Have you heard of postcrossing? It's a global postcard exchange community where postcrossers send and receive postcards with people all over the world. Most people include a prompt on their profile, and many ask, what is your favorite book you've read this year. I have told postcrossers all over the world, my favorite book I've read this year, by far, is "North Woods," by Daniel Mason.
Critics have called this book, "brilliant, elegant, and immersive." It was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a best book of the year on numerous lists including Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, the Chicago Public Library, and many more. The author, Daniel Mason, went to medical school and is a psychiatrist, he teaches literature at Stanford University, and has received numerous awards for his writing, including being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
The simple summary of North Woods would be that it is a collection of interconnected short stories about one location in New England from the American colonial period to the present day and beyond. The main character in North Woods is not a person, it is this specific section of forest and the house which eventually stands there.
The satisfying experience of reading this inventive and memorable book is more difficult to describe. I asked two friends in Waco who have also loved North Woods to help me. One said, "its about macrocosms and microcosms, its magical realism, or more specifically realism with just a touch of magic, an extremely detailed puzzle of a novel with an unconventional plot, ." The second friend said, "You can feel you are reading high quality literature, and its so enjoyable, its a great book, just tell everyone they have to read it!"
North Woods is a pleasure to read, it is sophisticated, surprising, entertaining and poetic. The interconnected short stories written in many voices, address grief, regret, love, mystery and delight. They examine the momentary and the eternal. North Woods is a book of BOTH AND
Anytime I see or eat an apple, I think of North Woods. When I see landscape paintings or cougars, I think of North Woods. References to ghosts, or climate change, or beetles, or American history, or lobotomies, or birds singing bring to mind North Woods. This is one of those books which entwines itself into your consciousness. I wish I could return to the feeling of reading it for the first time. I hope you, and the many postcrossers and Wacoans I have recommended this book, will enjoy North Woods as much as I did. As my friend said, "you just have to read it."
