Book news, cat news, bird news etc
Heya,
Short and scrappy one today, I think! Here’s the headlines:
The Husbands is out in paperback soon (!!)
I’m doing some Australian events (further !!)
Birds As Individuals
Cat news
Other things I’ve enjoyed lately
THE HUSBANDS IN PAPERBACK(!!)
Okay, first things first. The Husbands is coming out in paperback NEXT MONTH: 18 March in the US, 27 March in the UK. If you wanted to, you could preorder the paperback now from wherever you like to order books. Probably they’d send it to you slightly before it comes out; book preorders usually seem to turn up two or three days in advance, which always feels like an extra little treat to me.
The paperback covers haven’t been officially announced yet so I won’t post pictures here. I will say however that they’re on a bunch of bookshop websites, that there’s a totally new cover in the US (it’s fun and bright and lovely), and that there’s a new colour for the original design in the UK (it’s also fun and bright and lovely, and only from independent bookshops, everyone else gets the original blue). I am very much a paperback reader so this is all very exciting for me.
A LITTLE AUSTRALIAN TOUR
I’m writing this on the plane to Adelaide; I guess I’ll send it once I’ve arrived. It’s been a couple of years since I was last home, and for the last fortnight I’ve been just a big bag of longing for sunlight and loud birds, a loop of someone murmuring soon soon soon soon soon soon soon. I am shimmering with impatience now, three hours away from landing, thinking about airport doors sliding open, about stepping into warm air. Soon soon soon soon soon soon soon.
Anyway! While I’m around, I’ll be doing some events! More info and links to tickets are here but basically they’re:
In Adelaide at Marion library, with Mostly Books (my local bookshop when I was a teenager!), talking to Amy T. Matthews (my classmate for a creative writing course at uni, many years ago!). Actually I think this one is almost booked out? incredible
In Kadina at One More Page, not far from where my mum lives now
In Ballarat at Collins Booksellers on Lydiard, talking to Paula Gleeson
In Melbourne at a restaurant called Luxsmith, organised by the Sun Bookshop, talking to Emily Spurr — this one’s a fancy one, there’s dinner and everything
Usually book events happen in the months just after a book’s release, or else they’re timed for the paperback — but Australia doesn’t really do hardbacks, the books come out in big paperbacks right away, I guess because you need that little bit of flop and thwack if the main thing you’re gonna use a book for is to kill mosquitoes. So I’m super grateful to the writers who have agreed to chat to me and the venues that are having me along on, you know, a random Tuesday or whatever, almost a year after my book came out. I am weirdly emotional at the idea of doing my first book events in my home country but I promise to be normal during the events themselves.
BIRDS AS INDIVIDUALS
One of the other things I’ve been doing on the plane is reading a book called Birds As Individuals. It’s amazing. Quite apart from anything else it’s one of the most accurately titled books I’ve ever encountered: it’s called Birds As Individuals and that’s very much what it’s about.
It’s written by a woman named Len Howard who bought a cottage in Sussex in the 1930s, and then started feeding the local birds, and also letting the birds fly through her house, and nest there, and sleep on the picture rail above her bed, and pull threads out of her curtains and sit on her head and peck at her behind the knee for attention and look, here’s a paragraph from her book:
Many Great Tits are indoors with me for much of the time during autumn and winter, and I find it necessary to provide toys for them, otherwise they choose a pastime that inflicts damage to something of value to me. […] They have various ways of trying to divert me from my writing, often hammering on my skull, and sitting on my shoulder to pull my hair and tweak my ears, this meaning they want nuts and cheese. If I refuse to be bullied into noticing them sometimes one of them will walk on to my page and carefully lift my nib from the paper, looking up at me while doing it.
