Snapper by Brian Kimberling

Summer is a good time to pick up a read from an Indiana author.  Our book for Timely & Timeless Book Club for July was Snapper by Brian Kimberling.  We ventured into the mind of a young man who spends his working hours in the great outdoors of Southern Indiana doing research on nesting native songbirds.  If you are attracted by the charms and beauty of tramping through the woods in summer, then this book should appeal to you.

 

But Brian Kimberling has also managed to give us a glimpse into a young adult male mind in the face of love, loss and dealing with the different rates of maturation of his pals from school.  Having been to all four corners of the state and a lot of the in-between parts, the descriptions of Nathan’s adventures brings a new light on what one might find in our Indiana towns and woods.  I enjoyed the descriptions of the songbirds and their beautiful presence as well as the descriptions of the wildlife and the geography.

 

For Nathan, our protagonist, the personality of teenage angst carried further past school days for him and for several of his friends.  His crowd was self-described as the “nerds.”  Nathan is probably the most empathetic and grounded of his friends, but not necessarily when it comes to love.  His heart’s love figures into his life through the book.  Will they or won’t they find love together? 

 

This book seems to be a version of Brian Kimberling’s life for the most part.  He is a naturalist and has done the work he attributes to “Nathan.”  The book club enjoyed his sense of humor and being reminded of the feel of being in nature.  Several of us found it hard to get into the read, but most were glad to have made the effort.   Overall our group rated Snapper at 3.5/5.0.

 

 

For August, we are reading Still Alice by Lisa Genova.  We will meet at Downtown on the Square at noon on August 23^rd. 

 

From Goodreads.com:

 

Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At fifty years old, she’s a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. When she becomes increasingly disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her life--and her relationship with her family and the world--forever.

At once beautiful and terrifying, Still Alice is a moving and vivid depiction of life with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease that is as compelling as A Beautiful Mind and as unforgettable as Judith Guest's Ordinary People.