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Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss
The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us – all the delicate networks that make us who we are – have already been transformed.
In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.
Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind?
Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.
In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.
Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind?
Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.
290 pages, Paperback
First published September 28, 2021
About the author
Delia Falconer
25 books19 followersDelia Falconer is the author of two novels, The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Selected Stories and the memoir Sydney. Her fiction and non-fiction have been widely anthologised, including in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 21, 2021
A very strange, and strangely pleasing book. Falconer (2021) is a potpourri of critical theory neoterisms [from anthropocene to neologismcene], lyrical commentary on the depradations of climate change on animal and insect life, riffs on contemporary 'philosophers' like Latour, and eminent 'thinkers' like Barthes, a spirited philippic against literary critics like James Wood who have heaped scorn on BIG novels of ideas--like those of Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, & Don DeLillo among others--characterized by their encyclopedic scope and their "hysterical realism," pithy criticism of The New Yorker house style, jeremiads on the fate of the paragraph and the many-claused sentence, and meditations on the cinematography and meta-fictional world of the American police procedural drama CSI: Miami. The thing that keeps the book from weighing in like the lumbering shaggy-dog of facts and discursions it is is Falconer's lush, sensitive writing.
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May 5, 2022no rating but i spent half a therapy session crying over this book
September 23, 2021
Readers may remember that I featured the author Delia Falconer and her new book of essays Signs and Wonders after the Melbourne Writers Festival was cancelled, alerting you to the book's forthcoming release. What I didn't know then was that Signs and Wonders is a stunning book, and it is is going to walk off the shelves when it's released in October so if you don't want to miss out, best to pre-order a copy now. I don't like to promote FOMO but booksellers are already warning us about both shortages of Christmas stock and expected delivery delays due to pressure on Australia Post because of the explosion in online sales. Signs and Wonders is exactly the kind of book that's a perfect Christmas present for the hard-to-please, so don't be disappointed...
There are thirteen essays but it will come as no surprise that I opted to read 'The Disappearing Paragraph' first. This fascinating essay explores the impact on thinking of the way print has been altered in the age of screens. It begins like this:
Falconer learned to type as I did, on a typewriter, (though hers was electric, and the one at the State Film Centre where I worked, was not. ) But before that, as I did, she had absorbed the small visual rhythms of paragraphing by reading everything that came my way as a child. (For me, my grade 6 teacher Mrs Sheedy who was a stickler for writing conventions, reinforced the message with a red pen.) But now paragraphs are often not separated by the conventional indent, but by a double-line space. You see it here in this and all my reviews but it's also emerging in books. When I inspect my current TBR of books for review, three of the seven use double-line spaces. The publishers aren't consistent: Emily Bitto's Wild Abandon (A&U) has double-line spaces but also from A&U, Nellie, the life and loves of Dame Nellie Melba by Robert Wainwright, doesn't. Upswell publications The Dogs by John Hughes and Belinda Probert's Imaginative Possession have double-line spaces, but Monique Truong's The Sweetest Fruits has conventional indents. So does Transit Lounge's The One that Got Away, Travelling in the Time of Covid by Ken Haley, as does The Dancer by Evelyn Juers from Giramondo. And even Delia's own book isn't consistent with itself: 'Terror from the Air: Fire Diary 2019-20' has double-line spaces, but 'The Opposite of Glamour' has conventional indents. What's going on?
Does it matter?
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/21/s...
