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Mountainfit: Fjällsommar, Fjällsjälv
In 2011, a tiny bird observatory in far western Sweden found itself hosting its first American volunteer, and Meera Lee Sethi found herself exactly where she wanted to be: watching great snipe court each other under the midnight sun and disturbing lemmings on her way to find a gyrfalcon nest. Mountainfit is an ecological field notebook, a keenly observed natural history of the life that sings from the birches, wheels under the clouds, and scuttles over the peat bogs of the Swedish highlands. And it is a letter, in 21 jewel-like parts, from a well-read and funny friend. Meera’s vigorous, graceful prose communicates a wry understanding of how utterly ordinary it is to long for more out of life—and how extraordinary it can feel to trust that longing. Meera's intent was to create a book small enough to fit in your pocket and read on the train to work in the morning. It is that. But it's also large enough to contain a mountain or two.
- GenresNonfictionScience
127 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2012
32 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 29, 2012
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. What you are reading was supposed to be a book about birds but it is about this, too.
Shall we begin?
Have you backed a project on Kickstarter? It's gratifying, exciting, an exercise in connection. All of a sudden there's a new person or set of people in your life. You've never met him, her, them, but you share a dream and, together, you bring it to life. It can be about music, food, history, creativity. Some of the projects are wearable or edible; others illuminate your home, or the pages of Darwin's Origin of Species. They range from the silly and personal to the noble and altruistic. And they work because of us, because in spite of all our differences we have far more in common. And let's face it — this is the internet. Here you can virtually find those who share your teensy niche interest and literally change the world together. It's pretty awesome.
This book is the result of one of the more satisfying projects I've backed. Last summer, Sethi, a Chicago-based science essayist, volunteered as a field assistant at the Lake Ånnsjön Bird Observatory in Handöl, Sweden. There she tagged and tracked birds, heard a vagrant's voice of unrelenting conviction, discovered what it meant to experience a good lemming year, and set her sights upon a mountain inhabited by werewolves — er, wolverines. The Kickstarter project I supported was meant to be a bite-sized collection of bird essays: "part myth, part science essay, and part travelogue." The finished book is all those things and more, significantly longer than expected, personal, poignant and a pleasure to read. Diana Sudyka's cover art forms the perfect feathery carapace for these snapshots of Sweden and Sethi herself.
What better way to recommend Mountainfit than with one of my favorite passages in a book full of them? On the challenges and rewards of tracking:
I loved it because it meant a kind of meditation. The focus it required quieted the eternal mental hum most of us, no matter how content we are, carry around. With something so direct and practical to focus on, every question, doubt, desire, and confusion of my three decades on this earth fell away.
I loved it because it meant a kind of understanding. Radio tracking was probably the closest I will ever come to learning the language of the birds — or one small version of it. Over time, I grew sensitive to small changes in the volume, pitch, and quality of the signal, became used to how it altered in relation to the terrain I was covering, and could tell whether a bird was truly close, or just sending out a signal over the valley. As I listened, I had a fragile but totally immediate connection to the snipe I was following.
And I loved it because it meant becoming at home in the mountains.
Like the act of backing a Kickstarter project, what moved me most about Sethi's words was the sense of connection they evoked. I closed the book feeling pensive and satiated and... lucky, actually, as though I had made a new friend who was clever and kind and funny and sharp as the marks on a lanceolated warbler, both of us far from home and willing to wander wherever life takes us. It's not a bad way to live.
You can (and should) buy an electronic copy of Mountainfit here.
June 4, 2013
I received an advance copy of the book, and enjoyed reading it a lot. If you are interested in birds or nature, I highly recommend Mountainfit - it's a book that takes the reader along in an unknown landscape, far away from the normal routes - a place with an own rhythm, reflected in 21 chapters, each with a slightly different angle and theme. Parallel to the nature theme, Mountainfit also includes reflections on language - here's one of the passages I bookmarked:
"I love the idea that the language of the birds holds secrets, and that if we understood it we would learn a great deal more about our whirling, teeming, extraordinary planet; and about ourselves. The question is, how do we listen, and what secrets do we expect to find?"
Reading it, I thought: Mountainfit, it's also a field guide to listening, to being out there.
PS: this is part of a longer book post, more here: http://virtual-notes.blogspot.de/2013...
"I love the idea that the language of the birds holds secrets, and that if we understood it we would learn a great deal more about our whirling, teeming, extraordinary planet; and about ourselves. The question is, how do we listen, and what secrets do we expect to find?"
