Seasonal Book Recommendations for November 2021

What remains

“The Present”

As they were leaving the garden

one of the angels bent down to them and whispered

I am to give you this

as you are leaving the garden

I do not know what it is

or what it is for

what you will do with it

you will not be able to keep it

but you will not be able

to keep anything

yet they both reached at once

for the present

and when their hands met

they laughed

from Garden Time by WS Merwin

---

Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson

The original Swedish title of this book¹, Sent i november, literally translates as “Late in November”—something which I take comfort in, sending this newsletter as far into the month as I am.

Sent i november was the eleventh and last Moomin book Tove Jansson wrote, ending her series of more than 25 years running when it published in 1970. In this grand finale, the characters who give the series their name, those that this series is “about,” the characters around whom so much of Jansson’s global legacy revolves to this day: they’re gone. The Moomins are literally not at home.

I can think of few other books as haunted, that face loss as bravely and wholeheartedly as this one does. In all honesty and at the risk of sounding hysterical, Moominvalley in November reminds me of the Book of Acts. Yes, that one, in the New Testament. The one about what Jesus’ friends did after he left. Like the Book of Acts, the last Moomin book isn’t about Death, but about Loss, and much less about what was lost than those who have lost.

The book opens by separately introducing five of the Moominfamily’s friends, misfits all, scattered throughout the world, each feeling unhappy and, most of all, alone, as November closes in. For different reasons, they separately but simultaneously become consumed with the desire to strike out for the Moomin’s house. This, very importantly, isn’t a place they conceive of as their own home, but as a place better than home, a place where they have felt so fully welcomed. Each character is driven by memories of a place and of loving friends to whom he or she is uniquely valued. Yes, they tell themselves, the Moomins have many friends, but I am special.

Each character sets out across the graying landscape, over which the Nordic winter nights are drawing in, arriving at the Moomins’ house to find the Moomins absent. They’ve left no note; there is no explanation either for the confused friends or for the reader. The Moomins simply are not there. Worse still, a motley crew of others—each with their own loneliness and issues—has arrived and is trying to establish proprietary residence, each thinking and acting as though he or she is the Moomin’s truest, bestest friend. There isn’t even the cold comfort of being alone with cherished memories (and delusions) of visits past.

What follows is a hilarious and poignant houseparty in which each uninvited visitor tries to recapture their own sense of belonging by acting the mostest-hostess to their fellow uninvited guests (“The Hemulin continued… ‘I’ll go and make some coffee. The kitchen is at the back of the house.’ ‘I know,’ said Toft.”) There’s guestroom jockeying and passive aggressive comments about who should do the cleaning, and a talent night that is one of the most sparely heartbreaking pieces of literature I’ve ever read. There is the lonely and powerful fury of grief: (“Other people’s electricity had nothing to do with him, he could feel it in the air but it was strange to him, he had his own storm all to himself.”) Finally, there is everyone arriving at their separate conclusions that they need to leave Moominvalley because winter is coming and because the past as they imagined it is gone—or maybe only ever lived in their hearts.

Moominvalley in November doesn’t mention or even allude to death, but it is indisputably about Loss. Yes, as we reach adulthood, we come to know Death as the great, non-negotiable loss, but loss itself is older, and bigger, than biological death. We lose and lose and lose. We lose the narrow, starstruck focus of childhood; we loose relationships; we loose places we love; we loose physical capacity; we loose each day as it passes. And we, (at least I), haunted by what we lost, in turn seek out and haunt the places where we experienced what we remember as the purest happiness. But once we start haunting old haunts, the present crashes in to haunt our reverie. Worse still, we are confronted with other haunted people trying to recapture something they lost. Other people’s contrasting memories of a lost beloved (person, time, place) can feel like malignant ghosts in turn, haunting the “purity” of our own cherished memories.

Moominvalley in November holds all of this. It holds it with such compassion and gentleness, offering no answers or corrections to any of the characters or to the reader, merely acknowledging the sadness, the loneliness, the fury, and confusion as what we are all in alone. And still we have each other. We make each other coffee, we sing each other songs, we sit together and look out to sea, saying nothing.

Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat by Edward Struzik

On the one hand, I’m recommending this book because I just finished reading it and found it really interesting as someone whose passion for nature and science are expressed most keenly through her garden.

But also, peatlands: bogs, fens, some swamps—all the places where plants and geology weirdly halt the “natural” divisions between between growth and decay, land and water—seem a suitable subject for this time of deepening darkness,² this month for honoring the persistence of the past and the dead, a time of “putting the garden to bed,” of G20, COP26, and another year gone. Peatlands are the liminal places—vital to have at our doorsteps (filtering water, holding carbon), but treacherous to humans who would enter those living-dead-water-lands without caution.

Peat, I found out, can actually be formed by pretty much ANY plant substance that is trapped in a specific watery place, layer on layer, year after year—not just mosses. In much of South Asia, peat is made of palm! In parts of the Florida Everglades, it is formed of sawgrass. Most peatlands are only as old as the last glaciers that receded, and Struzik does a great job of explaining why glaciers are uniquely suited to forming peatlands. The speedy melting of polar ice right now provides a unique opportunity for new peatlands to form—if we let them.

Here in North America, we have not even a fraction of the Peat-Free movement that has taken root in UK and Northern European gardening and landscaping. In large part, this is because the world’s vastest peatlands are in Northern Canada, and we’re acting like they’ll never run out. It’s only thanks to my consumption of UK garden media that I’ve become aware of this as an issue at all.

Canada’s peatlands are tangled—like all things—in the legacy of European Imperialism, and some peatlands in Canada are the main source of income for several Indigenous nations. How convenient for white conservationists to swarm in now and ban peat mining when all other livelihoods for these communities are long gone. Also: these communities closest to the bogs will suffer their depletion in the climate emergency most acutely and extremely. There are issues of water filtration, but also the fact that, when drained, peat allows wildfire to spread for miles underground.

I appreciate Struzik’s understanding and explorations of the ways that peatlands are uniquely political: they way they have served as sites of shelter and autonomy for those fleeing slavery—from The Great Dismal in the Carolinas, to Seneca Village in what became Central Park, and throughout the Caribbean. And that as those ecosystems were exploited and drained to be “useful” land, so too were the lives and livelihoods of fugitive people threatened. All this said, I was repeatedly frustrated with some ways Struzik frames contemporary conservation movements as being uncomplicated by the systems of power and domination that he’s so aware of in historic contexts (NB: all contexts are historical).

All told, Swamplands is an incredible tour of unsung ecosystems, one that de-centers the faerie fens of Ireland and Scotland, and shows the enormous commonalities in peatlands from West Africa to Hawaii to Death Valley.

A Seed Is Sleepy by Dianna Hutts Aston, illustrated by Sylvia Long

There’s not a great deal that needs to be elaborated on for this one: I adore this series of children’s nature picture books: the illustrations are gorgeous and the prose—even just the titles—set forth, with great simplicity, an ethos of nature as being part of the same realm of emotion and beauty that humans are: A Rock Is Lively, An Egg Is Quiet, A Butterfly is Patient…

The first slushy, sleety snow has fallen on my garden today and I see all the seedpods I’ve left to dry and go their own way are bowed down under the weight of the snow and the early dark, many of them pressed into the earth.

I’m always moved thinking about the seeds in my garden sleeping through the darkness, and this picture book is a wonderful way to connect to that greatest fullness of this last growing season and the wellspring of the next—seeds—which might be sleeping in your garden soil or gathered away in a quiet cabinet as winter closes in.

1. About book linking: because I’m a bookseller, I’ve made book hyperlinks to the Bookshop.org storefront of the store where I work, Loganberry Books. If you have a local shop you love, I hope you’ll try to order from them first: like all communities, they are able to be there for you because you are there for them.

Also: Libraries! Libraries! I hope your library is as wonderful as mine.

2. I refer to what is seasonal for me in the temperate Northern hemisphere. My experience is overwhelmingly privileged/reflected in Western/Global North literature. If you are in a different environment, in the Global South or elsewhere, I would so love to hear about and share your seasons readings.