Orion Author Reading Lists

Derrick Jensen’s Reading List

October 16, 2009

These days apart from the reading I do for research I have mainly been reading crap: mysteries and so on. I have a lot of trouble reading most nonfiction these days, because I disagree with so many of their premises. I just tried to read this wretched book called Speaking with the Devil: A Dialogue with Evil, by Carl Goldberg, which was supposed to be about why people commit atrocities. It was extremely racist in that it called indigenous peoples’ beliefs in spirits mere projections. It was also extremely pro-patriarchy in that it implicitly accepted a lot of the presumptions and premises of patriarchy. The same was true for a book I just read on Boudicca. It has some interesting history, but the author could not even conceptualize a people who are organized even remotely non-hierarchically, or a people where women are not somehow in thrall to men. The same is true when I try to read most books on environmental issues, where it’s clear in most cases that the authors never question the continued existence of civilization, but rather suggest cosmetic changes within this culture. I realize that I run into a lot of these same premises at work in works of fiction—and I recognize that many of these works of fiction end up being pro-police-state propaganda, but in those cases at least I have a plot to carry me forward: who committed the crime?

All that said, a few months ago I was delighted by the pro-environment novels of Carl Hiaasen (although I still have problems with his sexism), and read most of those. So far as fiction goes, right now I’m reading a novel sent to me by one of my publishers, asking for a blurb, and so far as non-fiction, I’m reading a biography of Napoleon. As far as what I’ve read in the past few months that has been really good, I read The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith (which I published), and I’ve read a lot of great books by the Dakota writer Waziyatawin.

Derrick Jensen is the author of Thought to Exist in the Wild, Songs of the Dead, Endgame, and other books. In 2008, he was named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” His Orion column is called “Upping the Stakes.”

http://www.derrickjensen.org/

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Kathleen Dean Moore’s Reading List

September 30, 2009

This summer I am reading books about the Pacific Northwest Coast, because that is where I am, writing in a cabin above a tidal cove in southeast Alaska. I like to read books set where I am sitting. It’s right and fitting, like eating jalapeno peppers in the desert or wearing a yellow slicker in Maine.

So I’m reading The Curve of Time, by M. Wylie Blanchet, who gunk-holed with her children along the British Columbia coastline in the 1920s. I’ve just discovered the work of Holly Hughes, a poet who works as a skipper and naturalist up in humpback whale country; the book I’m reading is Boxing the Compass, poems of navigation by the compass or sometimes by the steady rhythm of your heart. A man who berths his boat next to mine in the little harbor loaned me a collection of essays women have written about sailing on the reflections of cliffs and calving glaciers, as you do up here—Steady as She Goes. And I’m reading Alison Deming’s new book of poems, Rope, many of which are set on the Atlantic coast.

As I think about it, I probably read field guides and natural history more than I read fiction, and two I love are Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Pojar and McKinnon)—far better than most field guides because it includes traditional ecological knowledge—and Southeast Alaska’s Rocky Shores, Animals (O’Clair and O’Clair), which was a gift to me from a friend in Sitka, who also sends me columbine seeds and the dried heads of Icelandic poppies.

I didn’t know until recently that Ed Ricketts, “Doc Ricketts” in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, co-authored a wonderful guide to north Pacific mudflats and tidepools, Between Pacific Tides. John Steinbeck wrote the introduction: “There are good things to see in the tidepools and . . . interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peep hole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing.”

In the tidewater village closest to my cabin, there is a little wooden building the people call the “Bus Stop.” That’s where they drop off jackets or canning jars or, most importantly, books they would like to pass along. Many of my books end up in the bus stop, but I hoard the coastal books on my shelves: The Only Kayak by Kim Heacox; The Island Within by Richard Nelson; Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea; holy, hilarious John Muir, Travels in Alaska. Then, of course, the best of all, Moby Dick, which is by now a thick stack of pages in a ziplock bag. There are sometimes four of us up here in the cabin, and we all want to read Moby Dick again, and nobody can bear to wait until the others are done. So the fastest reader tears chapters from the paperback book as she reads them and passes them to the next reader, until the book is entirely dismembered and we are all sighing with satisfaction as we read the perfect paragraphs—a travesty, I know, but arguably unavoidable.

