Chuck Erion’s Profile

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Chuck Erion rated a book 4 of 5 stars

The Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout

read in April, 2013

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Ms. Strout wowed me a few years ago with Olive Kitteridge. I'm even more impressed with Burgess Boys, having devoured it in 24 hrs last week at the cottage. She has a strong ability to get inside the family of 3 siblings whose adult lives are entangl...more

Apr 06, 2013 06:07pm · see review

Chuck Erion rated a book 3 of 5 stars

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees
by Roger Deakin

read in March, 2013

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The emerald ash borer is having a devastating impact on the ash trees across southwestern Ontario.

As a wood lover, I’m familiar with the ash’s white clear grain, but would be hard-pressed to identify the tree in the wild or along a city street. This...more The emerald ash borer is having a devastating impact on the ash trees across southwestern Ontario.

As a wood lover, I’m familiar with the ash’s white clear grain, but would be hard-pressed to identify the tree in the wild or along a city street. This is ironic given the numbers: there are apparently 6,500 ash trees in Kitchener and more than 12,000 in Waterloo.

Which brings me to Wildwood — A Journey Through Trees (Penguin, 390 pages, $20) by the late Roger Deakin, a British nature writer and filmmaker.

The book is a collection of short essays, let’s call them arboreal love letters, with settings that range from Deakin’s wooded farm in England’s Suffolk County to the walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. Perhaps the ash borer is not yet a threat in Britain. The book’s final chapter is about ash trees and how Deakin trained a grove of them to form a bower, “bent over into Gothic arches like a small church.”

Wildwood is a pleasure to read, not just for its copious information about different wood species around the world, but because of the deep respect for nature that it invokes. North American readers will need to look up some geographical references, as well as British woodworking terminology. Deakin, who died in 2006 of a brain tumour, shortly after completing this book, was an environmentalist, but Wildwood is rarely polemical. He previously wrote Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain (2000), about his love of water and swimming. The author takes pleasure in sleeping outdoors or in cabins and caravans open to the night air, with the sounds and sights of insects, birds and badgers to lull him to sleep.

Fashioning a rudimentary spoon felt a suitably Robinson Crusoe sort of activity. Creative in the most primitive sense, it purged my mind of all other thoughts but the here and now of this beautiful wood. Sitting here as night falls, all I hear is the river rushing over boulders and stone below. The steady sound could be rain, or it could be wind in the trees. No doubt when all these come at once, they harmonize into a single chord.

When he moved into a rundown farmhouse in Suffolk, Deakin counted its 233 oak beams and realized that a small forest had been cleared to build it.

Britain has the least forest cover of European countries. Reforestation is a noble cause made complicated by climate change — which tree species will do better under changing conditions? He traces the history of New Forest in England, which today is heavily populated but was first claimed as a royal forest by William the Conqueror in 1079.

Deakin notes that recent attempts to increase pasturage by draining bogs have led to the demise of bladderwort and sticklebacks. He spends a night tracking moths with local lepidopterists. Even the names of the moths and other nocturnal insects sound poetic.

I had a backyard walnut tree cut down three years ago and then had the trunk milled into planks. As the band saw ripped through each flitch, we eagerly lifted it off to reveal the grain pattern. This pleasure is repeated each time I restack the boards, or choose one to run through the planer.

Deakin’s chapter on the walnut burl veneer that is carefully installed in the dashboards of Jaguar automobiles conveys that same excitement. He mentions one large walnut tree that was purchased from the Queen’s Sandringham estate for £5000 and generated £50,000 (about $77,000) worth of veneer. I open most of the pages of Wildwood with the same delight in the pleasure of wood and words that I did with that walnut log.

It was Mahatma Gandhi who said: “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”(less)

Apr 06, 2013 05:58pm · see review

Chuck Erion rated a book 4 of 5 stars

The End of Your Life Book Club
by Will Schwalbe (Goodreads Author)

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Apr 06, 2013 05:51pm

Chuck Erion rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed (Goodreads Author)

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Apr 06, 2013 05:50pm

Chuck Erion rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Tenth of December
by George Saunders

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Feb 26, 2013 08:21am

Chuck Erion wants to read

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain (Goodreads Author)

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Jan 10, 2013 02:34pm

Chuck Erion wants to read

Don't Sleep, There are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett

Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
by Daniel L. Everett

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Jan 10, 2013 02:30pm

Chuck Erion wants to read

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
by Jared Diamond

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Jan 10, 2013 02:29pm

Chuck Erion rated a book 3 of 5 stars

The Emperor of Paris
by C.S. Richardson

read in January, 2013

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The Emperor of Paris by C.S. Richardson (released by Doubleday Canada last August, $25).
I knew of Richardson as a book designer, before his first novel, The End of the Alphabet, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first novel, so I eagerly...more The Emperor of Paris by C.S. Richardson (released by Doubleday Canada last August, $25).
I knew of Richardson as a book designer, before his first novel, The End of the Alphabet, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first novel, so I eagerly took note of the typeface, the page layout, decaled pages, dust jacket and endpaper artwork, etc. Even though The Emperor of Paris is available as an e-book, I believe that the reading experience would suffer without these tactile and visual elements. And I took pleasure in the irony that, despite the main characters being bread makers, the book is as much an ode to the role of books, storytelling, and the book stalls along the banks of the Seine.

Richardson gently reminds the reader to slow down and savor his story. There is a large cast of characters for a rather slim volume and I could perceive their places in the plot only midway through the book. Minor characters are drawn from the bakery’s environs, a blind watchmaker and an impoverished art student. Through it all flows the Seine, even flooding at one point. Emile Notre-Dame is a third-generation Parisian baker, his Italian wife Immacolata delivers their son on the marble tabletop where the dough is kneaded. Octavio the son is asked to leave school due to dyslexia and becomes his father’s apprentice. Both are unable to read but develop a game of building stories based on pictures, each adding alternate lines to the tale.

Emile volunteers to fight the Boche in 1914, returning after the Armistice barely able to talk. Father and son are drawn to the Louvre each Sunday to resume their picture-based storytelling. Emile begins buying books from the book stalls, not to read them, but rather for the colours of their bindings. He is drawn to a portrait of a young woman in the book stall. His path will inevitably cross with that young woman, an art restorer at the Louvre. Their parallel journeys unfold in a romance to art, to Paris, to the power of well-crafted words and images. The Emperor of Paris is as much an ode to the City of Light as to the value and pleasure of real books.

(from my book column in The Waterloo Record, Jan 5, 2012)(less)

Jan 10, 2013 02:26pm · see review

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