A Literary Life

Ship Fever (Andrea Barrett)

A friend is someone with whom you share the important things in your life, including books. (And if books are not an at-least-somewhat-important part of life, we will most likely not be that close of friends. No offence. Really.) Even so, friends don’t always share the same taste in fiction. When such tragedies occur, it doesn’t often come to blows — unless you insult The Hours or The Road, of course. (Just kidding, Pam!) Even better are the times a friend recommends a book, a novel you’ve never heard of before, and you find a little gem of fiction, something you can both google over as if it’s a shared experience.

This book was such a find for me, lent to me a friend who swears by National Book Award winners, and is a series of somewhat-interconnected short stories and the title novella. Vivid, unique and unexpected, these stories circle and dodge around the theme of science, especially the late 19th- and early 20th-century natural sciences: the time of Darwin, of aristocratic men grabbing butterfly nets and carefully pinning new species to velvet-lined shadow boxes, of drawing-room scientists, of adventure to new continents in search of unknown species. The stories describe the thin line between a fiery passion for science and a belief in magic, telling the tales of men and women who find the world is still more complex and powerful than the flimsy tools of science, who are abandoned in dark jungles and desperate situations, betrayed by the logic they so desperately believed in.

Ship Fever is a great read, one that makes me also want to begin following National Book Award winners. I’m thankful for the recommendation, and will turn around to recommend it to other friends who’d like to share an experience.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars - Hardcover book club selection

Award-Winning, Fiction, Short Stories |