I don’t know why it’s such a pleasure to read books that are of the place I find myself, but that is the way it is. The very best place to read Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder is close by the pounding surf. When I am in the desert, I can’t get enough of Edward Abbey. When I am driving past 100 Mile House in the broad valley between the Canadian Rockies and the Coast Range, I love rereading Smith and Other Events and Breaking Smith’s Quarterhorse, sly, fond, and funny books deeply grounded in that place.

It’s as if there are two kinds of resonance. Sometimes it’s as if the muscles in my heart were all violin strings, taut and tuned, and when a book sounds a tone, the same vibration trembles in me. So there is that kind of resonance, the sympathetic vibrations of a reader and a writer in perfect tune. But then, there is the resonance of the bell, which rings only because of its emptiness. Reading can shake that lonely space to shimmering. The books I read in winter will be all bells. Rick Bass’ stories about Montana in winter. Alison Deming’s poems about desert heat. Linda Hogan’s essays about Colorado. Brian Doyle’s riffs on God.

Kathleen Dean Moore is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University and the founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. Her current work is in the areas of environmental ethics and philosophy and nature, where she has published three award-winning books of essays: The Pine Island Paradox (Milkweed Editions, 2004); Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World (Lyons Press, 1999, 2004); and Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water (Harcourt Brace, 1996). She is co-editor of a forthcoming collection of articles about Rachel Carson’s legacy and challenge and the co-editor of How It Is: A Native American Philosophy, the collected papers of the late Viola Cordova.

http://oregonstate.edu/cla/philosophy/faculty/kathy

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Robert Cording’s Reading List

September 15, 2009

Most of my reading falls into three areas: reading that’s involved with my teaching; with my writing; with my penchant for books that capture the strangeness and amplitude of the world we live in. In that first category, I’ve been reading Robert Alter’s translation of Genesis and Avivah
Zornberg’s brilliant reflections on Genesis (The Beginnings of Desire), my favorite theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Creation and Fall and Meditating on the Word), and my guides to the Bible and living in general, Northrop Frye (Double Vision) and Simone Weil (Waiting for God).  I’ve also been re-reading two old favorite novels—E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—and two new favorites by Marilyne Robinson, Gilead and Home.

Some poetry books and poems that are always close at hand are: Robert Frost’s Collected (especially his great poems of work, “Mowing,” “Putting in the Seed,” and “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” that remind me again and again the paradise we regain by the sweat of our brows); T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and George Herbert’s The Temple; the Odes of Keats, especially “To Autumn” (I simply don’t know another poem that better captures what I’ve been trying to learn all my life: how to remain entirely present to the presentness and presence of things, even as they pass away); Czeslaw Milosz’s New and Collected and Adam Zagajewski’s Without End (I also love his essay collections, Another Beauty and A Defense of Art and Ardor); Stanley Kunitz’s Collected. Then there are poets whose work I return to again and again—William Matthews, Stanley Plumly, W.S Merwin, Ellen Bryant Voight, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Robert Hass, Philip Schultz, Gerald Stern and Robert Wrigley—and those poets who are friends and whose work I greatly admire: Sydney Lea, David Baker, Chris Merrill, Jeffrey Harrison, Baron Wormser, William Wenthe, and Gray Jacobik.

In the third category, I’d put the work of Oliver Sacks, Stephen Jay Gould, John McPhee, Peter Matthiessan, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry. I’d add the essays of Scott Sanders and Albert Goldbarth and a book impossible to categorize: The Embers and the Stars by Erazim Kohak (it combines phenomenology and living in a house in the woods). And my favorite nature writers, past—Thoreau, Gilbert White, John Burroughs—and present: Richard Nelson, Jane Brox, Robert Finch, Gretel Ehrlich, and Barry Lopez.

Robert Cording teaches at College of the Holy Cross, where he is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published five collections of poems, including Common Life. His poem “Snake Crossing” appeared in the May/June 2009 issue, one of several contributions to Orion. He lives in Woodstock, Connecticut.