February 2026 Reading

What a strange month of reading this has been: lots of audiobooks (which is odd for me) and fewer "hard" books.  This was also the month of the Winter Olympics and I found myself engrossed by them. What a nice break from reality; but that left less time for reading. 

The reason for all the audiobooks was that I spent the first week of this month traveling, including a 12 hour car ride to the place I was going and a 12 hour car ride back. So, I downloaded  audiobooks for the drive. We listened to two of them during the drives and I finished the others once I got home. All the audiobooks I finished were memoirs read by their authors. I generally like memoirs read by their authors because is sounds as if the author is telling you, the reader, the story of their life directly. 

These are the books I finished in February. 

Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker

This is the audiobook I listened to on my way down to the Gulf Coast. It was not what I expected, which is on me and not on the book. A memoir by the actress Mary-Louise Parker told as a series of letters to men (some real, some fictional), it was, interestingly, not much about  her career as an actress. She might mention that she was in NY to do a play but that was about it. It was almost completely about her personal life including her kids, her health and her love life. She has a very dry sense of humor and we chuckled along with some of her stories. On the whole, not the best memoir I've ever read but entertaining enough.

What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci

This was the audiobook I listened to on the way home. This is essentially a diary that Stanley Tucci kept over a year journaling the food he made for himself and/or his family and what he ate (whether made at home or in a restaurant). He includes recipes (you need to like pasta). Along the way he talks about certain projects he was working on beginning with the filming of Conclave. He also talks about the death of his first wife, which is sad. He also talks about the celebrities he had dinner with throughout the year. It took me a long while to figure out that his second wife, Felicity, is the sister of actress Emily Blunt (maybe he said that early on and I just missed it).  He can be very funny and I enjoyed listening although I did get a bit tired of hearing about pasta. And I don't recommend you listen to it if you are hungry. But I think listening to this book made me appreciate the little spots he did for NBC during the Olympics about Italian food in the Milan area. 

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

The third audiobook memoir that I checked out of the library for my trip turned out to be something I didn't want to listen to in the car. Read by the author, it was a very quiet book and I needed something that would keep me awake. But I did listen when I arrived home. Geraldine Brooks (the author of Horse, among other novels) was married for 35 years to Tony Horowitz, a Pulitzer prize-winning author. In 2019, while he was on a book tour, he dropped dead suddenly while he was walking down a street in Washington DC.  This memoir is the story of Brooks' grief journey.  A few years after his death she retreated to Flinders Island in Australia (she is Australian) to consider what happened and work through her grief. The memoir is partly a memoir of her time on the island and partly a memoir of the time immediately following his death. It is not a long book but I found myself very affected at points. (I'm glad I didn't listen to it while driving.) There were also parts where I found myself as angry as the author - for instance when she discovered that the family's health insurance had been canceled the day after Tony's death without any notice to her. Or when she had to apply for all new credit cards because she had never thought to establish credit under her own name prior to his death. And especially when she received the call from the hospital unexpectedly telling her that her husband had died but the doctor was finishing her shift and couldn't take the time to answer questions. I hope the administration at GW Hospital read this and made some changes. 

The Book of I by David Grieg

If you have ever wanted to read a comic novel about slaughter by Vikings then this is the book for you. The island of Iona was often a target of Vikings and the novel begins in the year 825 A.D. with the landing of a Viking hoard and the slaughter of all but two of the residents - a monk who hid in a latrine and the wife of the smith who made such good mead from local honey that she is spared. The Vikings also leave behind one of their own, believing him to be dead. This is the story of the following year in the life of the three on the island. Although this is a very short novel, each of the characters has an arc. It examines issues of faith, love, and loyalty, all the while in language that is humorous. I have no idea if the end of the novel is historically accurate but it was satisfying. 

The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukherjee

The next installment of the Wyndham and Banerjee series set in Calcutta in the 1920's, this novel is set a few years after the end of the last novel. Banerjee has returned from a stint in Europe but does not want to go back into the police force, he is working for Indian independence. Wyndham is still clean from his drug addiction but he drinks too much.  And he has lost the faith of the police force so he hasn't been assigned any good murders to investigate in a long time. The two come together again when Banerjee's cousin disappears at the same time that a rich local man is murdered. I always enjoy this series and you could read this without reading the previous novels, but of course it would be better if you started at the beginning. 

