Orion Author Reading Lists

Amy Irvine’s Reading List

July 02, 2009

Amy Irvine’s list of books that have most influenced both my life, activism, and writing:

The Malady of Death, by Marguerite Duras

Mythologies, by Roland Barthes

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. The best American fiction ever
written, I think. Its lyricism alone is worth the read.

Women of Wisdom, by Tsultrim Allione. This book offers introductions and translations of the “sacred biographies” of six Tibetan Buddhist women: Namgsa Obum, Machig Lapdron (1055-1145), Jomo Memo (12th c.), Machig Ongjo (12th c.), Drenchen Rema and A-Yu Khadro. I especially like Machig Lapdron’s story—which is one of offering up oneself—of feeding the demons until they pledge to become your allies.

The Only World We’ve Got: A Paul Shepherd Reader, by Paul Shepherd

The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey

Aspects of the Feminine, by C.G. Jung

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

Leap, by Terry Tempest Williams

The Deep Well Tapes: Volumes I-III, by Marc Bregman with Susan Marie Scavo

Loose Woman, poetry by Sandra Cisneros

Blue Desert, by Charles Bowden

Heidi, by Johanna Spyri. The most beloved book of my childhood—which probably explains why I now keep goats.

The Abstract Wild, by Jack Turner

Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization, by Richard
Manning

Derek Sheffield’s Reading List

June 16, 2009

Books I’m reading right now:

What Narcissism Means to Me, by Tony Hoagland. Funny, smart poems.

Now & Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns 1997-2000, by Robert Hass. A writer friend gave this book to me. An anthology of poems containing brief, helpful introductions by Hass. I read it like apples: one entry a day.

The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton. Try this on: “the earth is a living thing / [. . . ] is a black and living thing / is a favorite child / of the universe / feel her rolling her hand / in its kinky hair / feel her brushing it clean.”

The Story and Its Writer, edited by Ann Charters. An anthology of short fiction which approaches fiction primarily from a writer’s perspective. The appendices are packed with writers writing about their own work and the work of others.

Books I’ve finished in the last three months:

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. This is exhilarating. By the end of it, your electrons have jumped their tracks. It also makes you chuckle a few times every chapter. For example: “In 1781 Herschel became the first person in the modern era to discover a planet. He wanted to call it George, after the British monarch, but was overruled. Instead it became Uranus.”

Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Hard Night, and The Long Home, by Christian Wiman. I recently finished a “study” of Wiman’s works. His formal poems make me think of an edgier Frost; they are poignant and memorable and make me want to read more contemporary formal poetry. Ambition and Survival is a collection of essays, reviews, and more. This book mixes the personal with the literary so that as you read Wiman’s insights on Milton, you get glimpses into Wiman’s life. He uses the literary to elevate the personal and vice versa.

Home & Away: The Old Town Poems, by Kevin Miller. Lyrical poems of place and people a la Edward Hopper.

Earthly Meditations ,by Robert Wrigley. A new and selected book of poems. Many striking “nature” poems.

Generations, by Pattiann Rogers. No one makes science sing so well.

Essays I’ve read in the last two months as models for my writing class:

“Muck and its Entanglements: Cleaning the Outhouse.” This essay by John Berger addresses the human condition—mortality, spirituality, nature—through a description of shoveling excrement. It’s provocative, revealing, and funny.

”Chores.” A beautiful, visceral distillation of Deb Marquart’s The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. Reminds me a bit of Jim Heynen’s work, but with much more grit. When one of my students called it gross last week, I knew it was a perfect model.

“The Men We Carry in Our Minds.” This essay by Scott Russell Sanders addresses class and gender issues through moving personal reflection. My Latino students love it; they know exactly where Sanders is coming from—where he came from. They carry the same blue collared men in their minds.

“The Deer at Providencia.” This essay by Annie Dillard explores the place of suffering in the human condition. It is hard to shake—in a good way.

Periodicals I’ve read recently:

Poetry
Ecotone
Orion
The Georgia Review (the current issue, Spring 2009, focuses on culture and the environment; new work by David Gessner and other favorites)
Hayden’s Ferry Review
Flyway
Lyric
AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle

Books I’ve strayed from but will finish because I’m a lifetime member of the “clean your plate” club:

Wisdom of the Mythtellers, by Sean Kane
The Art of the Commonplace, by Wendell Berry

Books on the “to read” shelf:

The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, by David Quammen
Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold, edited by Luna B. Leopold
The Greening of a Nation?, by Hal K. Rothman
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, by Janisse Ray
The Final Forest: The Battle for the Last Great Trees of The Pacific Northwest, by William Dietrich
In the Wilderness, by Kim Barnes
Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee, edited by Earl Ingersoll
Our Lady of the Forest, by David Guterson
The Tie that Binds, by Kent Haruf
Just Before Dark, by Jim Harrison
American Bloomsberry, by Susan Cheever
Too many books of poetry to list . . . Alas.

Books on the “to buy” list:

Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems, by John Felstiner
Anything by Scott Russell Sanders

Lydia Peelle’s Reading List

June 01, 2009

How to approach a list like this? The first impulse was to list my all-time favorites, though that was just daunting. So I literally went through the stack currently on the nightstand, and picked ten—though I cheated a little at the end.

Non-Fiction
1. Mountain Dialogues, by Frank Waters. A gift from a friend. I admit that I had never read Waters before, and further sheepishly admit that I don’t know much about him. But how rare it is to pick up a book and get the sense you are in the presence of an old and wise friend. I have been thinking about the New Mexican desert all winter, so this came to me at just the right time - as books so often do.

2. Two Billion Acre Farm, by Robert West Howard. A history of agriculture in America. Published in the fifties, I’m not sure if it’s still in print—in fact, I don’t know if any of his books are still in print, but they should be; Howard has a wonderful, lively style and sensibility that is often very funny. Though it is a little old fashioned, this book is as relevant today as it was when it was published. The early settlers’ diversified farms, the cotton gin, the invention of canning, the revolution of the feed industry, the loss of topsoil, the invention of barbed wire and how it all shaped our young country—it’s all in there. And his underlying message of the need for sustainability is, of course, that much more vital and more pressing today than it was fifty years ago.

3. Horses at Work, by Ann Greene. A look at manpower and horsepower shaping America’s cities in the industrial age.

4. America Yesterday, by Eric Sloane. I am a big Eric Sloane fan, and always have one of his books near at hand, just to page through . . .

5. The Snoring Bird, by Bernd Heinrich. Ravens in Winter. . . The Trees in My Forest . . . Bumblebee Economics . . . Winter World . . . Heinrich is unparalleled. My father gave me this book, Heinrich’s memoir about his father and his beginnings as a scientist. Though I haven’t started it yet, I have become a big fan of his over the years and am very much looking forward to it.

6. The Art of Eating, by M.F.K. Fisher. Also a gift from a friend. A classic, and should be required reading for all interested in “slow” food.

Fiction
7. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. In her introduction, she writes that she tried to create characters who are like New England granite. They are.

8. Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

9. Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horse, Old Man, The Bear, by William Faulkner

10. . . . and four new and exciting debut short story collections:
The Boat, by Nam Le
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, by Kevin Wilson