Bass

Rick Bass's time at the podium was not at all what I had expected. It was, really, a pleasant surprise. Judging only from what we had read so far, I planned on sitting through an educational lecture on the migration patterns of wolves or some other species of animal. To be honest I anticipated fighting the urge to slip out the back, halfway through. His reading, therefore, was both unanticipated and underestimated. I was pleasantly surprised. A friend I was sitting with mentioned that it was sort of like story time for adults, and I agree. Except, unfortunately, we weren't allowed to sit on the plush carpet like we did at age five. He read stories that were both calming and alarming. You could choose to simply enjoy the language and narration and be whisked away into someone else's life, or you could decide instead to empathize with the owl and the "Blue Boy", and cry for nature. Instead of exclaiming for environmental activism, the stories speak for themselves and allows readers (or listeners) to draw their own conclusions about how to treat the world, which is a welcome experience. Bass used beautiful language, altogether, and crafted his tales well. I was particularly impressed by the ending of his first story, which ended with a question that required an answer. It caught me off guard and was very much out of the ordinary. This uniqueness was much unlike his writing in The Ninemile Wolves, which I was not as fond of. I must say, my opinion of Rick Bass improved greatly from hearing his reading in person.