There are thirteen essays but it will come as no surprise that I opted to read 'The Disappearing Paragraph' first. This fascinating essay explores the impact on thinking of the way print has been altered in the age of screens. It begins like this:
A new breath. A macro-punctuation mark. A flash of lightning showing the landscape from a different aspect. A collection of sentences with a unity of purpose. A new neighbourhood made up of 'streets' of sentences. These are some of the ways writers have described the work of the paragraph. And yet, among the many unsettling phenomena of our age, I have noticed that paragraphs have been disappearing — at least paragraphs as I once knew them. This may not amount to much amid the greater unravelling of our world but it is a significant disturbance within my own small literary ecotone. (p.155)
Falconer learned to type as I did, on a typewriter, (though hers was electric, and the one at the State Film Centre where I worked, was not. ) But before that, as I did, she had absorbed the small visual rhythms of paragraphing by reading everything that came my way as a child. (For me, my grade 6 teacher Mrs Sheedy who was a stickler for writing conventions, reinforced the message with a red pen.) But now paragraphs are often not separated by the conventional indent, but by a double-line space. You see it here in this and all my reviews but it's also emerging in books. When I inspect my current TBR of books for review, three of the seven use double-line spaces. The publishers aren't consistent: Emily Bitto's Wild Abandon (A&U) has double-line spaces but also from A&U, Nellie, the life and loves of Dame Nellie Melba by Robert Wainwright, doesn't. Upswell publications The Dogs by John Hughes and Belinda Probert's Imaginative Possession have double-line spaces, but Monique Truong's The Sweetest Fruits has conventional indents. So does Transit Lounge's The One that Got Away, Travelling in the Time of Covid by Ken Haley, as does The Dancer by Evelyn Juers from Giramondo. And even Delia's own book isn't consistent with itself: 'Terror from the Air: Fire Diary 2019-20' has double-line spaces, but 'The Opposite of Glamour' has conventional indents. What's going on?
Does it matter?
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/21/s...
June 3, 2022
"Real knowledge takes trial and error and one of the few certainties for those who research for a living is that evidence can look entirely different when looked at in a new light within an evolving discipline. It accretes over time – but duration has also dropped out of the public understanding of research. Meanwhile, the widespread belief in the possibility of an absolute proof that speaks for itself makes a large part of the general public increasingly hostile to knowledge that depends on scientific method and interpretation; and more susceptible, at the same time, to those who claim, emphatically, to be in possession of the truth. "
When these essays are good, they are great. Falconer's quiet honesty and everyday despair resonate strongly. She neatly pairs analysis with experience - the wonders that are revealed by ice melting, the joy of new birds in the backyard - all of which signify a broken world. The last couple of years have given plenty of material for this reflection: the pandemic, and the bushfires feature heavily here. I was, at times, jolted out of the narrative: Falconer flees to the South Coast against advice, and at others, her relative capacity to cocoon against the intrusions can be hard to take. But at its best, this is a very human compilation that invites an open-eyed approach to our moment in time.
When these essays are good, they are great. Falconer's quiet honesty and everyday despair resonate strongly. She neatly pairs analysis with experience - the wonders that are revealed by ice melting, the joy of new birds in the backyard - all of which signify a broken world. The last couple of years have given plenty of material for this reflection: the pandemic, and the bushfires feature heavily here. I was, at times, jolted out of the narrative: Falconer flees to the South Coast against advice, and at others, her relative capacity to cocoon against the intrusions can be hard to take. But at its best, this is a very human compilation that invites an open-eyed approach to our moment in time.
February 3, 2022
luminescent
June 12, 2024
Book Review: Signs & Wonders by Delia Falconer
During my trip in Bangkok, I went to this bookstore, completely by chance - I was contemplating on not going since was about to run late to meet some friends. Yet I ended up there and finding this book on the second floor. I was immediately drawn to it - perhaps because of my own bias of enjoying terms such as signs, wonders, dispatches (sub-heading: “dispatches from a time of beauty and loss”).
Generally with new authors, I tend to be more on guard - having not been exposed at all, I subconsciously start to compare them to the very best, which I know isn’t fair and I do my best to see the book in its own terms, but still, it’s a difficult act. But right from the get go, Delia’s writing put me at ease. She writes beautifully, no doubt. Yet, the central voice in the whole book remains this acute sense of beauty and urgency, while holding onto deep depression / sense of devastation within herself. That alone, feels quite generous because she could just as easily slip into murky “woe is me” territory, yet not once does she slip in that, instead, it’s a constant deep exploration of anxieties, curiosities, and perhaps these open fields of not knowing what’s really coming our way. Our way - as in everyone in this planet (obviously the extent varies) by way of the raging capitalism’s impact on climate itself. That’s the central theme of this book and all its essays.
