Delia Owens

Delia Owens (By the Book), New York Times Book Review, July 14, 2019, p.8.

When I was a child, I thought reading was something you did when it rained. I was a tomboy out collecting and releasing frogs and salamander or riding a horse named Strawberry.  When I was about 9, my friend dragged me into the library and while she was searching for a book to read, I stumbled into a display table filled with guidebooks for birds, insects, reptiles and shells.  In an instant my world of nature was connected with the world of words. 

COMMENT

     In this story serendipitously finding a book in a library display makes an impact on an outdoorsy child.  Guidebooks are an underappreciated source of inspiration for many people because of the way they seem to contain the observable world.  Though they are intended to teach people about unfamiliar things, guidebooks are especially wonderful because of the way they reflect familiar things in the observable world and reveal some of their secrets.  For instance, a bird guide shows you where the neighborhood birds go in the winter and maps of places where people never see those birds at all.   Birds can be one of the more disorienting aspects of travel likewhen you look up and see that white vultures instead of familiar turkey vultures, or a screaming flock of green parakeets instead of starlings, or notice a bright red cardinal when no such bird inhabits your home ecosystem.  Guidebooks are part of a literature of place and as climate change shifts the range of species they may become important historical records.

     Nowadays there are apps that identify birds, flowers, stars, and such, and GPS systems that make maps of where you intend to go,  but these seem to me to lack the depth of guidebooks.  For one thing, they declare an answer without the need to think through one’s own observations.  For another, instant identification lacks a larger context of interrelations.  I doubt that an app would help a child connect nature with the world of words, but Owens says that Roger Tory Peterson field guides led her to read Aldo Leopold, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Karen Blixen and Charles Darwin.