March 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

The Mirror and the Light has not yet landed in the family bookshelves, but it is certain that this epic third part of Hilary Mantel's generally epic trilogy about Thomas Cromwell will appear there sooner or later after it was published last week.

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I've read Stephen Moss's book, Mrs Moreau's Warbler, lately. Published in 2018, it weaves his personal experiences of bird-watching as a child and as an adult, with a general-knowledge work about the history of bird names.

A few bird names in Britain, like 'swan,' reached the island after past invasions of Vikings and Picts and Angles. One name, 'goose,' reaches longer back and further geographically, into the Indo-European realm.

Folk names became common in Britain, and sometimes their etymology takes a while to disentangle, like 'redstart.'

In the 17th century, 'scientific' names in Latin began to appear. In the 18th century, these names were standardized by Linnaeus and others. Then, and later, a few standardizations or 'fixes' took hold; others didn't. Also, 'bird' no longer meant a small creature, e.g. what we'd now call a 'baby bird'; it replaced the word 'fowl' as what we understand now to be a 'bird.'

Then, in the 19th century, scientists gave names to the birds whom they (')discovered(') in honour of fellow scientists — it was felt to be infra dignitas to name a bird after one's self — or family members like Mrs. Moreau.

In the 20th century, killing birds and stuffing them as specimens went out of fashion. Now, birdwatchers rely on binoculars and on birdsong instead of rifle scopes, but it took a long while to get there.

Moss writes modestly and the trivia seem weighty enough.

But I wish Moss had written more about Australian aborigines', Native American and other peoples' understanding of birds. He knows it is there but does not or cannot provide many details. He also does not reflect how bad British and other European colonialization often was, either, or at least not sharply enough to suit me.

For example, when he speaks of English as a useful lingua franca, I think of children in Canada who were kidnapped from their First Nations families by the government and raised as 'good Christians' speaking only English. They were punished if they did speak the languages they had spoken from birth.

Besides, I think that colonialization or European adventurers are responsible for a few bird extinctions — the dodo, the great auk and the passenger pigeon.

There's William Blake's weird phrase, "Where man is not, nature is barren." In modern times, it must surely be inverted: "Where man is, nature is barren." Nature, human and otherwise, often thrives better when we are not there, eager to 'appreciate' it.

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In between I read lighter fare: a German celebrity journalist's recounting of the early years of Riccardo Muti as a conductor, from lesser-known Italian figure to an internationally renowned conductor at the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, concerts at the Salzburg Festival, and finally La Scala.

Her insistence on comparing Muti to other great conductors like Herbert Karajan and Arturo Toscanini, to his face, was one example of sycophancy that made me wince.

Besides, she often repeated that Muti's love of having pasta regularly is a sign of how much he loves his southern Italian roots, for example, but I often failed to find any great or original insight in her observations. (My mother also likes having pasta regularly, and she's a lifelong German citizen.) She tamely echoed Muti's own self-analysis.

And she was profusely grateful that Muti didn't turn into a grandiose mini-giant who 'forgot' he'd ever met her the moment he was named to La Scala. To me, that underlines the theory that she was keeping the wrong company and that her standards are too low. To her, it was positive proof of how uncomplicated and grounded he (in her eyes) was.

I think she was shrewd about her journalist's industry and his music industry, however. And I had the feeling that she embarrassed herself and the sisterhood for pragmatic reasons, when she insisted on how dreamy women found Muti. (Who was very much married, with three children; so the journalist had to toe a careful line, which she did.) She knew the 'angle' that her editors wanted her to use to lure in readers.

I kind of, figuratively, laugh-cried at her journalist's lifestyle back in the 1980s and 90s ... luxury hotels, prime seats at the opera, travel from Germany to Italy with a photographer, conversations with Brooke Shields and Jim Jarmusch in New York ... Times have changed, I imagine. These accommodations and tickets would likely be paid for by an agent or promoter, and belong to a quid pro quo!

In the end I warmed to the book.

But the author's attempts to diplomatically avoid saying in her postscript that the book ends here because classical music celebrities are passé in the eyes of magazine editors so she never interviewed the man again, are still a bit disastrous. I've also found that sometimes when I try to be really weaselly and clever about something, I'm dreadfully transparent... it might be less insulting to everyone's intelligence to just drop it.

I won't mention the author's name, after admittedly maligning her, because I've likely done her an injustice.

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Now I am reading The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. Macfarlane spans a far broader arc than Moss, and I think manages to bind the scale of 19th century fiction to nature writing in the modern world. He pays homage to Henry David Thoreau but has his own writing style and distinct subject matter. In brief, 'I understand the hype.' But I don't feel competent to review the book without reading a lot more of it.