Books of 2026: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EMPTY LOTS: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown.
Sigh. Today, on "books I absolutely should have loved and unfortunately missed the mark for me": This liminal ecotone almost-memoir, almost-essay collection meditations on ecology and human/wildlife interactions at the fringes. (And, yeah, that's a Jeff VanderMeer blurb on the cover. You see why my hopes were so high.)
I'm not sure I've ever had this vexing of a time with someone's syntax before (rich, coming from me, I know), but! I'm in the middle of revising my own prose to tighten it up, and Brown had a lot of identical consecutive constructions (ie "of this of this of this" or "to this to this") that I'm mostly blaming on his lawyer background. Holistically, I bounced off his style pretty badly, which is why I've been slogging through this book since the first of the month.
There was also something almost...malaise-ical about this. He spent a lot of time describing places' vibes or appearances in great detail, but then the anecdotes kind of...fizzled? Didn't go anywhere? Like on pages 68-9 when he started a story about encountering a hungry wild coyote and then just. didn't end it. Sir what. Obviously you didn't get eaten, because you're writing a book, but What Happened, Please.
I'm also not over the moon with his ecological understanding, which is unfortunate given the book's main topic. I appreciate that he's stumbling across a lot of this by rambling around his house/empty lot property (and, TBF, it is a very cool house), but he went on a tangent about "invasives" around page 208 that had me rolling my eyes (because, yeah, "invasive" does mean something different from "introduced species," in ecology, please don't conflate them like you are here), he claimed to have found a fawn too young to walk (so, what, half an hour into its life? are you sure??), and he had some pretty lukewarm takes about birds, even as they were meant to be Inspiring His Wonder. Also, sir, Where Are Your Citations?? I wish there was an index, too, so I could peek at certain parts again easier.
I did like the confluence of urban and post-urban and ecological, and I did get some good mileage out of the liminal space vibe studies (although: wow, he used "liminal" and "spectral" way too many times in those sections lol). I flaggied one (1) single passage about walking and liminality, which was probably my favorite part of the book. Overall, can't say I recommend this one, but I will probably revisit passages to see if anything clicks better later. If it piques your interest, I hugely recommend peeping some sample pages before you commit, because *syntactical sigh*.
