Hey, it's Empire's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Do you have any bird people in your life?

The types of people who are just content to sit outside and watch the natural world unfold in front of them,

get to know the birds of the neighborhood, their traffic patterns, their eating habits, that sort of thing.

I've got one or two of these people of my family. My neighbor is one of

them. And also, apparently, so is famed author Amy Tan. She started keeping a journal of the

bird she saw and turned it into a new book titled The Backyard Bird Chronicles. And I'll be real,

I don't know if I personally have it in me to be a bird person, but listening to Tan talk to NPR's

Lila Faddle about getting to know and care for these creatures, I see the appeal.

That's after the break.

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If you know author Amy Tan for The Joylet Club, a novel about Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco,

her new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, might seem like a deviation.

That's because she never intended to write this book.

She was just trying to lose herself in nature,

but soon she had pages and pages of observations and drawings. And that's what this is. It's like a spontaneous memoir, and I just didn't think that it was publishable. But clearly it was. I spoke

with Tan about what drove her to the birds and the

delight she found looking out her window. I tend to be an obsessive person to begin with, but one of

the things I obsessed on in 2016 was the degree of racism that was being shown. And people now

...