Delia meanders around human impact on burning fossil fuels (and the history of coals - which I found quite fascinating), about feeding birds with her dying mother, around understanding signals across 1992 to 2021, about what COVID isolations really meant for her, the Australian bushfires and more.
I wanted to highlight two in particular which that I loved and why:
A. Hyper Realism: this pokes around a critic who was dismissive of Zadie Smith around the late 90s, as her book looked into terrorist attacks, among myriad of dystopian considerations that prior to that moment was missing from books. The critic was dismissive on the hyper realism and pondered on the past glories when people focused more on abstract and the quite literal approach to fiction that’s more relaxing and not so much grounded in reality. What Delia considers against this - is what ended up happening after 9/11, significant shift in the world’s view on Islam, on raging subsequent wars, the general climate and more. The essay, at least to me asks - at what costs do we try to be dismissive of things that are out of the ordinary? What would it take to open up to new paradigms? She further asks how a lot of authors tend to circumvent around climate issues, because people want easy reprieve. Again, at what costs?
A parallel example (albeit more superficial example), is when Charli xcx released Vroom Vroom back in 2016, which had a polarizing opinion, Pitchfork giving it 4.5/10 or 45% (Pitchfork since then has revised the score to 7.8/10 or 78%) yet Tiny Mix Tapes gave it 4.5/5 or 90% and went as far as saying “Vroom Vroom offers a brief, appealing glimpse of a world manifest with characters, ideas, and feelings, all presented with a novel exposition. This could be pop’s near-future: It’s just a hundred miles down the road.”
Why am I highlighting this now in 2024? It’s because Charli xcx released brat to universal acclaim at 95/100 on metacritic (PF gave it a career high 8.6/10) as the album is quintessential record of what she has been pioneering since 2016. It has only (sarcasm) taken 8 years for people to come around to what she was pushing for back then. Again, at what costs does these shunning work? What if people shy away from transgressive considerations in favor of what’s easier to consume? That’s the culture I fear we are in. I don’t know what that means - but I sense a dread.
B. Although the thread running across the essays are climate dread, Delia doesn’t shy away from showing her love and compassion for non-humans suffering because of our Anthropocene impact. Be it birds, be it seals, be it water habitants. You can tell her heart breaks, so does the readers, in what our human actions are doing to these animals. I think I personally crumbled when she wrote about a Koala giving up to the bushfires and surrendering to the fire. That’s what we are driving these animals towards.
I was speaking to my mother, as she reckons with some of the pigeons our family has, and how some of them have suffered due to the unruly heat (that seems to be the topic of discussions with every country it seems). And how she explained that these creatures cannot even talk to explain what’s happening, and simply waiting for recovery and if not, their demise. It’s paralyzing to think what that means. This silent pain. This silent devastation.
—
All in all, I am grateful I went to that store, and picked up this book. She wrote at a point in one of the essay - that authors should stop patting each other on their back and accept that writing doesn’t do much / bring about change. And yet, her words, her thinking - it changed me. It changed me to realize I need to drop my own greed to get ahead (because it’s my anxieties of getting left behind - a deep feeling that’s left at the wake of capitalism) and instead bring along people and animals - forward in this world (a world that’s beyond “being saved” but can still be looked after even with all the wreckage’s around us).
During my trip in Bangkok, I went to this bookstore, completely by chance - I was contemplating on not going since was about to run late to meet some friends. Yet I ended up there and finding this book on the second floor. I was immediately drawn to it - perhaps because of my own bias of enjoying terms such as signs, wonders, dispatches (sub-heading: “dispatches from a time of beauty and loss”).
