Orion Author Reading Lists

Joni Tevis’s Bookshelf

November 17, 2009

Alaska
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I started reading this during the summer, while on a research trip to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. After a long day of paddling the Canning River, it was such a pleasure to curl up in the tent and read a little Brothers K by the light of a 2 a.m. sun. I’m close to the end now; the trial’s about to start. Suspense!

Plants of the Western Boreal Forest and Aspen Parkland, Johnson, Kershaw, MacKinnon, and Pojar. Another Refuge read. I bought it for its sections on mosses (seep-swamp, dung, peatland) and lichens (club, leaf, crust and hair), but its explanations of grasses and sedges are wonderful too. Clear photographs made this book worth its weight in my backpack, and now that I’m back home, the lively notes make me hungry for field work.

Seasons of Life and Land: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Subhankar Banerjee. Incredible photos and thoughtful essays about the vast swath of land some call “America’s Serengeti.” I’m saving up for a return trip in my Bush Pilot Fund, but in the meantime, this book of photojournalism reminds me of how mind-blowing that place is.

Tanaina Plantlore/Dena’ina K’et’una, Priscilla Russell Kari. This useful book shows how closely plants, fungi, and lichen are linked with Native lifeways in central Alaska. Practical reading for anyone who wants to learn how to “read” that landscape more closely.

Carl Donohue, blogger, http://skolaiimages.com/journal/.  A friend and fellow devotee of the Refuge, Donohue lives the good life up in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. He’s an amazing photographer and an insanely knowledgeable and competent guide. I check his blog to see what autumn’s looking like in the boreal forest—and to find out if he’s managed to snag any good wolf photos yet.

Teaching
Swallow the Ocean, Laura M. Flynn. I just finished teaching this fine memoir to my nonfiction workshop. My students responded to Flynn’s deft scene-making, integrated research, and depictions of place. And every time I reread this book, it rewards me with new particulars to admire. Truly a keeper.

The Next American Essay, John D’Agata, editor. Another book I’m teaching in my nonfiction forms workshop. Where else can you find essays to fit themes like “Fable,” “Improv,” and “Unusual Shapes”? I want my students to know how to write personal essays, memoir, and lyric essays—and to look at shapes from their daily lives (football games, pop song lyrics, debates) and use those shapes in service of their material. This anthology helps them see the wide range of what’s possible in the essay form.

History
Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, Sean Hill. The Winchester Monologues and Night-Sea, Rachel Moritz. Lately I’ve been in the mood for poetry that harnesses the power of voice and historical specifics, and these three books accomplish that, exploring African-American life in Milllegeville, Georgia through the persona of Silas Wright; the mythos surrounding Sarah Winchester, heiress to the gun fortune; and the public/private lives, and griefs, of Abraham Lincoln. I love all three of these books. Emphatic reminders of the variety and vitality in contemporary American poetry.

The Men and the Mills: A History of the Southern Textile Industry. Mildred Gwin Andrews. I’m working on an essay about work and place in three kinds of Appalachian factories: glass, steel/screw machines, and textile mills. I live in upstate South Carolina, an area that historically had a lot of textile mills, but most of them closed ten to twenty years ago. This book gives context for what once defined this area economically.

Addictive & Amazing
The Bible. King James Version. Always on my nightstand. I’ve been rereading James lately—succinct, practical, wise. Maybe the long haul of Brothers Karamazov is to blame, but I’ve been enjoying the counterpoint of short books, like the minor (so-called) prophets Habakkuk, farmer Amos, and Hosea, with Gomer his heartbreaking wife.
The Truant Lover, Juliet Patterson. Patterson’s work is rich with compression, power, and a precision I’d like to steal for myself. These poems are a lodestone I return to again and again. They make me want to get back to Lake Superior’s North Shore, with its cobbles, spruces, and dark blue water.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather. Once I finish The Brothers Karamazov, I’m going on a Cather jag. I read Death Comes for the Archbishop not long ago, and I only wish I’d read it sooner. I’ve taught My Antonia for years, and it’s still fresh and surprising to me; I think I’d avoided Death Comes because of its title. But now I think the title is the counterbalance to the rest of the book, a picaresque history of the title character as he lives out his life in New Mexico. Moving prose.

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. One of my all-time favorites. Scientific information! Immersion journalism! Vivid images! Weighty monologues! The scene where Starbuck tries to convince Ahab to turn back to old Nantucket, and the captain almost, almost relents—it gets me every time. As Cather says of Antonia, I say of Moby—it’s “a rich mine of life.” And well-suited for dinner party read-alongs.

Joni Tevis is the author of The Wet Collection (Milkweed Editions), a book of lyric essays exploring connections between natural history, ancient texts, and family myths. She teaches literature and creative writing at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

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.

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.