3 Quiet Books To Deepen Your Days
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As a young reader, I didn’t like “quiet” books — the reflections of people wandering around and writing down their thoughts about everything. I remember recoiling at the thought of reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods — ugh, boring! I wanted fun books with quests and dragons like C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia or hearthfires and snowball fights like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
But in high school, after reading beautifully-crafted, somber, and often difficult texts like 1984, Ellen Foster, Boyhood, “Macbeth,” and Sula, we picked up The Essays of E.B. White. I felt like I had just wandered through a war-torn city into a forest humming with birdsong.
I’ve always loved the saying “still waters run deep.” Along with E.B. White, I found other authors who joined the still and shimmering surface of the present with the depths of the past. The quietness of these books didn’t bore me; it filled me with the serenity of awe. These authors awakened me to the reverberations of mystery in this ordinary, extraordinary world.
If you are thirsty for wonder, here are a few “quiet” books to try.
01 | The Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White
White lived from 1899 to 1985. His essays range over the tumult of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War as he explores the complex grief of moving out of a New York City apartment; the unexpected merriment of hosting a crew of firefighters after accidentally setting his chimney on fire; watching a young circus girl ride around a ring and around the mystery of time. He’s witty in simplicity, gracious to the characters he portrays, and often hilarious in his allusions - for example, tying John Donne’s famous and majestic poem “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to the death of a pig on his farm.
02 | The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
Sea captain lore; harbors flanked with solemn pine trees; the decades-deep friendship of elderly lobster fishermen; a woman known as the Queen’s Twin because she was born at the same day and hour as Queen Victoria; white gulls and lonely island farmhouses.
This short book, or very long short story, caught me from the first pages, when the narrator, a summer visitor to the coast of Maine, describes the garden of her landlady, Mrs. Todd. When Mrs. Todd walks around in her garden, her feet and skirts brush its herbs and release their scent so that “You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks’ experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.”
Reading this book in my first years in Maine taught me to love its landscape more, to drink in the ancient grandeur and fresh beauty of every season.
03 | The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane
Robert MacFarlane’s bewitchingly simple prose draws together past and present, shallow and deep: Roman roads and modern footpaths, ancient myth and contemporary tall tales, long-standing monuments and this season’s wildflowers. He writes so concisely, but so hauntingly, that he makes me want to abandon my busy life and go wander the hills with a notebook. For example, he describes walking across a golf course at night in the snow: “On the fifth green I lay on my back and watched the stars’ slow wheel.”
Skylark alarm clocks; treacherous, trackless sands where the tides can sweep away the unwary; poetry-loving pilgrims; hedges full of honeysuckle or dog-rose. MacFarlane is a well-known collector of beautifully specific nature words: for example, he defines rionnach maoim, a “Hebridean Gaelic” term that means “‘the shadows cast on the moorland by cumulus clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day.’”
In short…
While adventure books or cozy stories are still my favorites, I found a different pleasure in the work of authors like White, Jewett, and MacFarlane: the delight of reawakening, of sensing the vastness of my own sonorous, quiet world.