Birds As Individuals was published in 1952 and despite the paragraph above it mostly isn’t about the logistics of living with birds (it’s possible that side of things is addressed more explicitly in the followup book, which is called Living With Birds). This one is instead about specific birds Howard got to know, and their behaviours and personalities and habits, and their fallings-out and partnerings and friendships and children. It reads like a cross between:
okay, sure, a nature documentary
but also someone telling you very intensely about their grandchild
and a surprisingly detailed wikipedia article about the ebb and flow of who controlled a particular medium-sized hill over the course of several thousand years — there’s a lot about competing territories and nesting boxes
and finally, I dunno, Anthony Trollope? Maybe? Not in style, obviously, but the sometimes detached tone and the sense of things all going on busily in a place and the zooming in on different individuals and the way those individuals are continually dying or falling in love jockeying for position or being disgraced or suffering a great loss but all the time, the big roll of everything keeps going. Look it’s at least a decade since I’ve read any Trollope so I’m not sure this holds up, but you get what I mean
Howard is very logistical; Birds As Individuals isn’t at all the sort of edge-of-poetry that you get in a lot of nature writing, I’m two thirds of the way through and I know quite a lot about how wartime rationing affected the availability of different types of birdseed but almost nothing about how the crabapple tree in the dawn sunlight was lined at its edges with the first white frost etc. She’s also, at times, quite boring — there’s a literal family tree of great tits (clearly her favourites), and SO many details about fights over which bird gets to sit in which nesting box. But it’s a very compelling sort of boring, where maybe you skim for a few pages but the sheer quantity of details you’re skimming over is doing its own work. Here’s another quote, a little more typical:
Baldhead, even in his fledgeling days, was an interesting bird of very definite character. His parents, the Pugnacious Tits, started preparations for a second brood two weeks after he was fledged, and Baldhead developed an unusual obsession for watching all the nesting affairs. Normally first brood Great Tits take no notice of the second brood (only some Great Tits are double-brooded). The rest of the fledgelings never went near the nest, but Baldhead spent much time leaning over the nesting-hole, as if trying to solve the mystery of it all and why his father had suddenly taken to feeding his mother instead of him. When she came off her nest this inquisitive offspring would crane his head down the nesting-hole and stare at the eggs until she returned, often pushing him away and spreading her wings over the entrance in protest. Every day, as if magnetised by it, he returned again and again to the nesting-hole. It was funny to watch his start of surprise when gaping beaks first shot up at him from the nest.
And here’s a lovely bit about swallows playing games:
Ducks and Geese roamed in this field and the grass was sprinkled with a few white breast-feathers. I then saw a Swallow dip to the ground and sweep upwards with one of these feathers held in his beak and, circling above the other Swallows, he let it fall. As it floated down it was caught by one of the wheeling birds who then rose above the rest and again the feather was let loose, to float down through the many circling Swallows. This time it nearly reached earth, then one bird swept down with graceful dip and flicker of wings, rising aloft with the feather, to drop it once more.
The book is using these observations to make the case that birds have thoughts and memories and reasoning power and obsessions and personalities; that these vary greatly not just between species but also between individuals of a particular species; and that just like with humans, those individual personalities can shift over time as the birds get older, have more experiences, learn things, get into new relationships etc. It’s arguing that birds aren’t little instinct-driven automata but their own kind of weird tiny flying pecking people. At times Howard goes harder on this than I think most readers will accept — she definitely suggests a few times that birds may be telepathic and/or that they can probably see into the future — but even the wilder claims are so grounded in specific observations that you can see how she got there.
Apparently Birds As Individuals was out of print for ages, but it was republished late last year. It’s probably not for everyone but if this does sound like the sort of thing you would enjoy then it absolutely fulfils all its strange promise.
CAT NEWS
The cat news is: god, look at our ridiculous cats.
SOME OTHER THINGS I’VE ENJOYED LATELY
A game: Hey, Terry’s just put out a new game!
Or — sort-of! Terry’s Other Games is a collection of a bunch of his old games, some of them from literal decades ago, some of them from as recently as last year. Most of them were originally available to play online for free, but often old games kind-of fall off the internet or become difficult to play as browsers change over time. So this project brings the old games back and adds little commentaries; half preservation project, half overview of a career-so-far. It’s great, he really is very good at making games.
A book: I loved Laura Jean McKay’s 2020 debut The Animals In That Country, about a pandemic that gives infected people the ability to understand animals, to read meaning into their movements and smells and noises. It is… quite emotionally full-on; like, maybe don’t read it if you’re going through something. It’s also funny and strange and pacey and has a wonderful voice for the animals that isn’t sentimental or too human-legible but also doesn’t minimise the real rapport that can exist between, say, a dog and a human.
Another book: I’m still only partway through Elizabeth Lovatt’s book Thank You For Calling The Lesbian Line but it’s so good, a mix of memoir / queer history / specific history of a 1990s lesbian help line. A bunch of great details, sincere and careful and wry and extremely readable.
Books I read a while ago but they’re just out now: Miranda Pountney’s How To Be Somebody Else came out last year but had its paperback release last week (key features include: everything is a bit much so why not just refuse / being in New York and feeling fancy about it / excellent sentences). Nussaibah Younis’s Fundamentally is out in hardback today (key features include: bad decisions and worse bureaucracy / incredible escalations / amazing narrator).
Okay, I promised this one would be short-ish so I think that’s it, speak soon,
Holly