Elissa sent me this book a while back and I finally cleaned all my piles and found it again. It’s a good Sunday afternoon read about a young boy Tolly who is at boarding school while his father and stepmother are in Burma. He usually spends his holidays at the school, but this year is sent to his great-grandmother, who lives in a castle-like house called Green Knowe. It reminds me of an old YA mystery I read several times when I was younger, about a girl who somehow goes back in time inside the same house (the title and author of which I can’t remember). There are similar themes about the history of a certain place and all the people who have lived in it. This book has barely any conflict, most of it is just Tolly exploring and being really excited about not having a boring life for once.

Green Knowe is based on The Manor at Hemingford Grey, where Lucy Boston lived after separating from her husband.

I’m still trying to figure out what the other book was that I read. Maybe Stonewords?

Early on something about this book reminded me of Among other things, I’ve taken up smoking, I think because both are set around the ocean in the northeastern part of the US. But any notion of similarities beyond setting dissipated quickly.

This book is far more melancholy in tone and fantastic in scope, with a 19-year-old outcast who believes honestly that she is a mermaid and that her father who disappeared into the sea eleven years past is also a merperson, who finally decided to return home. She follows around a 33-year-old Gulf War veteran who she believes to be the mortal who must love her or he’ll have to die. Her mother is still waiting around watching the ocean with binoculars and telling her she should go to New York City. Her grandfather is endlessly typesetting his own dictionary to rival the Oxford English Dictionary (and apparently never printing anything, so he must have an impressive stockpile of type).

You can never quite decide if you believe she’s a mermaid or think she’s delusional or just find her incredibly imaginative in dealing with trauma.

I feel as if I’ve been reading this book forever but it’s actually just been a month or so. The scope of Weisman’s imagining of the entire world suddenly depopulated of humans is so broad that inevitably some parts feel leggy. But the scenario may give the best look at our overall impact on the planet.

There are moments where nature seems so incredibly resilient that you might get lulled into thinking maybe we haven’t done so bad. Even the Panama Canal wouldn’t last long; a lock superintendent describes it as “a wound that humans inflicted on the Earth—one that nature is trying to heal.” But then there is all the nuclear waste, the petrochemical plants in Texas, and all the plastics in the world that were ever made (many of which are massed together in the middle of the Pacific). You might start to wonder if it’s even possible for us to fix the damage done even by disappearing all at once. In the case of the petrochemical plants, our sudden disappearance might actually make things worse.

Weisman writes in a clear fashion and seems to simplify difficult concepts successfully. The book doesn’t always flow clearly from section to section, but that is also part of the broad scope. In the end, Weisman describes how:

Around 5 billion years from now, give or take, the sun will expand into a red giant, absorbing all the inner planets back into its fiery womb. At that point, water ice will thaw on Saturn’s moon Titan, where the temperature is currently -290°F, and some interesting things may eventually crawl out of its methane lakes. One of them, pawing through organic silt, might come across the Huygens probe that parachuted there from the Cassini space mission in January, 2005 … Sadly whatever finds Huygens won’t have any clear where it came from, or that we once existed.

He then continues to describe briefly how different religions approach the end of life on earth. I found myself in an existential panic, and even though he tries to get hopeful in the end, it all felt rather depressing. It’s still a great book, but so much stuff most of us don’t really want to think about.