Helm by Sarah Hall

This is an historical novel about the only wind in the British Isles that has a name: Held.  Held is a character in the novel. There are also many other characters who observe Held through the ages.  In my Quick Take I said that if you like short stories you may like this, as this novel is more like a collection of related short stories but not told linearly.  For me, that slowed down the narrative arc of the whole novel. Despite that, I did like this novel and was very impressed by what Hall accomplished in anthropomorphizing Held. 

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

The last of the audiobook memoirs I got from the library. Levy is a staff writer for The New Yorker and she writes with The New Yorker style. You know.  Start the essay with something really personal that will grab the reader, then go into whatever it is you are intending to write about and at the end go back to the personal story. I don't have a problem with this form of essay - I am a subscriber to The New Yorker. But in my opinion this style works better for essays than for books.  And probably works better when read on the page rather than heard in audiobook form. This memoir starts with the description of a horrible moment in Levy's life without any explanation about how she got there and then goes back to the beginning of her life. This memoir did not grab me. It's not that Levy didn't have an interesting life; it was as interesting as any other woman who wants a career and a marital life and a baby.  Her's might even be slightly more interesting because she was in a same sex marriage that had issues with fidelity and heavy drinking. I usually like audiobook memoirs read by the author because it usually sounds as if the author is telling YOU the story personally. I think the problem with this audiobook is that Levy wasn't great at doing the reading and it often sounded like she was angry when I think it would have worked better if she had sounded ironic. Maybe I would have liked it more if I had read a hard copy of the book. 

The Hideaway by Nikki Allen

Full disclosure, Nikki Allen is married to a distant cousin of mine and I met her one time a number of years ago.

This thriller is part of the oevre of "country house murders" where a group of strangers are stranded together in a house where they can't escape and someone is a murderer. But in this novel, the "country house' is a house in Costa Rica and the group of five strangers end up lost in the rain forest. The action of the novel is related in third person omniscient, with the chapters alternating between the points of view of the different characters. (Regular readers will know this is not my favorite structure for a novel, but it didn't bother me too much here.)  Each character has come to the retreat in Costa Rica because they are dealing with personal issues (traumas?) and they want to get their life together and come back changed. In real life Nikki has worked as a therapist and she is very good at representing the various issues that each character is dealing with. In fact, the strength of this novel is the development of the characters. As far as plot, this is of course a thriller/mystery and it's pretty good but I thought it lost a little bit of momentum in the later chapters where there was a lot of narrative and less action (the opposite of what you would expect - although in the old murder mysteries the detective DID do a lot of narrative at the end explaining what happened). I thought it was an enjoyable book, the kind to  take on vacation. As a first novel it was promising and I do look forward to her future books. 

Helm

 

The Book: In the history of the world, certain winds get names. Think of the Santa Ana winds in North America. In Great Britain, only one wind has a name:  Held. This is the story of Held, as Held observes the formation of the world and the coming of peoples. This is also the story of the people who lived with Held including the neolithic people who considered Held a god, a medieval "wizard" who considered Held a demon, a Victorian scientist who wanted to study Held, a 20th century farmer's daughter who considered Held her friend, up to and  including a scientist studying plastic particles in the air. 

The Author: Sarah Hall

Genre: Historical Fiction

Length: 507 pp on ipad mini

One good thing:  Hall creates Held as an actual character. Held is curious, mischievous, egocentric, ferocious, and in some cases as close to loving as a wind can be. Hall uses third person omniscient with Held (as with all the characters) but the narrator, when talking about Held, has a real sense of humor. I sometimes thought that the narrator of the chapters about Held could actually be Held referring to Heldself in the third person. 

One not-so-great thing: There are many characters and their stories are strung out throughout the novel forcing the reader, with each chapter, to try to remember who the character was and where we were in their story. Although there is narrative flow I found my attention wandering at about the 75% point in the novel and didn't come back to it for a few days. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story:  There is a narrative arc for each of the characters (except possibly Held) but I would not call this a narrative driven novel. 

    Characters:  There are many characters and they are well drawn.  Each has a story arc. In fact the story arc of each character could be a single short story. If you like short stories you may like this. (I don't and found myself wanting more definitive endings for each character.)

