The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Novelist Tan returns to nonfiction (after Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir) with an epistolary nature journal recounting her new ventures in amateur ornithology. Following David Allen Sibley’s contemplative foreword (narrated with measured engagement by Evan Sibley), Tan describes how, after the tumult of 2016, she began to take a deeper interest in the birds visiting her California backyard. She filled page after page with musings on the birds’ social relationships, personality quirks, her building sense of mindful presence, and the bane of birders everywhere—hungry squirrels. The journal entries vacillate between pensive introspection and hilariously unvarnished retellings of the messier bits of birding—aerial diarrhea, for instance. Tan’s narrative style remains steady throughout, restrained both in volume and emotion. Tan’s reserve as she narrates the audiobook allows the wit and humor of her everyday writings to reflect the largely quiet nature of her entries. While the book could have easily relied on allegories of nature and birds, it resists that temptation. Tan instead reminds readers that there is worth and beauty in simplicity.