North Woods (2023) by Daniel Mason

 Book Review

North Woods (2023)

by Daniel Mason

1,001 Novels: Revised

  Like the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project, I believe the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is best conceived as a project that is meant to be revised.  In the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die, the first revision (2008) was to go back and introduce additional diversity via increased representation of women authors, authors from the global south and generally reducing the number of picks for those authors with more than one book.

  So far, I haven't come across any duplicated authors in the 1,001 Novels project.  Editor Susan Straight is clearly on top of representation in a way the original editors of the 1,001 Books project were not.  Thus, I think the primary concern in revising the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is simply to make it better.  That brings me to North Woods, a novel about a patch of woods in Western Massachussets that made several year end best lists- I finally checked out the Audiobook after it made the New York Times books of the year list.  The fact that this is a book about a piece of land in the United States makes it particularly relevant for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America since it is an approach not embraced by any of the books I've read thus far.

    The book was critically acclaimed, and I enjoyed the Audiobook, though the episodic approach- switching from character to character over the course of hundreds of years, necessarily made it a choppy listening experience.  I'm sure that this would be a book to select for any revision of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project... specifically, one of the books from the Massachussets portion of the list, which looks like this:

1)Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2)The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

3)The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn

4)The Wedding by Dorothy West

5)The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat

6)Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

7)Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

8)Promised Land by Robert Parker

9)The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

10)We Love You Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

11)White Ivy by Susie Yang

12)Unraveling by Elizabeth Graver

13)Leaving Pico by Frank X. Gaspar

14)Born Slippy  by Tom Lutz 

15) Beyond That the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

16)Union Dues by John Sayles

17) Faith by Jennifer Haigh

18)April Morning by Howard Fast

19)An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England(2007) by Brock Clarke

20)Caucasia by Danny Senza

21)Vida by Marge Piercy

22)Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

23)The Wishing Hill by Holly Robinson

24)Father of the Rain by Lily King

25)The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin

26)The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

27)Don't Ask me Where I'm From by Jennifer de Leon

28)Meeting Rozzy Halfway by Caroline Leavitt

29)The Giant's House by Elizabeth McKracken

30) Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman

  My natural inclination is to just pull one of the books out of the bottom three- I think Meeting Rozzy Halfway  by Caroline Leavitt makes sense, but that also moves the place for that slot from Boston to the west of Massachussets.  Not much of an issue in this case, but I'd be concerned about dropping a more geographically underrepresented region of the country.