I Love Writing Book Reviews: Introducing That Me to Substack
Yesterday morning I finished reading a book. My first finished book this year! I began it a few weeks before I collapsed in the last week of July with slow heart beat into emergency and pacemaker surgery. Oaxaca Journal [‘Oaxaca’ is pronounced Waa-hah-ka because of its etymology] by Oliver Sacks. Most of my reading this year has been Spanish in order to help expand my Spanish. I’ve been reading the Spanish works of fiction, and the even the more brilliant newspaper essays, of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. (In particular De Europa y América 1955-1960. Obra periodistica vol.3.)
And with Oaxaca Journal being the first English book I’ve finished reading this year, and perhaps with my recent tangible change of heart, I decided to make another first: a small one. I would write this book review for substack, with pictures and links; and then turn it into a ‘standard’ review for Goodreads.
A Delightful Spanish Playlist Today
Spotify.
Youtube Music.
Youtube Talk.
I enjoy, perhaps even love, writing book reviews. Since about 2010 I’ve been posting them in Goodreads, here. (I have more than 350 reviews there.) For a few years I also posted them in Amazon, Google Books, and a couple of on-line used book stores that I like. I did that with the ego-expectation that my brilliant writing would bring to my blogs — ‘egajd: An empty page, with nothing to read but the threat of something…’ and ‘egajd books - read and almost read’ — more readers. I didn’t have seva§-mind — and didn’t even know what that was at the time — and as far as I can tell my brilliant reviews created no visible change in my blog’s subscriptions. Well, I guess not so brilliant, after all! 😂😆🤣😆😂
§Seva is action, doing, without expectation of reward, return, acknowledgment, gratitude or visibility — simply doing an action from the nothingness that is appropriate and eccentric in that moment. Seva is the appropriate eccentric action that gracefully extends compassion and reduces struggle and suffering in some, even tiny, ways. It is distinct from being a caregiver acting from a place of ego-expectation of recognition or reward. The former is energising and latter is enervating and leads to caregiver burnout.
And I confess that that purpose was a kind of hypocrisy at the time because I have no real interest in reading book reviews before I have read a book. I enjoy reading reviews after my read because I am curious what are the feeling-reactions of other readers. I am usually astounded by how often some or most of the reviews are diametrically opposed from mine. And with Oaxaca Journal that is what I did and what I experienced. And each time I do that it reconfirms that, being human is being party to embracing every possible diversity of thought, opinion and experience. And now I allow this to remind me that I am free to express opinion without the want or fear of the opinions of others.
So, Here Begins My Review of Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Wolf Sacks
Oaxaca Journal was a random find in a used book store in El Centro Oaxaca. It came to me when I was unuccessfully looking for a Spanish work of fiction, in particular Amor en el Tiempo de Cólera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez. I felt Oaxaca Journal call my name, and so it joined my now tiny Oaxaca library. That was early this year.
I started reading it in early July. From the get go it was an exuberant pleasure to read. And became especially more so while finishing it during my convalescence after the pacemaker surgery. In Oaxaca Journal Sacks writes the joy of an inquisitive living life like few others. This time the vehicle used to carry his curiosity, observations and words is his love of ferns, a fascination he’s had since childhood. And that ‘love’ is his mildly intoxicated expression of pteridomania. A new word to me: it turns out that ferns were the ‘victims’ of a huge European craze, called pteridomania, in the mid 1800s. It became so manic that collectors at the time brought to extinction some types of ferns. This love had him become a long time member of The American Fern Society and in 2001 the AFS arranged for a group trip to the province of Oaxaca, one of the great fern ecosystems on the planet.
Intermezzo: A Divertimento From Book Review to Social/Philosophical Comment
This next bit is a small diversion away from an actual book review. I connect Oaxaca Journal as a counterpoint to my recent observations on the pernicious nature of the way groups naturally evolve so as to stifle eccentricity and the individual. And that is true even of groups started effectively and with good individual intentions. (See, for example, my previous substack essay, ‘A Faint-Hearted Overture: Confessions Of Falling Down Dizzy With Health And Other Ego-Expectations.’). For readers looking for just this book review, go to the Goodreads version of it here or skip down to ‘Back to My Review’ below.)
One of the wonders of Oaxaca Journal for me at this time is that it provided me with a subtle and important counter-point synchronicity with my last essay’s critique of group pressure to squash the individual. As Sacks describes them, this is a beautiful group of eccentric individuals who honour and respect, and who in turn are honoured and respected, by the other members of the group. Perhaps a kind of joyful fern-filled nerd fest the has a space and energy that gives unique voice to people in love with the diversity of and particulars of life that includes people. Each equally in love with their own particular passion and its manner of expression that happened to, for this time, overlap synergistically with the fern-centric passions of others. I didn’t see even a hint from Sacks of dead moralising.
🙏 If this review gives you some pleasure, and/or an ‘aha’ benefit, extend our human intimacy and become a paid subscriber. 🙏
🙏 All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
Back to my review.
And what field trip would be complete without delicious food and drink?
And to wash [the food] down, a huge urn of hot cinnamon-flavoured chocolate … to which I have become completely addicted. [Oaxaca chocolate is astonishing! It displaces the thought of eating flaccid ‘gringo-American’ chocolate.] The atmosphere of the brunch is very sweet, very easy. We have been together for nine days now, and all know each other. We have worked hard, climbed gullies, leapt streams, and have seen a quarter of the seven hundred-odd ferns species in Oaxaca. Tomorrow we will all … leave this place and go back to our jobs in Los Angeles, or Seattle, or Atlanta or New York. But for now, there is nothing to do but sit under the great bald cypresses by the river and enjoy the simple animal pleasure of being alive (perhaps the vegetal pleasure, too; feeling what it might be like to live, unhurried, century after century, and still feel youthful at a thousand years old.)
