That’s the plan (and actually better pace than the stack of partly reads on my nightstand table).
The book is “A Year in the Woods” by Norwegian writer Torbjørn Ekelund– the sad state of web search yields no author managed web site, just links to book sellers or book reviews, I link therefore to a stubby Norwegian Wikipedia article.
This was a bookstore shelf guess grab I made in December on a tradition where Cori and I buy a gift book for ourself, ideally to be read over the holiday break.
I’m not writing a review here, but the book is Ekelund’s year long mission to spend one night each month a year in the forests not too far from home. He writes about his youthful idea of what a natural explorer does, his love of the land and forests instilled by his grandparents, but also with the balance of his content life in modern culture. His idea, then is to visit the woods for this monthly outing, to share how one place changes over the year.
Knowing my slow reading rate, I decided a gimmick of a strategy was to read each month, the chapter Ekelund wrote for the current month. Hence, I just read the September chapter, “Camp Life”
I enjoy the author’s description of the land and forest, noting the differences and similarities wih where I live, maybe not at the species level, tough spruce and moose figure prominently. I also appreciate the opening quotes or references to naturalists I do not know of such as this chapter’s reference to Helge Ingstad, and a book titled “Pelsjegerliv…. The Fur Trappers Life Among Canada’s People”
That leads my to look up Helge Ingstad, who gave up a life started as a lawyer to instead be an explorer (living as Ekelund loftily them), and spent much time as a fur trapper amongst Indigenous people in the Northwest Territories. If I understand correctly, this was almost an end of an error for this trade, as after it was altered by the use of airplane to track the game. I think the “Fur Trapper’s Life” was republished as In the Land of Feast and Famine, still available from McGill Press.
But Ingstad did much more, being the discoverer with his archeologist wife the significant ruins of a Viking village in Newfoundland. Let Wikipedia say it better:
In 1960, he discovered the remains of what later proved to be a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland in Canada. It is the only known site of a Norse or Viking village in Canada, and in North America outside of Greenland. Dating to around the year 1000, L’Anse aux Meadows remains the only widely accepted instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact and is notable for its possible connection with the attempted colony of Vinland established by Leif Ericson around the same time period or, more broadly, with Norse exploration of the Americas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helge_Ingstad#Viking_settlement_of_North_America
Ahh, see how I wander from the book? But that’s what a good piece of writing out to do, raise curiosity to go more, not to explain everything.
Ekelund is all together respectful/honoring of nature, family lore, but also a bit cheeky and sarcastic, and balances both the urban and wild land sides of his life. The chapters are quick, concise, reflective and humanly raw. It’s not all solo treks, in June we went out with fishing pals, and August was with his four year old son.
There’s much wisdom, I keep underlining. But I will [happily] not finish the book until a least after December. It’s an interesting approach to reading in bits rather than trying to plow through all in one motion (which I rarely do).
I have a few weeks to read the next chapter.
Featured Image: This was my photo of unread books in 2016 (I finished 2, those were high percentage days, if anyone actually reads this, guess which 2.) So It’s #NationalBookLoversDay flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I feel the challenge with eye-reading! About 6 years or so years ago, I realized that I hadn’t read a fiction book in a very long time and have tried to carve out the half-hour before bed to do so. Depending upon the book, I’m sometimes really on top of it–other times, not so much. There’s a weird reverse polarity that the shorter the book, the less likely I am to read it than the longer ones (e.g I somehow made my way through Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time doing this over 2.5 years).
That said, 75% of my annual reading is audiobooks, 20% is graphic novels, and 5% is actual “books.” I don’t know what that says for my reading practices 🙂
Thanks for sharing this — I just ordered it via Interlibrary Loan. It seems like a nice fit with Write Out in October.
Kevin
Hope you enjoy it, Kevin!
I still love to read (and have plenty of time to do it!). We were supposed to visit L’Anse aux Meadows last year but missed it due to weather conditions.
For a very good read, I recommend Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I don’t usually read science fiction but this story is so interesting- science and humor in dystopian times!