Reading it, I thought: Mountainfit, it's also a field guide to listening, to being out there.
PS: this is part of a longer book post, more here: http://virtual-notes.blogspot.de/2013...
December 27, 2012
I don’t recall how or when I first came across the writing of Meera Lee Sethi at her blog, The Science Essayist, but I remember slowing down my normal speed reading to savor her thoughts and words. While there are many blogs I enjoy for their content, I enjoy Meera’s blog for her lyricism, poetry, and sharp insight. She has a way of taking a seemingly ordinary natural thing, like dragon flies along the Gulf Coast, and imbuing it with extraordinary meaning, sense of place, history, and ecological and literary context.
Her writing dissects in detail things from the natural world that most people would simply lump into an archetypal category such as “insect” or “bird;” but she patiently peels back layer after layer until whatever thing it is she’s writing about is laid bare, explored, and exposed as a unique organism with a unique story and a unique place in the universe.
Meera volunteers at the Chicago Field Museum’s ornithology lab a day or two each week where she prepares bird skins. Sometimes she writes blog posts about the birds she encounters there. Sometimes it’s a tidbit about the species, sometimes it’s a tale of a particular bird or an interesting nugget about its life cycle, behavior or ecology. It’s always interesting.
Last summer, Meera sent an email to her friends and colleagues asking them to support a project she’d posted to Kickstarter. She was going to volunteer at a bird lab in Sweden, and she wanted to self-publish a book about the experience. I happily donated $50 and wished her well though secretly I was a bit jealous. Whereas I would spend my whole summer indoors planted at my desk, having an intimate affair with my laptop (writing my own book), she would spend hers hiking rugged mountains in Sweden and spending her daylight hours out of doors, chasing beautiful birds with beautiful stories.
A few months ago, her book arrived. It’s called MountainFit: Fjall Sommar, Fjallsjalv. Though she’d originally pitched the book as a “thank you” to folks supporting her project, I got the sense through various emails and tweets that her book had taken on a strange life of its own in the ensuing months since she’d returned from Sweden to her home in Chicago. It seemed she was wrestling with something deeply internal and personal… which is why I knew it was going to be an awesome read before I even cracked it open.
When I finally had a clear mind to read MountainFit, I was mesmerized. It’s some of her best writing that I’ve yet read.
In a nutshell, she composed a very long essay in twenty-one parts, with each part delineated as a chapter. Though I’ve been calling it a book because she does (I’ve no idea what the total word count is) the book’s length is on par with a longform New Yorker piece. It is the story of her experiences at the bird lab in Sweden; it’s a story of geography and ornithological natural history and the myths people have created around animals. But on a deeper level, it may also be a story of Meera’s reconciling of her inner geography, her sense of finding her place in the world, learning to be herself and trust herself wherever she happens to be.
She wrote of her doings at the bird lab, of learning to track gyrfalcons with radio telemetry, to monitor flycatchers in nest boxes, and the ecological importance of lemming erruptions to snowy owls, among many other predators. And while the events of the summer are interesting, what makes them truly engaging is Meera’s powerful sense of description and word choice. Take, for example, this excerpt describing catching a live bird:
I touch a finger to the azure head of a blue tit — still spitting bombshells from an open bill — and watch its feathers part when Stefan blows against its belly to check for fat below its filmy, wrinkled skin. This is the moment it first becomes obvious why being close to a bird, particularly a small one, moves us so: its entire body is a fibrillating heart.
Earlier in the text Meera described the first time she held a live bird as “shot through with the fevered nerve of a first kiss;” and despite a cold rain, the bird’s stomach was “warm as summer mud.” Meera’s attention to word choice, her sentence structure, cadence and pacing within each chapter/essay are exquisite. I could have just as easily stumbled across this story as a longform piece in Orion or a similar literary magazine.
In another poetic example she described herself, a brown-skinned girl from Singapore adrift in a pale white Nordic country. But the way she portrays the out-of-placeness of her skin color is stupefyingly beautiful: she recounts an anecdote where she and one of the Swedish bird lab staff members, Jennie, are sunning themselves on a hillside when Jennie reaches out to inspect Meera’s arm:
This is how I know I am strange to her: that she needs to see me up close. Jennie holds my arm close to her face… She has not known this shade of me before. She turns me over and under, over and under, measuring the milk-tea underside of my arm against the burnt carmel top. The difference astonishes… She returns my arm, turns to the sun, and closes her eyes. I can’t be sure, but I believe she’s made a brief addendum to the entry labeled with my name in the field guide she is keeping in her mind: After summer sun, turns umber.
