#Daniel Mason

[mythologyofblue]

“The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

-Daniel Mason, North Woods

[bangbangwhoa]

books I’ve read in 2023 📖 no. 104

North Woods by Daniel Mason

“Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past. …and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

[theinquisitxor]

March 2024 Reading Wrap Up

I read 6 books in March, which was a little less than I was hoping for, but I thought the quality of what I read was very good. I read 3 fantasy books, 1 nonfiction, and 2 fiction. I read a few new releases and continued some series.

1.Us Against You by Frederik Backman (Beartown 2), 4/5 stars. I started March with reading the second book in this series, and it was just as emotional and good as book 1. I don't read a lot of fiction like this anymore, but I have been enjoying these books. I'm hoping to finish the series next month.

2. The Poison Prince by SC Emmet (Hostage of Empire 2), 4/5 stars. This is the second book in this courtly political east asian fantasy series. While the first book has bursts of action, this book was primarily no action/just politics. This is really shaping up to be a new favorite series which I hope to finish next month.

3. The Prisoner's Throne by Holly Black (The Stolen Heir Duology 2), 4/5 stars. This was a good conclusion to this duology, and I think I enjoyed this book more than the first. I liked seeing some of the characters from the first series, and get caught up with what is going on in Holly Black's world.

4. Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester. This was my nonfiction audiobook for the month, and the author narrated the audiobook himself. This is a huge topic for an author to try and address in one book, and I enjoyed the stories that Winchester tells throughout.

5. An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors by Curtis Craddock (The Risen Kingdoms 1), 3/5 stars. This was my Random TBR Pick for the month of March. This book has been on my tbr since 2018, so I was happy to finally read it. This had a very unique world and setting which was cool to explore. Even though this is a series, I feel like you could read this just as a standalone. As of right now I don't plan on continuing.

6. North Woods by Daniel Mason, 5/5 stars. This was my favorite book I read this month, and a new all around favorite. This is exactly the type of literary fiction I enjoy, and checked so many boxes for me. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time to come.

That's all the books I read in March!

April TBR:

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

The Winners (Beartown 3) by Frederick Backman

The Bloody Throne (Hostage of Empire 3) by SC Emmet

Random TBR Pick: The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

Nonfiction Audiobook / The Language of Trees

If I have time:

The Hedgewitch of Fox Hall by Anna Bright

Song of the Huntress by Lucy Holland

[i-will-not-be-caged]

I’ve been reading this book the past few days and just finished it this afternoon. It was an oddly comforting thing to be reading during the midst of *gestures* all of this, but I was particularly struck by this line towards the very end:

“The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

Not really an encouraging quote in the traditional sense, but it did give me some comfort.

[teenagedirtstache]

[pleasuredelaying]

"Such joy that your sweet company makes, does leave a shadow in its wake.

To think that you were here but a week! -it felt both a minute and a lifetime.

You are like no one else I know, have ever met. My sole consolation, and it is a great one, is the realization of my life's fortune in your friendship, for it is fortune.

To think of all that had to happen so that we might meet, and all that might have happened to prevent it.”

- Daniel Mason, excerpt from North Woods.

[7r0773r]

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

He stood and watched her and for a moment she held his gaze, and in the deep recesses of his chest he felt something stir, a longing, that she would invite him to her room, to dry off only, of course, he would never ask for more. To dry off only, and then in the darkness of the room, scented with coconut and cinnamon, a wish that perhaps their hands would brush, first accidentally, then again, perhaps, bolder, deliberate, that their fingers would meet and entwine and they would stand like that for a moment before she looked up and he looked down. And he wondered if she thought the same, as they stood outside and felt the coolness of the water on their skin.

And perhaps it could have been, had Edgar acted with the spontaneity of the rain, had he moved toward her with the same boldness with which water falls. But not now. This expects too much of a man whose life is defined by creating order so that others may make beauty. It expects too much of one who makes rules to ask that he break them. And so, after a long silence, as they both stand and listen to the rain, his voice cracks and he says, "We'd better change then. I must find dry clothes." Fleeting words that mean little and much. (p. 240)

***

He thought of the room where he had learned to tune, and the cold afternoons when the old man would wax poetically about the role of a tuner, and Edgar would listen with amusement. As a young apprentice, his master's words had seemed maudlin. Why do you want to tune pianos? asked the old man. Because I have good hands and I like music, the boy had answered, and his teacher laughed, Is that it? What more? replied the boy. More? And the man raised a glass and smiled. Don't you know, he asked, that in every piano there lies a song, hidden? The boy shook his head. Just the mumblings of an old man perhaps, But you see, the movement of a pianist's fingers are purely mechanical, an ordinary collection of muscles and tendons that know only a few simple rules of rate and rhythm. We must tune pianos, he said, so that something as mundane as muscles and tendons and keys and wire and wood can become song. And what is the name of the song that lies in this old piano? the boy had asked, pointing to a dusty upright. Song, said the man, It doesn't have a name, Only song. And the boy had laughed because he hadn't heard of a song without a name, and the old man laughed because he was drunk and happy.

The keys and hammers trembled with the sway of the current, and in the faint ringing that rose up Edgar again heard a song with no name, a song made only of notes but no melody, a song that repeated itself, each echo a ripple of the first, a song that came from the piano itself, for there was no musician but the river. He thought back to the night in Mae Lwin, to The Well-Tempered Clavier, It is a piece bound by strict rules of counterpoint, as all fugues are, the song is but an elaboration of one simple melody, we are destined to follow the rules established in the first few lines.