    Setting: Hall does a great job in setting the scene in Cumbria and specifically the Eden Valley. If a novel with a great setting makes you want to see the location, you will be booking plane tickets immediately after finishing the novel. 

    Writing:  Hall's characterization of Held is the glue that holds this novel together. There were laugh out loud moments for me in reading about Held. The novel is structured as one of those novels that goes back and forth between characters but here the characters don't really have anything to do with each other. Most characters are unaware of the characters that came in time before them. It is their fascination with Held that ties them together.  In some ways this is really a book of interconnected short stories but Hall split up the stories into chapters so that no story is told linearly. If you like short stories this may not bother you. I don't particularly like short stories so I kept expecting something else that would hold the characters together or at least more definitive ends of their stories. 

Walter Scott Prize Longlist 2026

The longlist for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been released.  Here is the list:

VENETIAN VESPERS John Banville (Faber & Faber)

THE TWO ROBERTS Damian Barr (Canongate)

EDEN’S SHORE Oisín Fagan (John Murray Press)

HELM Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber)

THE PRETENDER Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)

BOUNDARY WATERS Tristan Hughes (Parthian Books)

THE MATCHBOX GIRL Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury)

EDENGLASSIE Melissa Lucashenko (Oneworld Publications)

BENBECULA Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon)

ONCE THE DEED IS DONE Rachel Seiffert (Virago)

THE ARTIST Lucy Steeds (John Murray Press)

SEASCRAPER Benjamin Wood (Viking)

I have already read Seascraper (which I liked very much) and Venetian Vespers (which I disliked).  I have Helm and The Pretender and intend to read them soon. The one that I'm most excited to read is Boundary Waters because it about the fur trade in the early 1800's. 

January 2026 Reading

It is always good to start the year with books you enjoy and so in December I decided to save for January a number of books that I wanted to read. It worked. I started the year off on a good reading foot.  

I finished my read of the 2025 Booker Prize short listed novels. I read a book of poetry that I enjoyed (which was a relief after not finding enjoyable poetry last year). Surprisingly I also read three nonfiction books this month, all memoirs. That puts me half way to my goal of reading 6 nonfiction books this year. 

I also carried through on my resolution to write more, individually, about books I read. I didn't do a "Short Take" for each of the books I read but I have provided a link for where I did.  

These are the books I finished in January. 

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovitz

The last of the 2025 Booker short listed books that I read, I enjoyed this one.  After learning of his wife's affair Tom Layward makes a decision. He will leave her but only after their youngest child leaves for college. Years later the time has come. Tom considers his options as he drives his daughter to college in Pittsburgh. Once in Pittsburgh he decides to continue the drive cross country to Los Angeles to see his son, stopping along the way to visit old friends. He is in ill health, suffering from what his doctor has said was "long COVID". Told in the first person, we are in Tom's head the entire novel. This is a character driven novel that focuses mostly on the one character.  My Short Take is here. Recommended.

My Beloved: A Mitford Novel by Jan Karon

Yes, yes, yes. Jan Karon's Mitford series is kind of hokey but that's ok. Sometimes in dark times you need to read the heartwarming hokey books. How great that she published her 15th Mitford book now. This one takes place at Christmas time and I read it during the 12 days of Christmas. My Short Take is here. Recommended only if you have read and are a fan of the other Mitford novels. 

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

A memoir of loss, grief, joy and finding calmness through surrounding yourself with beauty. In his twenties Patrick Bringley quit his job at the New Yorker after his brother died and took a job as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he worked for ten years. This memoir is a love letter to the Met but also a story of how he dealt with his grief by surrounding himself with beauty and stillness.  Another book to read during hard times. My Short Take is here. Highly recommended.

The Snow Lies Deep by Paula Munier

The latest in Paula Munier's Mercy Carr mystery series, this one takes place at Christmas time and where better to celebrate Christmas than in Vermont's Green Mountains? But someone is killing Santas, which puts a crimp in the local holiday festival. Former Army MP Mercy and her husband, game warden Troy Warner, just want to celebrate their daughter Felicity's first Christmas in peace. Instead they are called on to help solve the mystery with their dogs Elvis, a retired bomb sniffing Malinois, and Susie Bear, a search and rescue Newfoundland. In addition, they have to deal with both sets of grandparents who have their own ideas about how to celebrate the holidays. I really like this series because the author clearly understands dogs and the dogs are integral to solving the mysteries. But the mysteries are also usually good and Munier does a good job developing her characters. And you can't beat the beautiful location. This one had a fairly convoluted plot but it all came together at the end. You can read this as a stand alone mystery but as always I recommend you start at the beginning of the series.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