What is lovely to me about this passage is Meera’s ability to turn her scrutiny of wildlife, her keen naturalists’ eye, onto herself. Given that she’s spending a summer detailing the behavior and ecology of birds, the twist of perceiving herself through the eyes of her Swedish hosts — that they may be cataloging her otherness with a naturalists’ propensity for noting anatomical details, just as she’s been cataloging their birds with the same powers of observation — reveals her remarkable capacity for finding meaning and insight in the simplest of interactions. But the color of her skin is most likely also a physical metaphor for the mental otherness in which she percieves herself in comparison to others: it’s as if in studying birds she is searching for meaning about where and how she herself fits into the world.
In this vein, she makes a deep discovery by way of a migrating lanceolated warbler which has lost its way and ended up very off course, very out of its natural element, and very out of place. Visiting the meadow where this vagrant bird had been reported, Meera heard it singing for a mate it would never find. She reflected that its song was “the voice of conviction in the face of loss.” For birders, vagrants are entrancing and beguiling things to be gawked at and observed. She writes that they represent an animal which had a clear objective to get somewhere but somehow along its journey got irreconcilably off course and landed in a place where it was never intended to be. Meera relates to the bird’s state of being lost, of searching for a path to lead it where it is supposed to be.
Meera’s sighting of the lanceolated warbler comes near the end of her stay at the bird observatory and in the closing sections of the book. She traveled several hundred kilometers with an ornithologist to see the lost bird. Something fundamentally transformative must have transpired when she finally spied and heard that little wayward warbler, several thousand kilometers away from the breeding grounds where it was meant to be. She writes that she realized she’d spent most of her life seeking out an internal map to chart her course through life — something intrinsic to comfort her that she was on the right track, something to offer the certainty of knowing she was heading in the right direction, something like the internal map that guides birds on migrations — but that she’d never before “realized how devastating certainty can be when it comes undone. There is very little use in having a blueprint if you cannot follow it, and small comfort in a well-planned route if you find yourself so far off the map that you cannot return.” In that moment, it became clear to Meera that although she was born lacking a blueprint or a map for life’s journeys, what separated her from the bird’s purgatory in lostness was that she knew the geography in which she was wandering; and she knew that home was where she chose to make it. From this revelation she was comforted with the knowledge that she could never be truly lost. I would seem that seeing the vagrant birthed an epiphany that she didn’t need a blueprint or a map, what she most needed was to simply trust that she herself could be a reliable guide through her own life.
It’s clear that Meera’s journey to Sweden turned out to be as much about seeking out new birds as it was about seeking out new insights of self. She learned to be comfortable out of her element, comfortable exploring new physical and emotional geographies, and somehow it seems she discovered that home — or at least a comforting sense of place — can be present even when wandering in uncharted territories and new lands.
Her writing dissects in detail things from the natural world that most people would simply lump into an archetypal category such as “insect” or “bird;” but she patiently peels back layer after layer until whatever thing it is she’s writing about is laid bare, explored, and exposed as a unique organism with a unique story and a unique place in the universe.
Meera volunteers at the Chicago Field Museum’s ornithology lab a day or two each week where she prepares bird skins. Sometimes she writes blog posts about the birds she encounters there. Sometimes it’s a tidbit about the species, sometimes it’s a tale of a particular bird or an interesting nugget about its life cycle, behavior or ecology. It’s always interesting.
Last summer, Meera sent an email to her friends and colleagues asking them to support a project she’d posted to Kickstarter. She was going to volunteer at a bird lab in Sweden, and she wanted to self-publish a book about the experience. I happily donated $50 and wished her well though secretly I was a bit jealous. Whereas I would spend my whole summer indoors planted at my desk, having an intimate affair with my laptop (writing my own book), she would spend hers hiking rugged mountains in Sweden and spending her daylight hours out of doors, chasing beautiful birds with beautiful stories.
A few months ago, her book arrived. It’s called MountainFit: Fjall Sommar, Fjallsjalv. Though she’d originally pitched the book as a “thank you” to folks supporting her project, I got the sense through various emails and tweets that her book had taken on a strange life of its own in the ensuing months since she’d returned from Sweden to her home in Chicago. It seemed she was wrestling with something deeply internal and personal… which is why I knew it was going to be an awesome read before I even cracked it open.