My own self-imposed task, or indulgence, the keeping of a journal, is coming to an end. I am amazed that I have kept at it with such pertinacity — but this is my passion, rendering into words. I have made these last notes sitting under a tree — not one of the bald cypresses, but a prickly-pear tree, and John Bristow (the third John in our group! — as obsessive with his camera as I am with my pen) took my picture quietly when he thought I wasn’t looking.
† † †
Setting sun, long rays, gilding little Zapotec villages and sixteenth century churches — a sweet, mild, gently undulating land. This has been a lovely trip. I have not enjoyed one so much for many years, nor can I analyse, at the moment, quite what is so … [sic] right. The soft contours of the weathered hills, beauty. And now, in the gathering dusk, we pass [the record setting giant] El Tule [tree] once again, its enormous bulk devouring the old mission beside it.
… I feel young again, or rather, ageless, timeless.
A hand — dark, shapely, muscular — hangs out the window of a bus as we pass it. It is quite beautiful in itself. I am not curious about its possessor (157-8).
I have come away from this read feeling joy and the love of life. Being alive is beauty. And with a deep wonder and appreciation for the diversity, fragility and resilience of the humble ancient fern. Of life expressed in nature, as nature. Now I see around me, here in my near forest yard, the many different ferns with new eyes, with wonder. With these new eyes in halting Spanish I talk with Salomon, my landlord, about some of the ferns that I now see. There are many! He recently planted some new ones and I discover that he knows the names of most of the hundreds of plants, ferns included, here on his property! Astounding to me and my world is renewed and expanded with the old made new.
Sacks expanded my Oaxaca world even beyond that — into the depth and sophistication of the advanced Zapotec culture that existed for about fifteen hundred years, from about 600BC to 800AD. The greatest and most sacred of the cities was Monte Albán, not far from where I live. For reasons unknown the Zapotec abandoned the huge cities and palaces about six hundred years before the moralising Christian Spanish came to raze it and steal its gold in the name of God. Somehow the Zapotec managed to keep Monte Albán hidden from the conquistadors.
… My first impression of Monte Albán is quite overwhelming, and unexpected.
The city itself is spacious and immense, an immensity perhaps exaggerated by its uncanny emptiness. From the high plateau one has an arial view of Oaxaca, a patchwork spread out in the valley below. Here are ruins on a scale as monumental as those of Rome or Athens — temples, market places, patios, palaces — but high on a mountaintop, against the brilliant blue of a Mesoamerican sky, and utterly different in character. The city is still suffused with a sense of the divine, for it was once a city of God, like Jerusalem — but now it is desolate, deserted. The gods have flown, along with the people, but one can feel that they were once here.
… [A]s I gaze at the Observatory, and find myself reflecting on the strange interpenetrations of superstition and science, the mixture of incredible sophistication and naïve animalistic beliefs that the Mesoamericans embraced. And how much of this we still have in ourselves.
… Wandering around Monte Albán, I find myself continually reminded of ancient Egypt — seeing the temples, the raised platforms, the grand bases for pyramids, the whole grand architecture of outwardness and open spaces. Luis speaks of a sense of the sacred, no less than an aesthetic, at work here — a religion of natural forces and form, which gives shape to the city’s spaces as well as its structure. This seems to have been a gentle, reverent, open-air religion (though tied by elaborate synchronicities to the planets, the stars, the whole cosmos) — a religion which had no use for the violences, the human sacrifices, the horrors, of the Aztecs (125-128).
And I continue to share Sacks’ words as the best indication of his sensibilities and power of expression.
Gold was not valued by the pre-Columbians as such, as stuff, but only for the ways it could be used to make objects of beauty. The Spanish found this unintelligible, and in their greed melted down thousands, perhaps millions, of gold artefacts, in order to fill their coffers with the metal. The horror of this comes upon me as I gaze at the few artefacts of gold which had been preserved, through a rare chance, in [Monte Albán’s] Tomb 7. In this sense, at least, the conquistadors had showed themselves to be far baser, far less civilised, than the culture they overthrew.
… If we compare Mesoamerica to Rome and Athens, I was beginning to realise, or to Babylon and Egypt, or to China and India, we find the disjunction bewildering. But there is no scale, no linearity, in such matters. How can one evaluate a society, a culture? We can only ask whether there were relationships and activities, the practices and skills, the beliefs and goals, the ideas and dreams, that make for a fully human life (150-1).
This is a great read for a beautifully expressed elaboration about plants, far more than ‘just’ ferns which dominate the journey. I found the fern and plant details to be extraordinarily interesting, how morning glory was key to the Mesoamericans making rubber, for example. (And the word ‘rubber’ was the description of how rubbing the treated gum erased lead marks on paper.) Sacks includes insects, his enjoyment of eating grasshoppers (chapulinas) and the extremely deadly nature of fireflies. How ants are about 25% of the planet’s animal mass and are a huge contributor to methane gas — and because of formic acid are inedible. And the cochineal insect, the source of the perfect red for textile and food dye. It became more valuable by weight than gold. I saw the cochineal insects on cactus leaves in Teotitlán the weaving capital of Oaxaca.
And just how many ‘staple’ foods of the old world came from the new world.
A fascinating, expansive, read, that somehow with its joie de vivre, la joie d'être humain is also a light read. In the Goodreads’ rating world, a solid five stars.
★★★★★
🙏 If this review gave you some pleasure, and/or an ‘aha’ benefit, extend our human intimacy and become a paid subscriber. 🙏
🙏 All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏
A Delightful Spanish Playlist
Spotify.
Youtube Music.
Youtube Talk.
Song of the Review:
My colleague from work says they have the best cheese 🧀 over there 😋
🥰🙏🏾