Generally with new authors, I tend to be more on guard - having not been exposed at all, I subconsciously start to compare them to the very best, which I know isn’t fair and I do my best to see the book in its own terms, but still, it’s a difficult act. But right from the get go, Delia’s writing put me at ease. She writes beautifully, no doubt. Yet, the central voice in the whole book remains this acute sense of beauty and urgency, while holding onto deep depression / sense of devastation within herself. That alone, feels quite generous because she could just as easily slip into murky “woe is me” territory, yet not once does she slip in that, instead, it’s a constant deep exploration of anxieties, curiosities, and perhaps these open fields of not knowing what’s really coming our way. Our way - as in everyone in this planet (obviously the extent varies) by way of the raging capitalism’s impact on climate itself. That’s the central theme of this book and all its essays.
Delia meanders around human impact on burning fossil fuels (and the history of coals - which I found quite fascinating), about feeding birds with her dying mother, around understanding signals across 1992 to 2021, about what COVID isolations really meant for her, the Australian bushfires and more.
I wanted to highlight two in particular which that I loved and why:
A. Hyper Realism: this pokes around a critic who was dismissive of Zadie Smith around the late 90s, as her book looked into terrorist attacks, among myriad of dystopian considerations that prior to that moment was missing from books. The critic was dismissive on the hyper realism and pondered on the past glories when people focused more on abstract and the quite literal approach to fiction that’s more relaxing and not so much grounded in reality. What Delia considers against this - is what ended up happening after 9/11, significant shift in the world’s view on Islam, on raging subsequent wars, the general climate and more. The essay, at least to me asks - at what costs do we try to be dismissive of things that are out of the ordinary? What would it take to open up to new paradigms? She further asks how a lot of authors tend to circumvent around climate issues, because people want easy reprieve. Again, at what costs?
A parallel example (albeit more superficial example), is when Charli xcx released Vroom Vroom back in 2016, which had a polarizing opinion, Pitchfork giving it 4.5/10 or 45% (Pitchfork since then has revised the score to 7.8/10 or 78%) yet Tiny Mix Tapes gave it 4.5/5 or 90% and went as far as saying “Vroom Vroom offers a brief, appealing glimpse of a world manifest with characters, ideas, and feelings, all presented with a novel exposition. This could be pop’s near-future: It’s just a hundred miles down the road.”
Why am I highlighting this now in 2024? It’s because Charli xcx released brat to universal acclaim at 95/100 on metacritic (PF gave it a career high 8.6/10) as the album is quintessential record of what she has been pioneering since 2016. It has only (sarcasm) taken 8 years for people to come around to what she was pushing for back then. Again, at what costs does these shunning work? What if people shy away from transgressive considerations in favor of what’s easier to consume? That’s the culture I fear we are in. I don’t know what that means - but I sense a dread.
B. Although the thread running across the essays are climate dread, Delia doesn’t shy away from showing her love and compassion for non-humans suffering because of our Anthropocene impact. Be it birds, be it seals, be it water habitants. You can tell her heart breaks, so does the readers, in what our human actions are doing to these animals. I think I personally crumbled when she wrote about a Koala giving up to the bushfires and surrendering to the fire. That’s what we are driving these animals towards.
I was speaking to my mother, as she reckons with some of the pigeons our family has, and how some of them have suffered due to the unruly heat (that seems to be the topic of discussions with every country it seems). And how she explained that these creatures cannot even talk to explain what’s happening, and simply waiting for recovery and if not, their demise. It’s paralyzing to think what that means. This silent pain. This silent devastation.
—
All in all, I am grateful I went to that store, and picked up this book. She wrote at a point in one of the essay - that authors should stop patting each other on their back and accept that writing doesn’t do much / bring about change. And yet, her words, her thinking - it changed me. It changed me to realize I need to drop my own greed to get ahead (because it’s my anxieties of getting left behind - a deep feeling that’s left at the wake of capitalism) and instead bring along people and animals - forward in this world (a world that’s beyond “being saved” but can still be looked after even with all the wreckage’s around us).