I know that some people dislike when an Ian McEwan novel has a twist that reminds the reader that s/he is reading fiction. But I don't mind it. This novel is set in a dystopian future in the year 2119, and the humanities are still under siege at the university level. Thomas Metcalfe specializes in the literature of the early years of the 21st century, specifically  the poetry of the poet Francis Bundy (a sort of lesser Seamus Heaney). Bundy is reputed to have written a long poem for his wife Vivien and given the only copy to her. Thomas is determined to find it even though the geography of the world has changed immensely. Through the archive of emails, text messages and social media posts, he traces Vivien's days, especially the date of her birthday when the poem was given to her, and draws what conclusions he can. Through this research he creates a narrative that seems to fit the facts. But does it?  There are always things about people that remain unknown because neither the person nor anyone in the person's life ever refers to it in any kind of writing. The novel is divided into two parts:  the search and Vivien's actual story. Truthfully, I thought the second part, the shorter of the two, dragged a bit. Too much narrative, not enough action. But on the whole I enjoyed this novel.  My Short Take is here.  Recommended with reservations.

Doggerel by Reginald Dwayne Betts

After a disappointing year with poetry in 2025 I was glad to start off 2026 with a collection I enjoyed. I admit I would have understood it better if I had read a bit of the poet's biography before finishing the collection. When he was 16, Betts, otherwise an honors student, committed armed carjacking and was sentenced to 9 years in prison as an adult. While in prison he began to write poetry and after his release and receiving his GED he went to graduate school and received a number of degrees. It would have been very helpful to have known that in prison he received the name Shahid because through the collection he refers to Shahid. This collection examines his life both in prison and after prison using primarily (but not exclusively) his relationship with dogs. Sometimes as a person puts their lives together only their dog is a witness. Sometimes their dog reminds them to live in the here and now. Sometimes other people's dogs allow connection with other humans. This is not necessarily a light hearted collection and, as with most modern poetry, it is very personal and therefore not always understandable to a third person (my major complaint about modern poetry). It is a tribute to man's best friend although in the acknowledgements he thanks "Fiesty, the cat, a rescue, that circles my legs whenever I sit near her, & purrs that doggerel is kind of incomplete without a cat." Recommended.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

This memoir has been on my TBR list since it was released more than 10 years ago. Since there is a feature film of the book being released this month it seemed to be the right time to pick it up. Helen Macdonald tries to deal with her grief over the sudden death of her father by retreating from the world and raising and training a goshawk she names Mabel. Helen was an experienced falconer but goshawks are supposed to be difficult to train. Over the first year with Mabel she learns as much about herself as she learns about Mabel. The memoir is interspersed with memories of her father (who seemed to have been a lovely man). She also becomes somewhat obsessed with a memoir by T.H. White in which he describes how he (badly) tried to train a goshawk. Although filled with information about birds of prey and the woods around Cambridge, this actually reads more like a novel than the usual memoir. Macdonald seamlessly integrates facts into her narrative so that it doesn't feel like a digression but an essential part of the narrative. My Short Take is here. Highly recommended.

Honey, Baby, Mine by Laura Dern and Diane Ladd

I listened to this joint memoir on audiobook and I'm really glad I did. The book arose out of a series of walks that Laura Dern forced her mother to do when her mother was diagnosed with a life threatening illness. The doctor said that increasing her lung capacity by walking would be good for Diane. To distract her mom during the walks Laura asked her questions. That led to Diane asking Laura questions. The book is a transcript of the conversations (clearly also edited) but in the audiobook each of Laura and Diane read their own "parts" and, being actresses, that makes the whole book sound like it is taking place in real time. There is a lot of interesting information about working in Hollywood but the personal parts (especially when they disagree over their memories) are equally entertaining.  My Short Take is here. Recommended.

