Customer Reviews

Reading Water: Lessons from the River (Capital Discoveries)

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This collection of essays, in which Rebecca Lawton recounts adventures she's had in her many years as a boatman on Western rivers, is lovely. Though her descriptions of nature are not particularly lush, they capture memorable scenes with a brief, snapshot effect that leaves detailed images in the reader's mind. She fleshes out her descriptions with scientific and geologic facts--her writing is not burdened by science, but rather enlivened by it.
Lawton tells of how she nearly drowned a friend of hers with her own hubris; how she learned to get out of swift eddies; and how she became a boatman in the first place, despite the bias against females in that profession.
She also talks about her failed marriage, her mother's death from cancer, and a faithless lover. She draws life lessons from the characteristics of rivers, and although a few of the lessons seem too pat, or contrived to fit the river motif, many of them seem right on the money.
And always Lawson's writing has a sincere, honest tone, as if she is not trying to make herself look good so much as pondering what she has learned, from life and the river.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about lives they will never live, or who values the wisdom others have worked hard to attain.

Rebecca Lawton's collection of essays is lovely. She describes her rafting trips, the geology of the rivers she loves so much and draws comparisons to how rivers are like life. I thoroughly enjoyed the tales of her adventures and learned a lot about life by reading "Reading Water."

This lovely book seems simple enough on the surface (the memoirs of a woman river rafting guide), but, like water itself, there's much more going on beneath the surface. Reading Water is part of the Capital Discoveries Book Series from Capital Books, chosen for their focus on "journeys of self-discovery, transformation, inner awareness, and recovery." This book is a perfect fit for that series.

Lawton weaves many threads into each essay, much like the interwoven currents of the braided rivers she describes in one essay. Some threads are past, present, and further past; others are experience, observation, and research. These threads feel somewhat unrelated until the questions gradually flow over the reader like a gentle sprinkle as opposed to a downpour of forced epiphany.

Her writing style is beautiful and poetic (with the minor exception of an undue fondness for sentence fragments). Her style takes a few pages to get used to, but then it becomes hypnotic. To pose an obvious metaphor, her phrasing pulls the readers along with the sureness and variety of a peaceful river with occasional rapids.

Lawton's greatest strength as a writer is how she combines a scholar's depth of knowledge with a romantic's depth of feeling. She does a great job of interlacing fact and experience. The curious patterns in the lives of salmon might be discussed objectively in one passage, followed closely by the delight of feasting on their flesh in the next. Turning the pages of Reading Water, like reading the best of memoirs, is a learning *and* feeling experience.

As a memoir or as an investigation of the power of moving water to affect human beings, Reading Water is strongly recommended.

"reading water" is the river runner's term for seeing things below the surface, things that might leave only a subtle sign on the surface but may be crucial to your survival. Lawton is a trustworthy guide to the subtle signs--signs of time and geological forces and biological creativity and poetic wonders and human truths--that are easily missed but which make life far more wonder-ful. This is a gem of literary nature writing, with a keen poetic eye, but unlike much of the genre, in which writers may have spent too many years in the classroom and then tried to impose too many abstractions or too many other writer's styles onto nature, Lawton's classroom has been the roaringly real and deep and raw and beautiful nature of the Grand Canyon and other wilderness rivers, where river guides must face real matters of life and death and meaning, and she has allowed it to speak to her directly and meaningfully.

I keep Reading Water in my library for examples of fine writing to share with my writing students. I also turn to it to give myself some time in nature when I can't leave my office. Lawton approaches her material with a quiet and steady gaze. Whether she's describing her first view of the Stanislaus, the mixing of the green and brown waters at the confluence of the Colorado and the Green rivers, or the terrifying roar of life-threatening rapids, each word carries the reader toward a deeper understanding of the natural world. Lawton does not shy away from loss, grief, and other untamed regions of the human heart. And she never loses sight of the life-affirming forces that help us grow beyond sorrow and limitation. Other books come and go, but Reading Water is part of my permanent collection.

Rebecca Lawton is a wonderful writer. I found this series of essays to be engaging and informative. I also found her work as a woman in a primarily-male field to be inspiring. I can't imagine doing the work she did, and I always love reading stories about adventures I will never take! I also loved her descriptions of nature and the power of her connection with the natural world. A strong, informative read!