When I finally had a clear mind to read MountainFit, I was mesmerized. It’s some of her best writing that I’ve yet read.
In a nutshell, she composed a very long essay in twenty-one parts, with each part delineated as a chapter. Though I’ve been calling it a book because she does (I’ve no idea what the total word count is) the book’s length is on par with a longform New Yorker piece. It is the story of her experiences at the bird lab in Sweden; it’s a story of geography and ornithological natural history and the myths people have created around animals. But on a deeper level, it may also be a story of Meera’s reconciling of her inner geography, her sense of finding her place in the world, learning to be herself and trust herself wherever she happens to be.
She wrote of her doings at the bird lab, of learning to track gyrfalcons with radio telemetry, to monitor flycatchers in nest boxes, and the ecological importance of lemming erruptions to snowy owls, among many other predators. And while the events of the summer are interesting, what makes them truly engaging is Meera’s powerful sense of description and word choice. Take, for example, this excerpt describing catching a live bird:
I touch a finger to the azure head of a blue tit — still spitting bombshells from an open bill — and watch its feathers part when Stefan blows against its belly to check for fat below its filmy, wrinkled skin. This is the moment it first becomes obvious why being close to a bird, particularly a small one, moves us so: its entire body is a fibrillating heart.
Earlier in the text Meera described the first time she held a live bird as “shot through with the fevered nerve of a first kiss;” and despite a cold rain, the bird’s stomach was “warm as summer mud.” Meera’s attention to word choice, her sentence structure, cadence and pacing within each chapter/essay are exquisite. I could have just as easily stumbled across this story as a longform piece in Orion or a similar literary magazine.
In another poetic example she described herself, a brown-skinned girl from Singapore adrift in a pale white Nordic country. But the way she portrays the out-of-placeness of her skin color is stupefyingly beautiful: she recounts an anecdote where she and one of the Swedish bird lab staff members, Jennie, are sunning themselves on a hillside when Jennie reaches out to inspect Meera’s arm:
This is how I know I am strange to her: that she needs to see me up close. Jennie holds my arm close to her face… She has not known this shade of me before. She turns me over and under, over and under, measuring the milk-tea underside of my arm against the burnt carmel top. The difference astonishes… She returns my arm, turns to the sun, and closes her eyes. I can’t be sure, but I believe she’s made a brief addendum to the entry labeled with my name in the field guide she is keeping in her mind: After summer sun, turns umber.
What is lovely to me about this passage is Meera’s ability to turn her scrutiny of wildlife, her keen naturalists’ eye, onto herself. Given that she’s spending a summer detailing the behavior and ecology of birds, the twist of perceiving herself through the eyes of her Swedish hosts — that they may be cataloging her otherness with a naturalists’ propensity for noting anatomical details, just as she’s been cataloging their birds with the same powers of observation — reveals her remarkable capacity for finding meaning and insight in the simplest of interactions. But the color of her skin is most likely also a physical metaphor for the mental otherness in which she percieves herself in comparison to others: it’s as if in studying birds she is searching for meaning about where and how she herself fits into the world.
In this vein, she makes a deep discovery by way of a migrating lanceolated warbler which has lost its way and ended up very off course, very out of its natural element, and very out of place. Visiting the meadow where this vagrant bird had been reported, Meera heard it singing for a mate it would never find. She reflected that its song was “the voice of conviction in the face of loss.” For birders, vagrants are entrancing and beguiling things to be gawked at and observed. She writes that they represent an animal which had a clear objective to get somewhere but somehow along its journey got irreconcilably off course and landed in a place where it was never intended to be. Meera relates to the bird’s state of being lost, of searching for a path to lead it where it is supposed to be.
Meera’s sighting of the lanceolated warbler comes near the end of her stay at the bird observatory and in the closing sections of the book. She traveled several hundred kilometers with an ornithologist to see the lost bird. Something fundamentally transformative must have transpired when she finally spied and heard that little wayward warbler, several thousand kilometers away from the breeding grounds where it was meant to be. She writes that she realized she’d spent most of her life seeking out an internal map to chart her course through life — something intrinsic to comfort her that she was on the right track, something to offer the certainty of knowing she was heading in the right direction, something like the internal map that guides birds on migrations — but that she’d never before “realized how devastating certainty can be when it comes undone. There is very little use in having a blueprint if you cannot follow it, and small comfort in a well-planned route if you find yourself so far off the map that you cannot return.” In that moment, it became clear to Meera that although she was born lacking a blueprint or a map for life’s journeys, what separated her from the bird’s purgatory in lostness was that she knew the geography in which she was wandering; and she knew that home was where she chose to make it. From this revelation she was comforted with the knowledge that she could never be truly lost. I would seem that seeing the vagrant birthed an epiphany that she didn’t need a blueprint or a map, what she most needed was to simply trust that she herself could be a reliable guide through her own life.
