This month it was my turn to host book club, and since we've begun letting the hostess pick the book, I had to choose something. Lately we've read a lot of what I consider "fluff" fiction, light and mildly entertaining but not all that literary. I decided that this time, I wanted something with a little more meat to it. I did an internet search for the best books of the past couple of years and came up with three titles that I thought sounded promising. Last month I told the group a little about the three books I was considering and put it to a vote. North Woods by Daniel Mason was the winner.
What a joy this book was to me! It's the best thing I've read in ages. I think it's going to join my list of all-time favorite books, and that's a short list.
From Goodreads:
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—a daring, moving tale of memory and fate from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?
North Woods was so beautifully written that I found myself reading and rereading passages and wanting to take my time and savor them. Since I'd bought a copy and offered to let my friend Marian borrow it before book club, I had to read it much faster than I wanted to. To give you an idea of how much I loved it, when she brought it back to me the night of book club, I immediately started to re-read it. I'm taking my time and finding so many wonderful things I missed the first time.
Spanning centuries from the perspective of one small piece of land in northwestern Massachusetts, it's the history of a place, with the human characters coming and going across the years alongside the changing flora and fauna of the area. From NPR's review:
And from the Washington Post book review:
Indeed, to read “North Woods” is to suffer the sweet sorrow of falling in love with fresh residents only to see them swept away by the passing seasons. Persist. The silent spaces between these stories articulate what the residents can’t. Their errant lives begin locking together in a winding chain of unlikely history. And when the moonlight strikes just right, you may even see some past homeowner flit across the corner of a page once again.
As you may have guessed, North Woods made for a really nice discussion. I even printed out a "book club guide" from the publisher's website.
I also had several bottles of wine, as well as a cooler filled with ice and hard apple cider, assorted sodas, and bottled water.
