North Woods
North Woods is a 2023 novel by American novelist Daniel Mason. The novel, Mason's sixth, is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of a single house in New England over the course of several centuries.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2023–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Something I've thought about recently is how loud forests should be. Daniel Mason names this loss explicitly in the wonderful North Woods, namely that "[b]etween 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America. Once, the forest would have been deafening." Likewise, Cat Bohannon's stellar Eve notes that "[w]hen you first visit a tropical rain forest, the dominant emotion is usually surprise—not over the beauty of the place, nor over how hot it is. The biggest shock is that it's bloody loud."
- I have started looking at Goodreads ratings as a good proxy for well written books but there are a lot of bizarrely high rated pop culture books so it’s not perfect. Another strategy is to look at books shortlisted for the major awards. That’s how I came across North Woods by Daniel Mason (Pulitzer short list) which is by far the book I enjoyed most this year.
