Wild Notes by Mike Lubow (Birdwatcher Books, 2015), no illustrations, 155 pages, $11.99.
Why are you reviewing a self-published paperback that merely compiles some blogger's posts? The Internet has a mob of such navel-gazers. Isn't noticing them, like, being an enabler?
As in enabling navel-gazers? But why not? People who make an effort to examine their lives in words must slow down, and that tends to militate against rash action, of which the world has had quite enough already. Besides, some of these navel-gazing online diarists have interesting navels.
Mike Lubow's essays are spare, direct, observant and sometimes moving. And he likes birds.
Wild Notes is also available for Kindle at no cost through Kindle Unlimited, and more power to you if you'd rather not pay $11.99 to check him out. But some of us prefer to linger over brief, evocative or opinionated prose in a book format rather than squinting at it on a screen.
Screen squinting seems to demand an efficiency at odds with quiet reflection. One feels required to hurry up, get it read, move on.
Can't we just look them up on his website?
No, the clever rascal has hidden them.
Exactly how far should I anticipate being moved by this "sometimes moving" prose?
I won't pretend he's Annie Dillard deep, although he quotes her in an epigraph. But, for instance, he'll start with a startling thing he's noticed, say, a Canada goose stuck through by an arrow and yet still walking around.
"I figured this odd observation was worth a brief mention," he writes. "But first I Googled 'goose with arrow' to see if it really is odd.
"Well, it's odd, OK, but not because it's uncommon."
As he does here and there throughout the collection, he goes on to use a mild cuss word while reporting that Google pages are "full of stories about geese walking, swimming and flying around wearing arrows stuck through them."
"These birds are a good example of living with what the universe sends your way."
That's all he has to say about seeing a goose with a permanent wound?
No, he concludes that the universe "has some explaining to do."
Who is the author?
Lubow is a grandfather who is married to his college sweetheart, and he lives in Chicago. He was an advertising executive who went out on his own to create (as he describes it) a "smallish" agency. About a decade back, he wrote an occasional column in the Chicago Tribune titled "Got a Minute?" on the Guy Page, and he freelanced fiction and nonfiction to magazines. "Got a Minute?" was -- as one learns from the Tribune's online archives, "guaranteed to contain no more than 160 words."
Lubow's website is The Two-Fisted Birdwatcher, so titled because "you just can't hold a pair of binoculars up to your eyes without putting up your dukes." It includes his daily blog, his collected short stories, guest essays, bird ID contests.
ActiveStyle on 02/01/2016