Small Wonder audiobook

If I had to pick one book that would come with me wherever I went, it would be this one. This is my all-time favorite book. My favorite Kingsolver, my favorite book of essays (my favorite medium), my favorite. She is my hero.

Kingsolver's in a bit of a tough position; she cares deeply about things like biodiversity, homelessness, sustainable agriculture, and pacifism, but she can't usually approach these topics from a relatable, self-deprecating angle because she's the rare human who actually plans her lifestyle around her beliefs. In light of this, she does a damned good job of keeping the preaching to a minimum, and along the way she offers down-to-earth, beautiful writing on everything from reading short stories to mother-daughter relationships to hummingbird nests. I'd probably recommend her other essay collection ("High Tide in Tucson") before this one, but you can't go wrong with either.

Okay, so Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was one of those books that significantly changed my life, and I really liked, as did the rest of the world it seems, The Poisonwood Bible, but I honestly cannot tell you what made me want to read Kingsolver’s essay collection Small Wonder. Maybe I read about it on a blog or in a review, and whoever turned me onto this book, I owe you a huge debt of gratitude. This is the book that helped me start my book. No joke, no questions, this book did it.There’s something about Kingsolver’s voice in this collection that just comes off as honest and true, not overly crafted or carefully worded. This isn’t a collection of wrought language and complex metaphor. These essays are just the writer’s perspective on a lot of issues from her daughter’s decision to raise chickens for their eggs to the U.S. flag to biodiversity. Each piece is - in the way of most things - political for it states a clear perspective and opinion on something, and I really like that. I like knowing where she stands, and knowing why she stands there. I feel like I’ve just finished a really good visit with a dear friend, a trip where we spent the day walking the beach or sitting by the fire and just talking - sometimes deeply, sometimes heatedly, but always honestly, in the way I only can with my closest friends.The last page of the book, which is the last page of the essay “God’s Wife’s Measuring Spoons,” says this. . . . still I suspect that the deepest of all human wishes, down there on the floor of the soul underneath the scattered rugs of lust and thirst and hunger, is the tongue-and-groove desire to be understood. And life is a slow trek along the path toward realizing how that wish will go unfulfilled. Such is the course of all wisdom: Others will see the front and the back, but inside is where we each live, in that home where only one heart will ever beat. There we have to make our peace with all we need of sorrow, and all we can ever know of the divine, by whatever name we call it. What I can find is this, and so it has to be: conquering my own despair by doing what little I can. Stealing thunder, tucking it in my pocket to save for the long drought. Dreaming in the color green, tasting the end of anger. Don’t ask me for the evidence. The possibility of a kinder future, the existence of God - these are just two of many things fall into the category I would label “impossible to prove, and proof is not the point.” Faith has a life of its own.And well, that about says it. This book is one that will sit on my shelf to be caressed and peeked into when I, too, am seeking to conquer by own despair by doing what little I can.

Kingsolver has a way with words, that after reading the first couple of essays, you feel as though you should start a garden, start a chicken coup, and start riding a bike to limit your carbon footprints. Then after a few more essays, you feel as though, you should volunteer more often, and generally do better at being a human being. Assuming of course you weren't already. Kingsolver forces us to have questions of our own, about the state of affairs in our country, from the seemingly endless wars "we" find ourselves in, to the seemingly endless issues associated with poverty and homelessness. Will we ever be at peace with the rest of the world, and how can we? If we're starving many souls in the world, by our incessant need to consume more and waste more of the earth's resources without a thought to what we're going to do when we run out. However, far from being a "sky is falling" series of essays as I'm making it out to be, Kingsolver more than anything (from what I gather) wishes we all take time out of our busy lives to marvel at the small wonders this life has to offer. For we only have one to live, and there are only 24 hours in a day. And hopefully, life offers you many small wonders to marvel at instead of wasting hours of your life away in front of a talking box, commonly known as an idiot box, or television. But more importantly, that we find a way to help our local community, our world to be a better place for all of its inhabitant rather than a select few.

A beautiful and timely collection of essays—-as timely now in 2021 as it was when first published in 2002. It is incredible to see history repeat itself in so many (unfortunate/continuing) ways.

I highly recommend this collection of essays. Even though the essays were written years ago, still very poignant and relative to today's events.

As with any essay collection, some of these resonated in me more than others. Letter to My Mother brought me to tears. Many of the others spoke so eloquently about the way I feel about our country and the world we live in. I will continue to read anything Barbara Kingsolver writes, just as I will continue to nurture my garden and my children and grandchildren, hoping that they will change the world.

So much love, wisdom and thoughtfulness in these essays. I read them one a day.

From my blog post of January 2006:I discovered Barbara Kingsolver several years ago when I read her debut novel, The Bean Trees. I fell in love with her writing and since then have read everything she’s written, with the exception a nonfiction work entitled Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 and a National Geographic coffee-table book (Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands). You might say I’m a fairly devoted fan, buying everything as it’s published. Yet when her second collection of essays was released in hardcover, I held off. I’d heard negative reviews and complaints of her overbearing political opinions, and decided to wait until the paperback was released. But even then, once I finally got around to buying a copy, it sat on a shelf for over two years. It wasn’t until this past winter when I was struggling to find something that would grab my attention and reading more nonfiction than usual, that I was tempted to give it a try. It wasn’t a quick read and I was tempted to give up a couple of times. In “What Good is a Story,” Kingsolver admits to being a demanding reader, granting a mere thirty pages to be impressed before tossing the unfinished book in to the donation box. Ironically, had I adhered to such a strict guideline, I never would’ve reached the second half of the book in which 11 (out of 23) favorite essays lay in wait. I would’ve missed gems such as “Letters to a Daughter at Thirteen” and “Letters to My Mother.” “Marking a Passage” and “Flying” resonated so much more than “Knowing Our Place” and “A Forest’s Last Stand.” It’s not that I don’t care about our country and environment. It’s just that right now I’d rather read about family and gardening -- things that bring me comfort rather than anger or fear. To quote Kingsolver, I’d found “words that might help me become a better mother, a wiser friend.”Two favorite passages:“I learned a surprising thing in writing this book. It is possible to move away from a vast, unbearable pain by delving into it deeper and deeper – by ‘diving into the wreck,’ to borrow the perfect words from Adrienne Rich. You can look at all the parts of a terrible thing until you see that they’re assemblies of smaller parts, all of which you can name, and some of which you can heal or alter, and finally the terror that seemed unbearable becomes manageable. I suppose what I am describing is the process of grief.”and“It used to be, on many days, that I could close my eyes and sense myself to be perfectly happy. I have wondered lately if that feeling will ever come back. It’s a worthy thing to wonder, but maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, ‘twixt two extremes of passion – joy and grief,’ as Shakespeare put it. However much I’ve lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love.”