The Last Children of Mill Creek by Vivian Gibson

Six months after she retired, Vivian Gibson joined a creative writing class and began writing about her childhood. That turned into this memoir of her life growing up as a Black child in the 1950's in segregated St. Louis. Vivian lived in a segregated area called the Mill Creek Valley, a section of the city containing over 5,000 buildings and inhabited by 20,000 citizens, 95% of them black. My book group picked it for next month's discussion and the Missouri History Museum currently has an exhibit called Mill Creek: Black Metropolis which runs until July 12.  The Mill Creek Valley neighborhood was demolished in 1959 for "urban renewal". Almost no trace of it remains today.  Vivian remembers the community that lived there and the details of her life. This book was not only informative but nostalgic for me. Even though Vivian is black and I am white and I did not grow up in Mill Creek I remember many of the things she remembers including the Charlotte Peters show on television that my mom watched at noon every day, going to Soulard Market for fresh fruit and vegetables, making cornbread (with my grandma) and being allowed to play in other kids' backyards but being told not to go in their houses. I did not, however, grow up in a house infested with rats. I enjoyed this book. I'm not sure it would have the same effect on someone who wasn't from St. Louis. 

Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville

This was a month long read-along with my usual BlueSky reading group. I think most of the people in the group (at least the ones that were posting the most often) had read it before but I hadn't. You might expect more "action" in a book about a whaling ship searching for and trying to kill the Great White Whale but most of the book is more like a treatise on whales, whaling ships and whalers. Fortunately Melville writes with humor, and his descriptions are vivid and every time I would think that I was bored out of my mind he would pop in with some quip that made me laugh. Also, the sections on whales and whaling included most of the "deep thoughts" that Melville had (or seemed to have). While I'm glad I read this book (finally) and I appreciated the writing, it was my least favorite book that I read this month. I don't need a novel to be plot-heavy (this isn't) but I do like my novels to be character-driven and through most of this novel (really, until the last part) it isn't. Even though the plot (such as it is) is driven by Ahab's obsessive search for the White Whale, Ahab himself isn't really much in the novel until toward the end. I will say that Melville created a good sense of place - being on a whaleship hunting for and processing whales - which is usually a plus for me but I found that I really wasn't that interested in whaling ships and whales.  My Short Take is here.

In some ways it is a shame I chose to read "Moby Dick" and "H is for Hawk" in the same month. "H is for Hawk" could be read as a treatise on hawks and hawking but Macdonald's digressions into hawks and hawking were integrated into the greater narrative and were necessary for her character arc (even though it was a memoir and not a novel). On the other hand Melville, who was ostensibly writing a novel, did not integrate his information about whales and whaling into his narrative but put them into (many) separate chapters. This was, I think, partly because of the age in which the novel was written but also the digressions may have been his way of showing how time slowly passed on a whaling ship where you might have nothing to do but reflect on life. Either way, I have to say that in my opinion those sections went on much too long.  

Moby Dick or The Whale

 

 

The Book:  Ishmael, who already had a sea career on a merchantman vessel, decides he wants to join a whaling crew. He chooses to join the crew of The Pequod without meeting its captain first. What he doesn't know until the ship sets off is that the captain, Ahab, is on an obsessive quest to find Moby Dick, the great white whale who took off Ahab's leg on an earlier voyage. While Ishmael (and the crew) wait to find Moby Dick, Ishmael (or maybe it's the author) fills the reader in on the biology of whales, the politics of a whaling ship, the character of his crewmates and what it is like to kill a whale and process the whale oil.  And along the way there are digressions about life in general and critiques of other authors who have written about whales and whaling. But is this really a book about the search for a whale or is the white whale a metaphor for ... well, your choice.

The Author: Herman Melville

Genre: Fiction (Classic)

Length: 625 pp (paperback Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition); 24 hours by Audiobook (read by Anthony Heald).  About halfway through the book I picked up the audiobook and switched back and forth between the two. 

One good thing:  When they finally find Moby Dick the story becomes quite thrilling. And by that time you have been told so much about whales, whaling ships and how to kill and process a whale in the mid 1800's that it all makes sense and adds to the tension.

One not-so-great thing:  As DH Lawrence said: "it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and of considerable tiresomeness."  It really can get tiresome if you aren't in the mood to know every detail about whales and whaling. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story: While reading this, I heard someone I follow on YouTube say that he read Moby Dick last year and hated it. He called it a short story padded to be a really long novel. If you are a plot oriented person who needs a page-turner, who requires fast pacing, you probably will hate this novel too. 