It makes you wonder, said the old man, lifting his wineglass, why a man who composed such melodies of worship, of faith, named his greatest fugue after the act of tuning a piano. (pp. 284-85)

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #386

An end of week recap “The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.” – Elizabeth Hardwick (born 27th July 1916) This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look…

[lilianeruyters]

Daniel Mason || North Woods

I might have bought this novel because I was intrigued by its layout: chapters alternated with poetry and photography. I had no idea what I was about to read. Fortunately North Woods did not disappoint me, I was drawn into the novel right from the start. North Woods is the history of a certain spot deep in the woods of New England. This woodland is a given, the people coming to live there in…

[bookcoversonly]

Title: A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth | Author: Daniel Mason | Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (2020)

[kimbazee]

Fiction to Read or Consider

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps keep my blog ad-free. Family Family by Laurie Frankel had such an unusual feel to me. Themes include teen pregnancy, adoption, and childhood trauma, but it isn’t sad or even serious. Everything almost feels like a joke. Her main character,…

[warningsine]

American novelist and doctor Daniel Mason is already well known for his wonderfully atmospheric historical novels The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier. North Woods sees him explore innovative approaches to historical fiction, and even surpasses those earlier books. The narrative begins in the 1760s and continues through to the present day – and then moves further into some undated moment in the future. It tells the story of a “remote station of the north woods” in Massachusetts, and a lemon-yellow house with a tall black door that is built in this “hilly, snow-dusted country” which lies towards “sun’s fall”.

The story is told in fragments that capture the lives of the inhabitants of this place. They include a young couple who have fled a Puritan colony, Native Americans defending their territories and an English soldier who decides to give up “the smell of gunpowder” and devote himself entirely to apples. There are also jealous sisters, a man engaged in “Southern business” (hunting for a runaway slave) and a hunter who hires a medium to lay ghosts to rest. His attempt fails entirely because, for Mason, history is raucous and rowdy. No character in his novel is ever entirely dead. All reappear repeatedly – and their echoes are felt in the text.

Throughout these many narratives Mason shows how random objects – books, rings, stones, paintings – are preserved despite disruption. But it is not only human life that endures and is resurrected. Non-human actors also play their roles – lusty beetles, spores, seeds, logs and even a wild cat. The fate of humans and the processes of the natural world are inextricably linked. The apple orchard that lies at the centre of the novel starts with a seed which “gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs” of a dead English soldier. The Osgood Wonder, the apple tree that grows from this seed, has “deep English roots” and becomes “the nonpareil of the district”. But after a squirrel drops a single acorn, the orchards are gradually “swallowed up by oak and chestnut”. The chestnuts then fall prey to a spore, which is shaken from a dog’s coat and goes on to lay waste half the chestnut forests of New England. Later, young lovers from out of the area bring firewood to the now deserted house. Enjoying days of glorious sex, they are unaware that one of the logs in the boot of their car contains “the larvae of a scolytid beetle overwintering within the bark”. Soon, “the beetle has locked his mate in lust”. This coupling leads to the spread of Dutch elm disease: “It is logs and beetles all the way back.”

Mason tells these proliferating stories through a patchwork of different texts – a book of “Apple Lore”, calendars, ballads, footnotes, letters, case notes, an Address to an Historical Society. These texts are also interspersed with images of paintings, photographs and fragments of musical scores. This might sound chaotic, and the reader does have to work to keep up. Narrative batons are picked up and dropped at a dizzying speed. Occasionally, the reader worries that Mason is about to be buried under his own flamboyance. But part of the joy of this book is exactly that feeling of risk and reach.

Perhaps the most moving section relates to Robert, a schizophrenic who lives in the house in the early years of the 20th century and who is “interested in the enumeration of what seemed like every single tree and stone” in the forest. When Robert’s sister fails to believe in his visions, he makes films to record the ghosts of past inhabitants. When his sister returns, many years after Robert’s death, she plays them and sees nothing “but the gentle motions of a forest that no longer was”. She also remembers how Robert believed that by walking through the forest and “stitching” with his footsteps, he could “repair” the world.

This idea of “stitching” seems to mirror Mason’s own work in writing this novel. All he is doing is describing the history of a small patch of woodland. Yet through some strange alchemy he shows how death is “not only the cessation of life, but vast worlds of significance”. Inevitably, as the story progresses the human impact on the natural world grows darker. But this is not a melancholy book. “To understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.” No matter the extent of the destruction, “it all begins again”. This is a brave and original book, which invents its own form. It is both intimate and epic, playful and serious. To read it is to travel to the limits of what the novel can do.

[anokatony]

My Favorite Fiction I've Read in 2023

Another year. Here are my favorite fiction reads of 2023, and as always, fiction is all that really counts.     ‘Glassworks’ by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith – ‘Glassworks’ is an intriguing and endlessly fascinating quirky family saga with one family member of each of four generations involved with working with glass in one form or another. The situations that Olivia Wolfgang-Smith creates for her…

[andreabadgley]

Thanksgiving week read 🍂🍁

[judgingbooksbycovers]

North Woods: A Novel

By Daniel Mason.

[bargainsleuthbooks]

#ARCReview #NorthWoods #DanielMason #BookReview #LiteraryFiction #NetGalley #HistoricalFiction #RandomHouse

#PulitzerPrize nominee #DanielMason is back with a new book called #NorthWoods. I suspect this book will be nominated 4 lots of awards, too. #literaryfiction #Bookreview #ARCReview #historical fiction #nature #environment #ghosts #netgalley #bargainsleuth

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—a daring, moving tale of memory and fate from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier. When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to…