Sunday, March 30, 2008

Groovy book club in Melbourne

Books @ Fed Square - Cult Book Group
Interested in reading and discussing books that have caused a stir or attracted a cult following? Fed Square’s free new book group is a chance to talk about controversial and challenging literature in a relaxed informal environment. The group meets once a month at CafĂ© Beer Deluxe in the Atrium at Fed Square. For more information email books@fedsquare.com

Sessions will be held at 10am on the first Saturday of every month, commencing 1 December 2007.

Reading list:

January: The Complete Maus, Art Spiegalman
February: A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
March: Catch-22, Joseph Heller
April: Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
May: Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
June: 1984, George Orwell
July: Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

To see every bird on earth - Dan Koeppel

I guess this book is a memoir, as much as it is a novel, but it felt like reading a novel. It's subtitled 'A Father, a Son, and lifelong Obsession', where bird watching - and specifically bird listing is the obsession. At the time of writing, his father had seen over 7,000 birds. That's 7,000 species, not just 7,000 flappy squawky individuals. Seen and identified them, using all manner of field guides. Seen and identified them in all manner of hard to get to places. And then recorded them, meticulously, with cross referencing and reference to the official tally of species for a region. Changing the list as species are deemed to have been split or 'lumped' (as taxonimists decide that one species is actually two different ones that look pretty similar, or decide that two are really the one). To get this list his father dedicated huge chunks of time and attention to his pursuit, becoming more and more single minded about it as he grew older.

The story jumps from the past to the present, linking stories of Dan's grandparents' lives as they left Europe in war, and adapted to life in America, memories from his own childhood and his parent's marriage in it's early days, goes off on tangents about the history of bird watching, or of other famous listers, includes tales of adventure in far flung places as people hunt down birds to spot. And it does this all rather effortlessly, not a dry tedious detail book, but seeming rich with interesting stories that ebb and flow around each other. What I found most interesting was the author's own story of coming to terms with his father's reality, and the generous and philosophical way he looks at his dad's own childhood, and the pressures on him, and the joy and escape he got from watching birds (as well as the relentless family pressure to enter a career in medicine in give up any notion of being an ornithologist), and his conjecture that the repression ended up with the love of bird watching becoming an obsession. But he says it all so much more kindly and interestingly than I do. It was interesting to trace the author's own story of himself as a child and young man, and how his father and he interrelated, and to see that although there were periods of estrangement and hurt (when he wished his dad was different and more available to him) in the end he got to a point of trying to share their lives however they best could - which ends up with him with binaculors in the Amazon with his dad sharing the moment of him spotting his 7,000th bird.

It's quite interesting to look at the kind of behaviour in the book that is easy to say falls squarely outside the 'norm', and consider how these boundaries might gently blur - all the different kinds of tallies and lists that people make, all the different kinds of 'spotters' out there, as well as the garden variety tally-er (to-do, countries I've been to, books I've read, bands I've seen.. etc). Makes you wonder about (and the book explores this too) some general desire in humans to feel more in control through recording and counting, and maybe, in terms of bird watching, to feel connected to the wonderous abundance of nature. But maybe a little more the former than the latter.

If you like stories about people and what might or might not make them tick, tales of 'the life less travelled', how other people navigate their family dynamics, or you just want to appreciate birds just that little bit more, this one gets a double thumbs up.