Eastside Audubon Book Club is Three Years Old
By Becky Serabrini
As I write this in December, our chapter’s book club is about to reach its third anniversary and if there is any bird that can fly as fast as time, I’d like to know its name! To have read and discussed so many great books in such excellent company as can be found in our book club has truly been something to be grateful for. When I founded the club in January, 2017, I hoped to find kindred spirits who would like to delve into the entire natural world, as I’ve always found Audubon interested in doing. Luckily, others joined me. While birds are often the stars in the books we’ve chosen, the first book we read as a club was The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and we are ending our third year of meetings with a book called What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe.
Another thing I believe is that every type of genre and style of writing offers learning and satisfaction, and our founding members wanted to give that a try as well. We have therefore recommended to each other and voted in works of fiction such Border Songs by local author Jim Lynch; absorbed the journaling of a birding soldier in Birding Babylon by Jonathan Trouern-Trend; and picked our favorites from Firekeeper, a book of poetry by Pattiann Rogers. Probably some of the glue that keeps us all together is how we alternate a light and charming account, such as A Hummingbird in My House by Annette Heidcamp with the more dire mix of history, politics and biology found in many of our picks such as Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan. Books dedicated solely to one particular animal have been popular, such as about the wolf, the barn owl, the whale, and the octopus as well as the wolverine, the jellyfish, and the starling. We have read specifically just about dirt, grassland and chalk streams. Following the investigations of journalist Susan Orlean in The Orchid Thief was a distinct pleasure as were the revelations of another researcher, Kirk Wallace Johnson, in The Feather Thief. A personal favorite of mine, The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, generated both love and dislike in our group. One of our most unanimously beloved books was The Wonder of Birds by Jim Robbins.
Time will continue to wing onward through 2020 and beyond, but the Eastside Audubon book club will slow it down a little with more authors who have captured an important story to tell- fictional or otherwise- so that we can stop for a bit along our various journeys and understand from each other what there is to tell about it.
We pick our books a few at a time. Here is our list for January through April. For more information contact me at wingsinapril@gmail.com.
2020 Reading List:
January - Eager, the Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb
February - Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich
March - Fill of Joy-More Tales from Montlake Fill by Constance Sidles
April - I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong