Brugge Blog

So Bill Lueders, the long time news editor for The Isthmus weekly newspaper, has finally discovered Farley Mowat. Bummer. He is someone you want to discover early if you want to have any chance of catching up with his output. And I guess I haven’t been paying attention, because he apparently released another book just last year, Bay of Spirits.

Farley Mowat is one of a small group of authors that I love, not just because their books are so wonderful, but because they are also so prolific that I can have a bunch of mini-binges of them over the years, and never repeat myself. I can binge on someone like Barbara Kingsolver, but that means going back and reading ones I’ve read before; with Mowat, it seems like you never run out. I’ve probably read less than a dozen of his books, which still leaves lots of choices for the years ahead. (And if I’m getting too much Mowat, I pick a John McPhee book at random and get ready to be fascinated by something I had never considered before. )

Which is the other quality that makes Mowat’s books so enticing: from native tribal life, to wildlife, to human aggrevation, to childhood stories, I’ll either be laughing, crying, steaming, or sighing. But never bored. A steady diet of a single author does crowd out the chance to read others’ ideas and stories, but with someone with as varied a taste and life experience as Mowat, you can forget that you’re reading from just one life.