Slowly reading this. Working long hours now. Besides, this book is a draught worth savoring.

Josephine W. Johnson won a Pulitzer for her fiction, but handles creative non-fiction just as well. The Inland Island follows a common format found in nature writing, each of the 12 chapters meandering through a different month from January to December. Short pithy sentences. An amazing vocabulary, employed not for the sake of showing off, but for the poetry of language.

Here nature is imperfect and complete. Despoiled by human concerns and yet undaunted. Johnson writes this memoir from the heart of the Vietnam War. Her anger and desperation turns up on one page or another, but mostly she focuses on the natural world, with teeth, instinct and that mad desire to live on.

Reading this book made me poke a slug’s antenna just to see what would happen. (It retracted back into its gooey head.)