One of the pleasures of Shields’s work is encountering women characters who are so fully realized. In the first pages of “The Stone Diaries,” Daisy’s mother, Mercy, is busily preparing a Malvern pudding before her husband, Cuyler, returns from the quarry where he works as a mason. But the pudding isn’t for him. Cuyler is a “dainty eater,” “a pick-and-nibble fellow”; he does not crave sweetness. As Mercy lifts a teaspoon of sugar to her lips, we understand: The pudding — combining its ingredients, smoothing its layers and, finally, consuming it — is an indulgence she entertains for her pleasure only.
They aren’t about humans imposing their ways on others; they’re about us learning to critique our own norms through interaction with other intelligent beings. These stories don’t pretend to be high art, but they are different lenses we can use to envision the future. We will need all kinds of stories to share with the galaxy. It’s lucky we’re so good at coming up with them.
In a novel that is, like all of Smith’s, rich with references, characters quick to share stories about artists and their work, and the misfits and heroes of history, “Summer” is more than a perennial season. It is the bravura performance of a writer, poised at the edge of the day’s vast darkness, gathering all the warmth and light of our inner summer.
In their vibrant book, “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close,” Friedman, a journalist, and Sow, a digital strategist, seek to give friendship the serious treatment they believe it deserves. The mission to elevate the status of friendship has been central to their popular podcast, “Call Your Girlfriend,” and their efforts led journalist and author Jill Filipovic to deem the pair in her 2017 book, “The H-Spot,” “Modern feminism’s grandes dames of female friendship.”
This book pries at the distinctions between things: the ornithologist, obsessed with “nature”, still has a pair of binoculars. Macdonald studied literature at Cambridge and it shows: nature is not like us, and not not like us. It is estranged but familiar. Everything is political and lensed through class.
Millennials have grown up in a world shaped by boomer priorities, boomer attitudes and boomer policies — but that world is slowly crumbling. This book should help boomers understand millennials a little better, and they might as well: The winds are shifting in our direction.
Madgalena is a geography book about a river that is also a political history of Colombia, an admonition of ecological disaster, an impassioned defence of indigenous wisdom, and a memoir of the author’s various travels and friendships over the years.
The black kitten cries at her bowl
meek meek and the gray one glowers
from the windowsill. My hand on the can
to serve them. First day of spring.