Discovering New Worlds Very Close By

Animal Dreams is sitting on the end table next to me on the couch.  Waiting.  Just finished Flight Behavior, and before that Poisonwood Bible right after reading my first Kingsolver novel, Prodigal Summer. 

With a few exceptions, my novel reading started in high school English class and ended with high school graduation.  With an English professor partner I usually do not say that out loud, but this past year has been different.  Stacks of books about politics, requiring more dusting than thinking, have been replaced.

Reading Kingsolver is a welcome, if occasionally disturbing, adventure into worlds outside and within myself.  Part of me thinks, ‘hey, I should try to write similarly accessible and gripping stories where readers learn about how politics really works,’ in place of her teaching us about the natural world.

A larger part of me knows I could never actually pull this off.  But it speaks to how deeply I am loving her work.  I am a teacher and now I am her student as well.  

The stories of those in Zebulon Valley helped me see the complicated relationships between predators and prey that, together, create delicate ecosystems we take for granted as always resilient.  The lessons learned about our missionary and colonial impulses—at home and abroad—in Poisonwood Bible felt like the best political science course I had ever experienced. 

Dellarobia’s struggles, (particularly her exchanges with Ovid and his with the reporter), and Kingsolver’s gentle-yet-powerful description of these, help me see our world in finer shades, where climate change looms as an intimately experienced existential challenge to our species, relationships, and sense of self & community.

But I am not going to try to capture all that I love about these novels, because I lack the skill to articulate, perhaps even to fully identify, all the ways these are sparking my interest and curiosity. 

Just wanted to note that this is yet another way Julie enriches my life…one of a million or more, and to take a moment to appreciate her and these novels, the round house and our Christmas ornaments, date night, the noodle restaurant, Grand Canyon, and Cinque Terra.