Of all the books I read in 2024, three of them in particular echoed through my own work and gave me inspiration for future projects.
None of the three books were about crows or ravens.
I do realize it’s a bit late for a 2024 book review. I did mean to write this between Christmas and New Year, but I was too busy reading new books I received as gifts! Better late than never, I hope.
Ghost Trees: Nature and People in London Parish — by Bob Gilbert
I was reading this around this time last year. The trees were bare, the sky a uniform grey. In short, a time when it’s easy for an urban nature enthusiast to feel at a low ebb.
Reading this book refuelled my desire to get out there and start noticing things again. It also made me wish I could meet Bob for a coffee and chat.
The book explores the human and natural histories of the Poplar district of East London through its past and present tree populations.
I was attracted to the title of the book as it reminded me of the poplar trees that were felled at the end of our street in 2020 and still feature in my dreams and creative ideas. In fact, the first chapter of the book was about the Black Poplar trees that gave the district of Poplar its name. Vital at various points in British history for arrow making and the manufacture of matches, the black poplar faded into almost complete obscurity as wetlands were drained for development and “tidier” looking trees became more desirable for landscaping.
One of the local crows still obstinately perching on one of “their” poplar branches even after the trees had all been felled.
This book has a combination of joy, humour, and defiance that really speaks to my soul. There’s the joy and humour to be found in observing nature, however urban the setting, and the defiance of nature finding a way to thrive amid the cracks in the asphalt.
The writer, Bob Gilbert, like me, grew up in a working class urban UK neighbourhood. He really captures my own feelings about the vital importance of valuing nature in a city setting. Sometimes, in the face of local planning decisions, I feel as if no-one else cares about scraps of urban nature, so it was revitalizing to read Bob’s words.
“Much of recent nature writing, too, whilst producing wonderful expressions of wilderness, has turned its back on the urban experience. But there is a wildness in the unexpected eruption of nature into the everyday — like the kingfisher I saw this morning on the bank of an urban canal — and it is these small joys that most of us must learn to treasure, and to take them wherever we can find them. The fact is, the city is now where most of us happen to be. Sometime in 2014 the world passed the point where more than half of its population lives in urban areas. In the UK, according to the Office of National Statistics, the figure is as high as 80%. For most of us, the city is our starting point. If we are to restore any connection with nature at all, it is in the cities that we need to begin.”
Side Note: It took me several weeks to read this book — not because I wasn’t engaged, but because it was competing with Edgar for attention as my “morning coffee” book. Edgar will distract me during this reading period by (a) trying to lick the foam from my latté and (b) nudging the book if he isn’t getting enough ear rubs.
I learned so many little snippets about city trees and urban nature in general from Bob’s book that I can’t begin to list them all.
I will, however, leave you with this one fascinating piece of information with which you can impress your friends on the urban nature trails.
Most city trees have a “splash zone.” Above this zone, the tree’s bark grows mostly mosses and lichens. Below a certain line, there is a lot more algae in the mix. Why is this?
Geordie will demonstrate.
The Seabird’s Cry — by Adam Nicolson
As the title would suggest, this book is about seabirds, not crows — but it filled my head with thoughts and insights applicable to all birds and how I see and portray them.
A copy of the book was first loaned to me by a friend in Wales after we’d been out in a boat to see puffins.
Puffins!
The book deals with ten species of seabirds, but I jumped ahead to the puffin section. That chapter was so beautifully written and gave such an affecting description of these birds that I ordered my own copy of the book so it would be waiting for me when we got home. I also made arrangements for another boat trip to see more puffins. More puffins!
Puffins are often described as “clownish” birds for their colourful beaks and clumsy gait on land, but Nicholson gives us the gift of a much wider version of their reality, with all of its drama, hardship, tension, skill and devotion.
Puffins we saw on the Farne Islands
It’s not often that Anglo-Saxon poetry (my specialty when studying English Literature many, many years ago) is referenced in a bird book (well any book, really) but there, on page 4, are lengthy quotes from both The Seafarer and The Wanderer.
Be still my beating heart!
Apart from the thrill of some Anglo-Saxon poetry, this book taught me a lot about the very essence of birds and the role they play in the human psyche.
I also learned new words for concepts that I have tried for years to explore in my photography.
Inscendence is a word created by the American philosopher, Thomas Berry to capture the opposite of transcendence — “not moving beyond the life we know but climbing into it, looking for its kernel.”
Birds, Nicholson, argues are a gateway to the state of inscendence. Crows, ravens and keeping a close eye on the urban nature around me, is my own pathway.
Perhaps my favourite word of 2024 (and one I’d consider getting as a tattoo if I weren’t so afraid of needles) was also discovered in this book — Umwelt.
Umwelt is the window through which we perceive the world around us.
Every living organism lives in a different house of abilities, needs, priorities and perceptions and so each one necessarily looks out at the rest of the world through a different window. While humans have often believed that the view from OUR window is “reality” there are an infinite number of windows (or umwelten) — each as valid to the particular house dweller (bug, bird or person) as another.
While the Umwelt philosophy was developed in the early 20th century by Estonian biologist/philosopher Jakob von Uexküll, it seems in many ways to echo the nature-centric worldview long held by many Indigenous peoples.
Reading the book strengthened my aspirations for my crow and raven photographs. I want my work to act as a sort of periscope, enabling humans swimming along in our own sea of concerns to pop up our heads now and then and see the world from other perspectives.
Philosopher Crow — Mavis, 2017
An Umwelt Periscope, if you will …
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
I’ve enjoyed many of Elizabeth Strout’s novels about the “unrecorded simple lives” of New Englanders, but this was the first time I felt her words inspiring my own work.
Perhaps it was the time when I was reading it, near the end of 2024. Perhaps it was the mood I was in, feeling that the details of crows’ lives were likely of no interest and/or import in the times in which we find ourselves living.
I’ve been dithering about expanding upon and republishing my book City Crow Stories, wondering if those stories are worth telling and reading. It seems unlikely that a prod in the direction of writing more would come from a novel, and yet …
Many of the characters in Tell Me Everything have been reappearing in Strout’s novels for years — Olive Kitteridge, the novelist Lucy Barton, her ex-husband, WIlliam and Bob Burgess, the lawyer. Like most of us, their lives are at once ordinary and extraordinary.
Olive wants to tell Lucy a story , she’s also uncertain, not knowing if it’s even worth telling
“Well, tell me anyway,” Lucy says, simply enough. And it was as if Lucy was speaking to me as well as Olive.
“All these unrecorded lives,” Lucy marvels, “and people just live them.”
As I do with most sentences, I can’t help inserting “crows” in place of “people.”
All of these unrecorded lives being lived (human and corvid) are important in themselves and they are the point of the stories.
I thoroughly enjoyed Tell Me Everything as a novel and finished it with the bonus of having resolved to continue my own modest foray into telling everything I know about the lives of my local crows.
And what am I reading now, to start off 2025?
My morning read is Apples on a Windowsill by Shawna LeMay — a beautifully written book about her relationship with still life paintings. My evening reading is currently the latest Ian Rankin book, Midnight and Blue.
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