It's a pleasure to sit with Amy Tan as she sketches and watches her way to an obsession about the birds in her Marin County backyard.
Most birders have origin stories, the tales they tell of how birds, for whatever reason, moved from background to foreground in their lives. Novelist Amy Tan’s journey, cataloged in her delightful new nonfiction book “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” began with a sketchbook and a pencil. At the age of 64, she enrolled in a drawing class with naturalist John Muir Laws.
Stay with the book, though, and you’ll come to appreciate Tan’s approach. Like the early naturalists, Tan learns by watching, bringing no preconceptions, and it’s a pleasure to sit with her as she observes and accumulates knowledge. She takes careful notes, she sketches what she sees and she tries to draw conclusions. As David Allen Sibley puts it in his excellent introduction , “The drawings and essays in this book do a lot more than just describe the birds.
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