Year: 2021

On Animals, by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press, 237 pages)

Susan Orlean had me at “Shiftless Little Loafers,” her 1996 essay in The New Yorker in which she bemoaned how little babies do to earn their keep.

But then she lost me. I’ve not kept up with Orlean’s work, even as she grew in fame and output. I didn’t read The Orchid Thief in 1998or The Library Book in 2018, and didn’t even know about Red Sox and Bluefish, a 1987 paperback collection of Boston Globe columns on “Things that Make New England New England.”)

My bad.

After reading On Animals, I’ve repented of Orlean negligence and vowed to catch up, even though her new book is the type that generally irritates me: one composed almost entirely of previously published works. These essays were originally published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Smithsonian magazine, and they’re introduced under the unifying umbrella of a 2011 Amazon Kindle Original.

Normally there’s one suitable response to pre-published essays released in book form just before the holiday season: pffft. As in, you want us to pay money for essays we’ve already read for free? However, this is the rare collection that’s worth overlooking the bald money grab, at least for anyone who is, like Orlean describes herself, “animalish.”

Orleans begins by describing an ordinary childhood of animal longing, in which she and her siblings had to overcome their mother’s resistance in order to obtain a dog and a butterscotch-colored mouse. Early on, Orlean displayed a quirky sense of comedy that underlies her work. She writes of the mouse, “I named her Sparky and pretended that she was some sort of championship show mouse, and I made a bunch of fake ribbons and trophies for her and I told people she had won them at mouse shows.”

In college she splurged on an Irish setter puppy, causing her mother to sigh, “Well, for heaven’s sake, Susie. You and your animals.” She married a man who once promised her a donkey for her birthday and who, for Valentine’s Day one year, arranged to have an African lion — “tawney and panting, with soft, round ears and paws as big as baseball mitts” — visit her Manhattan apartment on a leash. (The lion was accompanied by his owner and three off-duty police officers.)

Orlean quotes John Berger, who said that people get attached to animals because they remind us of the agrarian lives that most of us no longer lead, but she says it’s more than that, that animals give a “warm, wonderful, unpredictable texture” to life. As such, she’s spent much of her career writing about animals and spent much of personal life caring for them. (It helps that she lives on 50 acres in California, enabling her to keep creatures such as ducks and donkeys.)

In “The It Bird” Orlean writes of her interests in chickens and tells the fascinating story of how Martha Stewart helped to launch a nationwide chicken craze by publishing glamour shots of chickens in her magazine. “Show Dog” is a brief meditation on the lives of championship dogs, focusing on a boxer from Massachusetts named Biff. (“He has a dark mask, spongy lips, a wishbone-shaped white blaze, and the earnest and slightly careworn expression of a small-town mayor.)

“The Lady and the Tigers” explores the strange life of the New Jersey woman who owned 24 or so tigers, more than Six Flags Wild Safari. “You know how it is — you start with one tiger, then you get another and another, then a few are born and a few die, and you start to lose track of details like exactly how many tigers you have.”

In “Riding High,” Orlean examines the history of the mule, the cross of a male donkey and a female horse that is always sterile because of its uneven number of chromosomes, and in “Where Donkeys Deliver,” she writes of falling in love with “the plain tenderness of their faces and their attitude of patient resignation and even their impenetrable, obdurate temperaments.”

This essay is as much a reflection on the mind-boggling differences in cultures as it is on donkeys alone. Orlean notes that donkeys in America are mostly kept as pets, whereas in other countries, such as Morocco, they remain beasts of burden. She writes of seeing a small, harnessed donkey walking gingerly alone down a steep road in Fez, with no one showing any interest. When she asked someone about this, she was told the donkey “was probably just finished with work and on his way home.”

Other animals that merit their own chapter in this book include rabbits, lions, pandas, oxen, pigeons and whales, with side trips into the business of taxidermy and animal actors in Hollywood.

In her chapter on chickens, Orlean acknowledges a largely ignored problem: Animals live short and brutish lives and then die, giving animalish people self-inflicted pain. She writes of sitting in a vet’s office sobbing after having to have a sick chicken euthanized. (“I eat chicken all the time, so I have no right to morally oppose the killing of a chicken, but I couldn’t kill my own pet.”) And she owns turkeys, “an impulse buy,” but they are pets that will not be eaten. “I am having turkey for Thanksgiving, but not my turkeys,” she writes. (Her husband calls them “landscape animals.”)

Eventually Orlean concludes that animals are “an ideal foil for examining the human condition.” Agreed, but animals are more a romp in the park than a philosophy class. That’s true of On Animals, as well. A

Book Notes

The end of the year is time for celebrating with family and friends, making resolutions for the new year, and hearing wealthy CEOs tell us what books we should have read but probably didn’t.

Bill Gates, for example, had a difficult year PR-wise but still found time to share his five favorite books of the year in a video in which he strolls through a holiday tableau, under what’s probably fake snow, wearing a buffalo-checked lumberjack shirt as if he were a simple man of the people. (You can find this on YouTube.)

Gates, who famously reads 50 books a year, says he looks forward to reading for three hours a day when he’s on vacation. His five recommended books for 2021:

Project Hail Mary (Ballantine, 496 pages) by Andy Weir, a novel by the author of The Martian, about a high-school teacher who is startled to wake up in a different star system. (Gates read the book over a weekend, he said.)

Hamnet (Knopf, 320 pages) by Maggie O’Farrell, speculative fiction about William Shakespeare’s life; Hamnet was the name of his son, who died at age 11.

A Thousand Brains, a New Theory of Intelligence (Basic, 288 pages) by Jeff Hawkins, who is best known as the co-inventor of the PalmPilot, one of the first handheld computers. In this book he delves into artificial intelligence and where it’s headed.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race (Simon & Schuster, 560 pages), by Walter Isaacson, probes the development and ethical quandaries presented by CRISPR gene editing technology.

Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 320 pages) by Kazuo Ishiguro is a thought-provoking novel about a specific form of artificial intelligence, the personal robot engineered to be a companion to humans.

For what it’s worth, we, too, loved Klara and The Sun, and gave it an A back in the spring. So we’re more interested in what Ishiguro believes to be the best books of the year than Gates. There’s no heartwarming video involved, but here they are, courtesy of the UK newspaper The Guardian, which did a roundup of several authors’ favorites.

The Premonition, A Pandemic Story (W.W. Norton, 320 pages) by Michael Lewis; Failures of State (Mudlark, 432 pages) by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott; The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories (Hogarth, 208 pages) by Mariana Enriquez; and Spike, The Virus vs. the People by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja (Profile Books, 253 pages).

Book Events

Author events

• MIDDLE GRADE AUTHOR PANELFeaturing middle grade authors Padma Venkatraman, Barbara Dee, Leah Henderson, Aida Salazar and Lindsey Stoddard. Virtual event hosted by Toadstool Bookshops in Peterborough, Nashua and Keene. Sat., Dec. 18, 4 p.m. Via Zoom. Visit toadbooks.com.

• JOHN NICHOLS Author presents Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiters. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Feb. 1, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• TIMOTHY BOUDREAU Author presents on the craft of writing short stories. Sat., Jan. 15, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• CAROL WESTBURG AND SUE BURTON Virtual poetry reading hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 20, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.