March 3, 2023
I do not read many essay collection books mainly because some of them cover too wide a variety of subject matters. I always try to avoid books discussing too many subjects that happen to be far from my circle of interest. This one is in the middle, having not too many subjects outside of my interest.
I find the author's chapters relating to climate change and deteriorating ecology to be informative and eye-opening. Her discussion on Australia's worst year of forest fires is gripping. Her chronicles and narratives in these chapters are meticulous and attract my attention.
I like the chapter The Weight of Things as the author writes about literature world covering many interesting books, some I already read while others are in my wishlist. The last chapter is also an enjoyable read when she discuss bioluminescense by starting with the famous TV series: CSI (Las Vegas) which happens to be my favorite series as well. The chapter on animal rights is also interesting but is far from my social circle in my part of the world in which too many people still live too far below the poverty line.
The chapters that I would not comment on are one named COVID Walking Diary which is a bit too straying and winding in subjects and the one on contemporary writing style that has to do with books I know nothing about. Short chapters on Birds, Gun Tree, and Coronavirus diary are OK.
In summary, this books should be attractive for readers interested in nature writing and literature.
I find the author's chapters relating to climate change and deteriorating ecology to be informative and eye-opening. Her discussion on Australia's worst year of forest fires is gripping. Her chronicles and narratives in these chapters are meticulous and attract my attention.
I like the chapter The Weight of Things as the author writes about literature world covering many interesting books, some I already read while others are in my wishlist. The last chapter is also an enjoyable read when she discuss bioluminescense by starting with the famous TV series: CSI (Las Vegas) which happens to be my favorite series as well. The chapter on animal rights is also interesting but is far from my social circle in my part of the world in which too many people still live too far below the poverty line.
The chapters that I would not comment on are one named COVID Walking Diary which is a bit too straying and winding in subjects and the one on contemporary writing style that has to do with books I know nothing about. Short chapters on Birds, Gun Tree, and Coronavirus diary are OK.
In summary, this books should be attractive for readers interested in nature writing and literature.
April 17, 2022
This is a really interesting book.
While ostensibly depressing, detailing the cries of our doomed planet Falconer weaves a love of light, writing and photography into the last few years of pandemics, September 11 and the Australian bushfires amongst other things.
Having lived, walked and swum in many of the same places, also had twins, attended the same university and read many of the same unusual books I felt proud and at home with this Australian writer. But what really struck me was the chapter “hysterical realism”. Why I yearn for books set in isolated places and escape on remote swimming expeditions may well be more than recharging from our hyper complex world and may well be a helplessness in grappling with unease at overdevelopment and family members who see everything as another cycle. No wonder I seek out books like Williams “Stoner”.
Worth a second read when it comes out in smaller format.
While ostensibly depressing, detailing the cries of our doomed planet Falconer weaves a love of light, writing and photography into the last few years of pandemics, September 11 and the Australian bushfires amongst other things.
Having lived, walked and swum in many of the same places, also had twins, attended the same university and read many of the same unusual books I felt proud and at home with this Australian writer. But what really struck me was the chapter “hysterical realism”. Why I yearn for books set in isolated places and escape on remote swimming expeditions may well be more than recharging from our hyper complex world and may well be a helplessness in grappling with unease at overdevelopment and family members who see everything as another cycle. No wonder I seek out books like Williams “Stoner”.
Worth a second read when it comes out in smaller format.
December 31, 2024
A book mourning the loss of Australian biodiversity and climate change as we go deep into the Anthropocene. And you know the Aussies have it rough on that front.
It gave me a vibe similar to The Uninhabitable Earth, in the sense that you have to be in a certain doomy mindset to truly appreciate. Similar to how it's possible to look forward to depressive music: it's in some ways cathartic to read another human being express thoughts and feelings you have kept bottled up inside of you for too long.
I enjoyed most of Falconer's musings, though I would have liked less literary and book-related references and more observations that would have been easier to follow for someone like me - a millennial who largely listens to books while running.
