s Son was something that caught me by surprise. I was walking around my local Barnes and Noble when I found it. Granted, as I guiltily do, I was taken in by the cover. It is serene: an idyllic Irish landscape with perfect cows lying cozily hither and tither. The author photo was a scruffy younger man, not at all your average farmer. And it is true that he isn’t, just as the book isn’t your average autobiography on what it means to be in a family of farmers. Taking the mantel of farmer was not easy for Connell, having grown acquainted to an urban lifestyle in Australia and Canada before moving back home to Ireland. There was his contentious relationship with his father, missteps that lead to death of livestock, and other trials and tribulations that numbered more than bales of hay. The Farmer’s Son is a beautiful book about many things, but most interestingly about the collision of two different generations in a lifestyle that may seem to some as old fashioned.

I have been a fan of Lawrence Wright for many years. He is widely known via his groundbreaking novel about Scientology called Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. It was later made into an HBO documentary directed by Alex Gibney. He also wrote about the rise of Al Qaeda in his book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. As seems to be the pattern, this was made into a Hulu mini-series. I read his latest book, God Save Texas, interested first and foremost in learning about a state where I spent my childhood. Now that I live in California, you get a sense of how people see the Lone Star state: gun-hungry, right wing fanatics who are closed-minded and heavily against any and all government intervention. Wright, who lives in Austin, takes into account the history of the state, from the state’s break with Mexico, the Alamo, all the way to now. It is a state that has a heavy hand in politics. Wright takes a detour from his usual reporting style and writes in first person. He is a biased observer and he knows it. But he loves his state, for all its complexity and influence.

I am an unabashed wolf fanatic, which began after reading Nate Blakelee’s American Wolf: A True Story of Obsession in the West and led to as many nature documentaries about the wolf as I could get my hands on. Jim and Jamie Dutcher’s The Wisdom of Wolves about living among the Sawtooth Pack was another book that did nothing but elevate my low-key obsession. I am now only a little bit into Rick McIntyre’s The Rise of Wolf 8. He is a subject in Blakelee’s American Wolf because McIntyre was a part of reinstating wolves back into Yellowstone National Park. This was an outrage to local farmers who blamed wolves for killing their livestock, leading to their eradication years before. But as McIntyre and most experts believe, we live within the world of animals and should do our best to treat them like we would our neighbor.

And then there is Susan Orlean. Many may know her from her riveting The Library Book about the fire of the Los Angeles Public Library, thought to be arson. She brought her keen eye and hungry wonder to The Orchid Thief, a fascination about a man that started from a small clipping in a newspaper she read on a flight. From there she traveled to Florida and learned about the dark world of orchid collecting, and how those collectors fed their obsessions by acquiring the most rare and coveted flowers. A book about flowers in the swamps of Florida should not be this good, but this is Orlean. She will never steer you wrong.

Sometimes you have to read fiction. You have to escape, get lost in a space war here and there, climb on the back of an ogre, do some magic. Yet a healthy dose of knowledge never hurt anyone. Especially when it is a topic you don’t know much about. I know nothing about farming, but if The Farmer’s Son taught me anything—even if I didn’t ask—I know what a calf birth looks like. Knowledge, my friends. It isn’t always pretty.