My Favourite Nature Stories is a charming volume of twenty-one stories, some have already been published, some are new pieces and some have never been published. Ruskin Bond dedicates the book to all who ‘cherish the green world of India, its forests, fields, streams and sacred rivers.’ The stories cover a range of subjects and locales, but it is the Himalayan landscapes that are perhaps dearest to him. It is a pleasure to read Bond as his language is direct and uncluttered and yet evokes the world around him. The essays are of the moment, like a Zen poem and in those few pages, a sunlit world is vividly brought to life. For instance, in a few lines he describes life on a maple tree: ‘A portion of it was blackened where it had been struck by lightning, but the rest of it lived on; a favourite haunt of woodpeckers: the ancient peeling bark seemed to harbour any number of tiny insects, and the woodpeckers would be tapping away all day’. Or the beauty of the cosmos flower: ‘The cosmos has all the genius of simplicity.
November 2016, volume 40, No 11