It’s clear that Meera’s journey to Sweden turned out to be as much about seeking out new birds as it was about seeking out new insights of self. She learned to be comfortable out of her element, comfortable exploring new physical and emotional geographies, and somehow it seems she discovered that home — or at least a comforting sense of place — can be present even when wandering in uncharted territories and new lands.
October 24, 2013
Author Meera Lee Sethi travels to Sweden one summer to volunteer at a bird observatory. Her time in the mists and mountains of Sweden led her to write a collection of contemplative essays that are collected here.
What beautiful language! I was in deep like from the beginning and in love by the closing sentences of the first chapter.
"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. What you are reading was supposed to be a book about birds but it is about this, too."
Aren't you just ready to sink into Sethi's writing and follow wherever she leads?
This slim book is imbued with layers of meaning. There are the surface stories about the birds and the landscape of Sweden and then there are the ways in which Sethi ties those things back into human experience. In the first chapter the migratory cuckoo becomes a metaphor for the wanderlust and yearning for other lives we all feel sometimes. In another the isolation we each occasionally feel is linked to the poor "vagrant" birds who get blown so far away from their native lands that they will never make it back. And so it goes throughout the whole book.
The fjälls of Sweden are so beautifully described that I'm ready to catch a plane and visit. Not being a fan of cold weather, Sweden isn't high on my list of places to visit, so this is really saying something.
I loved that there is an index at the back listing some of the birds that Sethi mentions in the book. When I'm reading I really don't stop to look up things I want to know. I always think I'll do it later but, of course, when later comes I've forgotten the names of what I want to research. I'll be hitting Google in a few minutes to look at these birds for myself.
And that brings me to the one thing that could really make this book better. I think it is just begging to be illustrated with watercolors or charcoal sketches that match the author's evocative yet spare style. I would buy that edition in a heartbeat. There's nothing wrong with it as is but I want the deluxe illustrated edition.
Bird-watchers should enjoy this but those with a scientific leaning or even a tendency toward the philosophical will enjoy it as well.
Thanks to the author for sending me a copy for review.
What beautiful language! I was in deep like from the beginning and in love by the closing sentences of the first chapter.
"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. What you are reading was supposed to be a book about birds but it is about this, too."
Aren't you just ready to sink into Sethi's writing and follow wherever she leads?
This slim book is imbued with layers of meaning. There are the surface stories about the birds and the landscape of Sweden and then there are the ways in which Sethi ties those things back into human experience. In the first chapter the migratory cuckoo becomes a metaphor for the wanderlust and yearning for other lives we all feel sometimes. In another the isolation we each occasionally feel is linked to the poor "vagrant" birds who get blown so far away from their native lands that they will never make it back. And so it goes throughout the whole book.
The fjälls of Sweden are so beautifully described that I'm ready to catch a plane and visit. Not being a fan of cold weather, Sweden isn't high on my list of places to visit, so this is really saying something.
I loved that there is an index at the back listing some of the birds that Sethi mentions in the book. When I'm reading I really don't stop to look up things I want to know. I always think I'll do it later but, of course, when later comes I've forgotten the names of what I want to research. I'll be hitting Google in a few minutes to look at these birds for myself.
And that brings me to the one thing that could really make this book better. I think it is just begging to be illustrated with watercolors or charcoal sketches that match the author's evocative yet spare style. I would buy that edition in a heartbeat. There's nothing wrong with it as is but I want the deluxe illustrated edition.
Bird-watchers should enjoy this but those with a scientific leaning or even a tendency toward the philosophical will enjoy it as well.
Thanks to the author for sending me a copy for review.
