Summer

My somewhat literal selections for Love Blippin’ Books 20 (#LBB20) on the theme of ‘summer’, of which I have just finished the Kingsolver, and am just getting started with the Crowley.

I was a relatively early enthusiast of Barbara Kingsolver, stumbling across her novels like ‘The Bean Trees’ and ‘Animal Dreams’ in the early 90s, gathering what I could from American bookshops in rare visits across the pond.  Her work engages with what I was teaching at the time: intersections of nature and culture, and I recommended her work to my Environmental Studies students. She broke through with ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ in 1998, and was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Demon Copperhead’ but as her books got thicker I struggled to get around to them, at a time when my reading was limited to a daily commute, so I’m now doing something of a catch-up of what I’ve missed in the last 20 yrs.

‘Prodigal Summer’ (2000) explores three overlapping narratives of relationships in the same place in Appalachia during the course of one summer. I enjoyed the book, but did, initially at least, find some of the characters and relationships a bit contrived - set up to provoke discussions about, for example, whether it was right or not for farmers/ranchers to shoot coyotes. If we look at the balance between showing and telling, there was a lot of telling. Most of the characters do develop though, and in the end I did feel immersed in their world.

‘Engine Summer’ (1980) has been on my shelves a long time, not least because it is one of David Pringle’s ‘Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels’ which has been guiding a lot of my reading since the late 80s. I haven’t read anything by Crowley before. I’m only a few chapters in, but it seems to be a post-apocalypse tale. A trope of such books is the ongoing hints of what has survived from current industrial society, and what has led to the post-apocalyptic culture developing the way I had. Working with that puzzle is part of the fun, so I’m deliberately avoiding reading anything about the book until I’ve finished it.  I will pop back with an update when I have.

Thanks as always to @squatbetty for the prompt, and feel free to join in.