The Comfort of Crows

I sat in my backyard, reading this book, listening to birdsong, and admiring the garden blooming before me. Renkl's writing is lyrical and meditative, and she presents her deep affection for the natural world in all its iterations throughout the seasons. Calling to mind childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and all the requisite changes and challenges of each phase, she ties the seasons of life to the passing seasons in her own backyard. This book reads like a devotional - it is quiet and allows the reader to reflect on life - past, present, and future. The accompanying artwork by the author's… show more.

Even though I can read Margaret Renkl’s New York Times column every Monday, I counted the minutes until I could get her newest book, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, which I will likely want to be rereading for many years to come. Here, as she takes us through the seasons, we take heart from the ways she shows us “how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me, and includes me, too.”
 
I have a new category inspired by Renkl: “Writers that make me weep, but always in a very… show more.

I read this beautiful book straight through last fall, and then I immediately began to read it again. I treat myself to a single entry every Sunday. Margaret Renkl's lyrical prose opens my eyes to aspects of the natural world right in my own backyard. And Billy Renkl's beautiful collages are a visual feast.

I came to The Comfort of Crows with the expectation that it would be well written. I had read Margaret Renkl’s columns in The New York Times.

I stayed with the book in awe of the author’s graceful, evocative language, yes, but also of her remarkable ability to share her imaginative, nourishing vision of the natural world and her place in it.  

As the title suggests, the book covers a single year, season by season, in and around Renkl’s house in Tennessee. It starts in winter, and that’s when we learn about crows, whom she loves because they are… show more.