Theresa > Recent Status Updates

I want to like this book, despite its romance novel-sounding title - it’s historical fiction, it involves not only gardening but a well known botanist, among other appealing traits - but I am absolutely drowning in all the detail. In fact, I’ve started doing something I hate, which is skipping entire paragraphs if I’m convinced they’re just extra detail. But I will slog on to the end!

I'm about 2/3 of the way through this very good book, but wondering how anyone could read it and describe it as 'incredibly funny.' It is NOT a funny book. There is some humor, but not the kind I'd call funny. It's a darker, sadder, survivor's humor.

Morton has 16 more pages to make me curious about what happens or to make me care about the characters. Any book that doesn't draw me in in the first 100 pages is likely to be cast onto the discard pile. Life is too short to read un-engaging books.

Re-reading.

I've only read the front and back flaps and the first two pages (the prologue and its translations are too much to cover here), and I've already had to look up the word semiotics, refresh my understanding of the term Ecclesiastics, and learn the meaning of Caput Mundi. So. I know what I'm getting myself into, I think.

I won't be finishing this book. I knew nothing about falconry before starting this book, and I've learned that the entire process is abhorrent to me. There is nothing in it for the hawk; all the misplaced satisfaction is for the human.

I won't be finishing H is for Hawk, primarily because I don't find myself in the author's corner in her efforts to tame her goshawk. It seems a cruel and unnecessary endeavor. The only positives are for the human. I see nothing that makes being 'manned' a better life for the hawk.

In Chapter 24, discussing the three oaks growing together and why they change color and drop leaves at different times, the author describes the tree that drops its leaves first as more 'anxious' or for a positive spin, more 'sensible' than the other two, which he describes as 'bold.' Nonsense. Is it possible the first one draws nutrients first, and the others continue photosynthesizing because they need to?

The degree of anthropomorphism in this book is distracting, making it hard for me to read many pages at a time.