July 1, 2014
This is a small gem of a book, written in beautiful, hymn-like prose. When Meera Lee Sethi travels from the United States to northern Sweden to volunteer at a bird-ringing observatory, she enters a world that is entirely new to her, from the brilliant cast of light and songs of birds unknown to her, to the unfamiliar language born of this high latitude, one of mountains, rivers, forests and lakes. But she enters that world with an astonishing sensitivity and openness, eventually returning with a set of short essays that read like love letters to the natural world. She writes with beautiful grace, bringing that world of great snipe leks, ghostly gryfalcons and lemming encounters close, brushing it with an intimacy that left me feeling like I'd journeyed there alongside her. It's a book that revels in the mystery of wild creatures; it's a song of joy.
February 24, 2014
FTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
This is the latest from my publishing company, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, slated for release on June 10th, 2013. At that point I will get a longer essay up here, explaining why I decided to sign this book in the first place. Don't mistake this version for the other "Mountainfit" listing here at Goodreads; that other one is for a slightly different version Sethi self-published last year!
This is the latest from my publishing company, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, slated for release on June 10th, 2013. At that point I will get a longer essay up here, explaining why I decided to sign this book in the first place. Don't mistake this version for the other "Mountainfit" listing here at Goodreads; that other one is for a slightly different version Sethi self-published last year!
April 11, 2012
Fantastic.
So happy to be a supporter of Meera's Kickstarter project. This book is wonderful.
So happy to be a supporter of Meera's Kickstarter project. This book is wonderful.
February 10, 2015
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Meera Lee Sethi. This is one of the most joyful reads I've ever had.
Read
October 15, 2020This is charming and thoughtful collection of short essays grounded in a summer the author volunteered doing bird conservation work in Sweden. It’s also, to me, a bit overwritten, with no metaphor left behind.
But I snickered appreciatively at her description of that Nordic horror, salted licorice: tasting a piece, she says, “is like suddenly falling asleep and plunging straight into a dream in which you are inhaling a swimming pool full of pee.”
But I snickered appreciatively at her description of that Nordic horror, salted licorice: tasting a piece, she says, “is like suddenly falling asleep and plunging straight into a dream in which you are inhaling a swimming pool full of pee.”
January 6, 2014
I know Meera from the #cnftweet community on Twitter, where she posts highly crafted, delightfully obscure microessays that often remind me of the Hemingway line about how a good short story is like an iceberg, with only the tip showing, so I was very interested to read her book.
Glad I did. Not only did I get an intimate tour of an ethereal landscape, its feathered inhabitants, and the ways we try to learn about them, I got to spend time inside an original, deeply introspective mind.
One of my favorite of her observations: "Millions of years of natural selection have shaped us this way--given us a perceptual system that simplifies the chaotic, shifting behavior of the objects in its environment by sheeing reflections of itself everywhere."
And an example of Meera's often limpid description: "This is a night so clear that all the world seems to have been poured through a fine filter, and come out immaculately clean."
Glad I did. Not only did I get an intimate tour of an ethereal landscape, its feathered inhabitants, and the ways we try to learn about them, I got to spend time inside an original, deeply introspective mind.
One of my favorite of her observations: "Millions of years of natural selection have shaped us this way--given us a perceptual system that simplifies the chaotic, shifting behavior of the objects in its environment by sheeing reflections of itself everywhere."
And an example of Meera's often limpid description: "This is a night so clear that all the world seems to have been poured through a fine filter, and come out immaculately clean."
October 24, 2013
Sethi's book is a beautiful meditation on her travels to Sweden, where she assisted in the tracking of various species of birds. While I'm not much of a nature-book reader, nor do I particularly know anything about birds, I really enjoyed Mountainfit. Sethi's openhearted enthusiasm for what she learns and encounters is contagious, and the way she writes is closer to poetry than journalism.
Sethi wrote a guest post for my site about the Swedish coffee break called fika, and also gave a recipe for a cinnamon roll-esque recipe, kanelbullar. Check it out here.
Sethi wrote a guest post for my site about the Swedish coffee break called fika, and also gave a recipe for a cinnamon roll-esque recipe, kanelbullar. Check it out here.
Read
June 11, 2013Since I'm promoting this title, and work for the publisher, I won't rate this book. But I will tell you that if you like books with a scientific bent, books that focus on wildlife - and birdlife specifically, books that are non fiction, memoir-style collections, then this is the book for you. And I'd be happy to offer you an ecopy for review. Just drop me a line here!
September 6, 2016
I love that this book overflows with wonder and joy of the natural world! I want more! Read my full review on my blog, Guiltless Reading.
Read
December 10, 2014Recommended by Leslie Brunetta on Science for the People show #243 on December 13, 2013. http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/epi...
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews