Reviews and Comments

I read the first half of this book in fits and starts over 3 years and the last half in a week. I don't think the book changed - I think I did and was able to appreciate it more. The main character is a young woman who truly believes in the potential and promise of the Russian Revolution and becomes a scientist. The book chronicles her relationship to and understanding of science and her artist partner through the political changes between the revolution and the lead up to WWII.

You can tell Parr is a historian - and it's to the story's benefit. It can be difficult with hindsight to understand how people thought and why they acted as they did. But Parr understands the time and its ideas. Her characters aren't railing against the Soviet state from the vantage point of 100 years on, but are young adults excited or wary to be part of an enormous change in their country and the world.

She treats her characters with such kindness and respect even when they're wrong - maybe even especially when they're wrong.

Orchard takes you through the life of an ancient orchard in England with a chapter for every month of the year. The book beautifully describes the natural history and ecology of the orchard - including the relationship of humans to the orchard and its denizens. This is a system with extraordinary biodiversity where humans steward the environment, and while people harvest from it, the agricultural practices don't just make for bountiful harvests of apples and pears - they support a resilient, highly functional ecosystem.

It reminded me a bit of 1491 where you see people shaping an ecosystem to produce more things useful to humans but maintaining extraordinary resilience and biodiversity - and not requiring lots of external inputs (like fertilizers from fossil fuel).

Sometimes the noble savage tropes creep into modern environmental thinking, but this book made me think about how the ancestors of folks practicing and relying on the kind of exploitative and unsustainable agricultural system we have today knew very well how work with the native plants and animals to make a living.

Not that I'm arguing to go back to some idyllic agrarian age, but even white Europeans and their descendants have traditional knowledge that we could learn to use again.

I really appreciated the structure - months as chapters - of this book. I read along over the course of a year and it was satisfying to feel the year change around me as the orchard moved through its own seasons. It made me wish I could participate in the seasonality of my own landscape better. And perhaps I will!

The snowdrops are blooming today and the ravens are circling.

This book is a joy to read. It has an interesting structure that lends itself to slow savouring, a chapter at a time, as each chapter begins with an essay that meanders around and is inspired by a particular fruit and ends with a recipe or two for that fruit.

The nature of the essays is as varied as the fruits - surprising, funny, bittersweet, angry, nostalgic, musing, hopeful, tart.

I will probably never make a single one of the recipes in this book but i read them all anyway. I didn’t expect to - i thought I’d just read the essays and skip the recipes. But they’re somehow a continuation of the story of the chapter and it feels soothing and right to end with them and follow in the mind at least the physical and sensual processing of difficult fruit.

This is technically a recipe book, but it’s actually a marvellous collection of loosely connected and moving essays about food and the ways gathering, preparing, cooking, sharing, and eating it intersect with our lives.