    Characters: If you are looking for a deep examination of the inner lives of characters this is not the novel for you. Captain Ahab is, of course, a famous character although, surprisingly, he isn't really much in the novel until the end. In fact most of the characters other than Ishmael, the narrator, aren't much in the novel. And Ishmael disappears into a third person narrator for much of the book. We don't even see Moby Dick until toward the end. You can go for many chapters without any real reference to any character. On the other hand, Ahab's madness drives the plot of the novel. 

    Setting:  If you have ever wanted to know what it is like to be a whaler on a whaling ship, this is the novel for you. Even if you never wanted to know, this novel will tell you. By the end you may feel that if you were magically transported back to the mid 1800's onto a whaler, you would do fine. 

    Writing:  This is an odd novel because it doesn't really follow any of the normal rules of novel writing. It is more like a treatise with a story hidden within it. Fortunately, Melville is surprisingly funny, often intentionally but sometimes unintentionally.  His descriptions are specific and even I, who have a difficult time visualizing things described in novels, pretty much understood his descriptions. I feel like most of the people who like this novel like it because of Melville's "turns of phrase" which can be very vivid. Be aware that this is a novel of its times and includes all the prejudices of its times. 

    

Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding)

 

The Book: When actress Diane Ladd developed a life threatening illness the doctors said that she could  possibly prolong her life by increasing her lung capacity with long walks. Her daughter, actress Laura Dern, set up a regimen of walks which Diane resisted at first. But Laura would distract her mom by asking her mom questions about her life and career, including her divorce from Laura's dad Bruce Dern and the death of their first child. Then Diane turned the tables on Laura and asked her questions about her life, children and career including her divorce. The conversations are fun to listen to especially when they intensely disagree about their memories. They were determined to leave nothing unsaid. And they even include a few recipes for favorite foods they discuss. 

The Author: Laura Dern and Diane Ladd 

Genre: Non-Fiction (memoir)

Length: 8 hours on audiobook

One good thing:  The book is written as a transcription of their talks but since this is an audiobook and they are reading their own "parts" it is especially effective because they recreate their actual conversations and each of them, being an actress, is very good at that. Even their arguments sound like they are occurring in the moment. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook for this book.

One not-so-great thing:  If you listen to the audiobook version you apparently miss out on the photos that are included in the hard book. 

H is for Hawk

 

The Book: When Helen Macdonald's beloved father unexpectedly dies of a heart attack Helen tries to deal with her grief by raising and training a goshawk that she names Mabel. Helen is an experienced falconer but goshawks are known to be very difficult to train. Helen tells of her successes and failures both in training Mabel and in dealing with her grief. Her memories of her father, who seems to have been a lovely man, are strewn throughout the memoir. She also evaluates previous writings about the training of goshawks especially a memoir by T.H. White (the author of The Sword in the Stone). Unlike Helen, T.H. White had no experience and made a mess of his attempt to train a goshawk but despite that Helen is drawn to the memoir and compares her own experience with White's experience.  By the end of the year Helen has learned much about Mabel and about herself.

The Author: Helen Macdonald

Genre: Non-fiction (memoir)

Length: 387 pp (e-book on my mini ipad)

One good thing:  This beautifully written memoir reads more like a novel than most memoirs.

One not-so-great thing: There really isn't anything not great about this book but I suppose if you are completely uninterested in either birds, woods or T.H. White you might be a bit bored with parts of it. 

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":  Although this is a memoir, it reads like a novel so I feel it is appropriate to discuss this. 

    Story:  Obviously, since this is a memoir, the story is dependent upon reality. And yet there is a story arc as Helen trains Mabel and moves through her own grief.  This is not a page-turner but a book to be read slowly and savored.

    Characters: Because of her grief, for much of the book Helen has mostly withdrawn into a world that is just she and Mabel. But she makes Mabel a character without anthropomorphizing her. I definitely ended the book wanting more of both Helen and Mabel.

    Setting: Most of the book is spent in the woods and fields of England in and around Cambridge.  It's nice to read a book set in this locale that isn't about the university. 

    Writing: This is a beautifully written book. All of the information about birds, especially goshawks, could have been very dry but isn't. And all of the information about White could have been seen as a distraction from the main story but instead is well integrated into Helen's story.