Books

How Green Was My Valley

A boy grows up in a Welsh coal mining village as it industrializes.

This novel exudes life on every page. The joys and pains of the author’s experience come through with such intensity that you can’t stop reading it, even if it’s past bedtime and you’re running low on the emotional wherewithal to process it. 

But it’s like the kind of physical workout you get when you’re playing a sport you love. You don’t even realize how intense it was until you wake up sore the following morning.

In some ways, this book feels like a spiritual ancestor to 100 Years of Solitude. There’s a hint of magical realism to it, personalities echo and vary across generations, and the central family seems to play an impossibly large role in building and shaping their little community. 

I also detected echoes of Sons and Lovers, plus a heavy dose of prewar Bildungsroman like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

Highly recommended. A gem.

Fire

Sebastian Junger covers a set of disparate topics, unified by their danger. 

It’s not a coherent, focused look at one thing, which is a minor demerit. But it beats the alternative of tracking down a bunch of National Geographic magazines just to read his work. 

The stories about Kosovo, escaping captivity, forest fire fighters, and traditional whaling in the Caribbean stuck with me in particular. 

It’s all ~25 years past the point of journalistic relevance, but the writing and storytelling is as good as ever. 

Recommended for fans of Junger, but if you’re not yet a fan, read his other stuff first, starting with The Perfect Storm and War.