But don't get me wrong, it's exactly the kind of book I'd like my Sydney-born quasi-climate change denialist dad to read.
It gave me a vibe similar to The Uninhabitable Earth, in the sense that you have to be in a certain doomy mindset to truly appreciate. Similar to how it's possible to look forward to depressive music: it's in some ways cathartic to read another human being express thoughts and feelings you have kept bottled up inside of you for too long.
I enjoyed most of Falconer's musings, though I would have liked less literary and book-related references and more observations that would have been easier to follow for someone like me - a millennial who largely listens to books while running.
But don't get me wrong, it's exactly the kind of book I'd like my Sydney-born quasi-climate change denialist dad to read.
March 22, 2023
In the title essay that begins this collection Falconer explores how the evidence of this change is becoming all too obvious, prompted by her awareness that the fish she used to watch in Sydney Harbour had disappeared. She catalogues the appearance of animals in odd places, and the emergence of things that have disappeared a long time ago like mammoth calves from melting permafrost or the hunger stones that emerged in drought-stricken German rivers. To live now, she writes, is to live in a permanent state of self-questioning, "another sign of disorder, or a souvenir of a joyful chance event?" Read more on my blog.
December 20, 2021
Falconer is a beautiful writer and I loved her novel The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers. This collection of essays and vignettes from Falconer, who is a novelist a well as a Walkley Award winner, is compelling and each chapter deserves time and attention. There are elements of memoir in stories of childhood but all the essays link to our inner and outer(environmental) world. Recommend this one to everyone for Christmas as the writing is superb, and the essays are so varied that we can all find something that captures us in here.
May 8, 2022
Was reading this collection concurrently with Atwood's 'Burning' essays and it was interesting to intermingle the Canadian and Australian voices on much the same topics of climate change and our Anthropocene reality. DL was my lecturer at UTS for Creative Non-Fiction and is such a generous and sensitive teacher and these essays deepen our experience of this strange present shining moment in time before the greater fall that awaits us without addressing global warming. DL critiques the magic of 'glamour' that has slicked over the huge loss of species and LIFE with its sheen.
December 5, 2022
I’m awed by Falconer's intellect and art in composing essays. She’s extraordinarily complex and sophisticated in her thinking. She starts in one place and then somehow traverses somewhere completely different and then at the end it all comes together… This book is a good example of neuroscientific proposition that creativity is all about making unexpected connections between normally unconnected things. Falconer's way with language is also quite extraordinary. What a brain! She really reveals you the world anew.
June 6, 2024
A poignant warning of the dangers of falling prey to the hypnotism of the glamour society of modern times.
This book is full of the author's unique revelations about the deep warnings hidden in everyday culture, which may or may not spring from the unconscious of man's psyche.
As well as shocking instances where wildlife was harmed and endangered.
She also shares the pain of living in a time of instability and in the throes of the Anthropocene.
A call to change for whoever needs to hear it- which is everyone.
This book is full of the author's unique revelations about the deep warnings hidden in everyday culture, which may or may not spring from the unconscious of man's psyche.
As well as shocking instances where wildlife was harmed and endangered.
She also shares the pain of living in a time of instability and in the throes of the Anthropocene.
A call to change for whoever needs to hear it- which is everyone.
May 23, 2022
Everything about climate change is timely these days and there's no shortage of contributions. As a writer rather than a scientist, Falconer's latest book, a collection of essays, is better written and more lyrical than most. She draws well on a range of research without it ever being heavy-handed. The book that I've read most recently that is similar is Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs, which gets mentioned within and Giggs also supplies a blurb.
November 17, 2021
Luminous insight into our changing world. Beautiful writing that examines our state of decay.
June 7, 2022
Some beautiful writing, both tender and tough, about the world we are losing — and the one we have been making. Highly recommended.
December 16, 2022
I really liked the way this book began but my interest waned when it became a dissertation on how the novel has changed and the long section on CSI. In some ways just too academic.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews