My confession is this: it is easy for me to list, but not to read my list. How rarely I fully immerse in one book at a time, or in a whole book over time in such a way that I feel I’ve done it right, in such a way that the author’s breath and experience become part of mine. I love it when a book changes the way I breathe! I love it when a book makes me disappear, when a book says, or gestures with its pagey fingers, “come hither” and I go wherever it beckons me to go. But I am a slow reader, and this slows me down in everything I do, even in getting this list to Orion. If I cannot hear the book’s words being uttered aloud between my two ears, if I cannot feel-hear the orb of each sentence, so much of the book’s world is lost to me. I’m so terribly slow in a world that loves speed. I read slowly, and thus reading lists—especially the long ones!—intimidate me even as I gravitate to them. And I confess, probably an offshoot of being slow, I am a dabbler. I read a bit of this, a bit of that, not unlike how I travel, always meaning to come back to that stonecrop poem on the prairie of Jim Galvin’s beautiful kicking poems, or that Garcia Lorca essay, Play and Theory of the Duende where he is describing the lived experience of, rather than the idea of, duende.
So here is not a reading list, but a sloppy video camera panorama—a glimpse (in no particular order), a hodgepodge of the stacks, clutters, chaos of books that currently surround me, and are calling me hither, as I hereby vow to become a better reader, to commit more time, to read faster and longer, to become more organized, more methodical, to remember more; as I promise to complete one list and start another, as I resolve to read all the books scattered in my nooks and crannies, or at least the promise of a title or a first line: (as Rilke’s Book of Hours drifts up from my bedside pile and I open to a blue feather I’ve tucked there and find myself reading both German and English translation ‘If I had grown up in a land where days/ were free from care and hours were delicate...’):
The Fortieth Day, Kazim Ali.
What the Living Do; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe.
Muscular Music; Wind in a Box, Terrance Hayes.
A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders.
The Necessary Angel (very tattered, yellowed, with a bookmark of a skeleton reading a big book from Paperback Traffic, Polk Street, San Francisco), Wallace Stevens.
The Rain in the Trees, and anything W.S. Merwin.
The Blue Plateau: a Landscape Memoir, Mark Tredinnick.
The Glance, Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks, his great Introduction called “A Soul-Friendship”) Also Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, John Moyne and Coleman Barks.
The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry, Rafael Campo.
The Moonlit Pond: Korean Classical Poems in Chinese, translated and introduced by Sung-Il Lee (opened to page 46, I keep coming back to this first line “Driven out of the court to become a sorrowful bird…” written by “Deposed King Tanjong 1441-1457”).
The Lessons of St. Francis, John Michael Talbot with Steve Rabey.
Figure Studies and Pinion: an Elegy, Claudia Emerson.
Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone, Gary Ferguson and Douglas Smith (I did read this whole book and re-read the portrait chapters which inspired me to write a series of wolf portrait poems in their voices).
Paradox & Healing: Medicine, Mythology & Transformation, Michael Greenwood and Peter Nunn.
Memory for Forgetfulness, Mahmoud Darwish.
Carpathia, Cecilia Woloch.
What’s Happening to My Body?: The Book for Girls, Lynda Madaras (My daughter is almost twelve—this book is hers, but I’m reading it too—these books have changed so much since I was 12!).
Sing Down the Moon, Scott O’Dell (also hers, but beautiful!).
Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross—new translation and introduction by Mirabai Starr.
Holy Bible (the copy my 91-year-old friend Osie loaned me—her book so studied and lived by her that there is a path her thumb has worn down the center where she has thumbed for daily passages.)
Winter World: the Ingenuity of Animal Survival, Bernd Heinrich.
2009 was a rich year for Appalachian writers and those who like to read them. Just the past few months have brought four new works on mountaintop removal mining, including Silas House and Jason Howard’s Something’s Rising, a rousing and historically important collection of interviews with and essays about Appalachians fighting mountaintop removal. Howard has also edited We All Live Downstream, an anthology of poetry, short stories, essays, and novel excerpts, again, written by people directly involved in the mountaintop removal struggle. Plundering Appalachia, edited by Tom Butler and Doug Tompkins, features photographs and essays on the mining practice, and Silas House, Shirley Stewart Burns and Mari-Lynn Evans have published Coal Country as a companion to Evans’ new film of the same name. (I should note that Shirley Stewart Burns’ 2007 Bringing Down the Mountains is, in my opinion, the most comprehensive discussion of mountaintop removal available.) Two more books I’m looking forward to are Ron Eller’s highly praised Uneven Ground (2008), a history of economics, “development models,” and community in Appalachia since 1945, and Chad Montrie’s To Save the Land and People (2003), a history of resistance to Appalachian strip mining.
Here are a few more very recent books by Appalachian writers, all written out of a deep connection to place:
Now I turn toward the norther, wester, and wetter part of my place identity. A year ago, I saw an exhibit of Salish Coastal art at the Seattle Art Museum. I had no background in Northwest Native art and went to the exhibit out of sheer curiosity, but the experience was so profound that it launched for me a year of transformative reading about Northwest Coastal art, culture, and shamanism. Here are some of the most memorable and affecting books of my excursion so far:
Finally, I close with five books, all concerned with place and spirit, that I’ve read in the past five years and that still surface in my mind almost weekly:
Ann Pancake is the author of Strange As This Weather Has Been, a novel about a West Virginia family devastated by mountaintop removal mining and a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground, was a Bakeless Prize winner.
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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.
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
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The primary scientist I’m interviewing here is Will Steffen, the head of Australia’s Climate Change Institute. I’m reading a paper-in-draft by Will—along with the Nobelist Paul Crutzen, and eighteen other authors—that Nature will soon be publishing, “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity in the Anthropocene.” It will be a tad controversial regarding population pressures.
Another Australian scientist important to my story is Griffith Taylor, a geologist and geographer who was an early 20th-century bellwether about climate change and habitat. Historian Carolyn Strange and co-author Alison Bashford have written a readable and well-illustrated biography of this important figure simply titled Griffith Taylor.
The terrific nonfiction magazine from Melbourne, Quarterly Review, features long essays and responses by notable Australians. Issue 31 from November 2008 centers around “Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia,” by a leading environmental writer, Tim Flannery. Australia is arguably the continent/country most at risk from global warming, and his piece is both frightening and heartening in its specifics and suggestions, a tough balance to achieve.
The art book for this week is the catalog accompanying Mandy Martin’s thirty-year retrospective at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, Mandy Martin, Painting 1981-2009. Martin, one of Australia’s most important artists, has been working for decades in both field and studio with scientists, writers, and Aboriginal Australians to produce an astonishing body of work about Australia’s desert and industrialized environments.
I’m also working toward finishing the manuscript for another book, All Along the Line, which is likewise set partly in Australia. For that I’m finally reading what has become an underground classic among geographers and anthropologists, Lines: A Brief History. It’s an interdisciplinary romp through the relationships among writing, walking, and music, among other linear matters, by the British anthropologist Tim Ingold.
For the journal Places I’m reviewing the new book Las Vegas: Urbanizing the Mojave Desert, by Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern. It’s a small but juicy essay-and-photo book about the contradictions posed by the growth the city that art critic Jeff Kelley, who was raised there, once called “the American dream in drag.”
And for fun? The cartographically resplendent novel by Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, as well as Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Both are coming-of-age stories and illustrated, which tells you something about what it takes to balance the science readings in my small cranium!
William L. Fox is Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, and author of Aereality. He’s a frequent contributor to Orion; his essay for the portfolio “Mulholland’s View” appeared in the July/August 2009 issue.
That said, though I keep my bedside table stocked with books, I almost never read in bed, and carry my books back and forth comically, like a cat who cannot find the right place for her sweet mouse. I drag a book into the living room and read in the commotion of the four eleven- and twelve-year-olds (only one of whom is mine totally, though all are mine partially by right of neighborhood domain) trying to create a website for their band, Fang. Or scrunch into the window seat with the calico who doesn’t want me there, and who will nip my toes.
Anyhow. More on my disgraceful habits later, my slap in the face to all the great traditions of bedside tables. Here’s what’s currently blessed by the wood of mine:
Shakespeare’s collected works. Shakespeare is my beginning and end, and I still use the battered set I bought in college. It is always there. Shakespeare inhabited me when I was young, a high school dropout, and someone who could not in any academic sense read him. Every few years I reread all of the plays but I dip into the book constantly; recently I reread Julius Caesar and looked up, out of curiosity, Anthony’s speech in the play versus the account of it in Plutarch, Shakespeare’s source. (Plutarch presented Anthony as no great speaker, simply a man who could rouse a crowd with tales of money and gore.)
Beowulf, the Seamus Heaney translation. I am on my second read, and trying to make my way through as much as I can of the Anglo-Saxon, which I have never studied. It’s an astonishing language, alternately grim, profound, gorgeous, that presents the world in a way that renders it inescapably present: those noun compounds: world-candle for the sun, whale-road and swan-road for the sea (that they could have taken those creatures so for granted!). I wonder how we would treat our world if we still saw it that way.
The End of the Game by Julio Cortazar. I brought this home because I had not read it in thirty years and wanted to reread a book that made me smitten long ago with language. It is a remarkable collection of short stories—strange, human, surprising—and I love it as much now as when I came across it in college.
Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard. I have read essays from this collection but I have not read it in its entirety, so I plan to this summer. I love Dillard. When I went to graduate school classes on literary nonfiction were rare, and my graduate program had none. Reading Dillard to me is like taking a class in how to write nonfiction, in the best sense.
“Sunrise Insomnia Service,” a poem by my husband, Bruce Beasley, which he gave me to read in draft form. It’s brilliant. He’s brilliant. And I get to live with him. Very cool.
Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, by a very talented young writer named Julie Wade, whom I once had the privilege of teaching. The book has been accepted by Colgate University Press—just a week ago—so I got an early copy of the manuscript. It’s a lyric memoir about love, family, coming out—things she manages with the true Poundian instinct for making it new. It’s as tough as it is beautiful.
So what’s the deal with the dream of a bedside table? The truth is, though I mean to read in bed and do occasionally, when I make it to bed at the end of the day I generally watch TV—something on DVD, like Battlestar Galactica, then the Daily Show. Perhaps with the riot of brilliance out the doors, the fragrance pouring in through the window, books would be too much, a spin too many on the wheel.
Susanne Antonetta is the author of two nonfiction books, A Mind Apart and Body Toxic, and four books of poetry. She wrote “Language Garden” for the March/April 2005 issue, one of several contributions to Orion.
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
Amy Irvine’s Trespass won the 2009 Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award for creative nonfiction. She lives in Norwood, Colorado.
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
Derek Sheffield’s poetry collection, A Revised Account of the West, won Flyway’s Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award. His poem “Delicious Apocalypse,” his second to be published in Orion, appears in the September/October 2009 magazine. He lives in the eastern foothills of the Cascades.
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
Lydia Peelle lives in Tennessee. Her debut short story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, was published in 2009 and includes “Kidding Season,” which was featured in the March/April 2009 Orion magazine.
I’ve been a resident of the Sunbelt for some time now, and when the parlous state of our economy and regional politics gets to be too much I need to remind myself that this part of the country is not just a bad example—it has also shaped a lot of cutting-edge thought into how people and place interact. I pick up a copy of Wallace Stegner’s The Sound of Mountain Water, perhaps: brilliant and clear-eyed essays about the West’s problems and promise. Or I read about Aldo Leopold, who came to this region almost exactly a hundred years ago as a freshly minted forestry graduate. A tenderfoot. But he watched and listened, and soon learned of the region’s cowboys, Native Americans, and New Mexico farmers (to say nothing of wolves, pinyon jays, and thick-billed parrots) how land should and should not be managed. His intellectual journey is well limned in Julianne Lutz Newton’s Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac. Wisdom, it turns out, and not just callousness and greed, resides in American places too.
No book I’ve read in recent months, though, has given me more pleasure than one by my good friend Jim Malusa, who some years ago had the brilliant idea of riding his bicycle to the lowest point on each continent. It took him a while (turns out that Djibouti’s a tough place to get to, and to ride in), but the end result of his journeys was a great travelogue, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents. Traveling with scant supplies but with enormous patience and good humor, Jim met the locals, saw the sights, and conveys a great lesson that’s all the more important in an era so easily given to xenophobia: namely, that people all over the place are pretty much alike. I’m hoping he travels somewhere else soon so that he can write about it some more.
Peter Friederici teaches journalism and science writing at Northern Arizona University and lives in Flagstaff. His most recent book is Nature’s Restoration. He wrote the Coda “Transmutations” for the January/February 2009 issue of Orion.
Hold Everything Dear, by John Berger. The poetry of polemic, under Berger’s tender, unflinching gaze, telling the essential stories which are the truths of our time.
Upside Down, by that enigmatic poet of fire and love, Eduardo Galeano.
Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error, on the neuroscience of thought, which necessarily includes the role of emotions. (Three cheers.)
Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, a sea-play of the human heart by a part-Maori woman wearing (and deserving) a Shakespearean mantle.
Nick Broomfield’s “The Battle for Haditha.” This film speaks volumes about the Iraqi war, from the point of view of both the brutalized U.S. Marines and the Iraqi civilians. Both points of view? Yes. That is its genius and its humanity.
Patricia Riley (Ed.), Growing Up Native American: An Anthology. A revealing, eloquent, telling book of Native American voices.
Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines. A psychologically brilliant novel about how wider politics narrates its hopes and tortures in the lives of individuals, through generations of one family.
Nils-Aslak Valkeapää‘s The Sun, My Father. The shamanic Sámi poet recreates the landscapes of northern Europe on the page.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A post-apocalyptic world where the only possible chance for humanity is fragile and almost-unworded grace.
]]>For days when writing feels like pushing a Buick uphill with my forehead, I read pretty much anything by Charles Bowden, Joan Didion, or David Foster Wallace. I particularly like Bowden’s Down By the River, a story about murder and family and drugs, wrapped around a steel spine of excellent investigative reporting on Mexico-U.S. drug policy. I often re-read Didion’s essay “At the Dam” to study her clear, concise language. And I read Wallace’s essays in Consider the Lobster for his attention to detail, humor, and brilliant insights.
In honor of President Obama’s first days in office, my book club is reading Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, the 1960 best-selling account of a white man who darkens his skin and lives as an African American in the South. It’s fascinating.
Other books that I’m reading right now are ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan’s latest, Where Our Food Comes From; This I Believe, a collection of the NPR series, edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman,; The Best American Short Stories of 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie; Table of Contents, by John McPhee; and a collection of W.S. Merwin poems, Present Company. Also, I’m trying, really trying, to get through Ken Wilber’s The Marriage of Sense and Soul. I would like to say I’m reading this to expand my mind, which is partly true, but it’s more accurate to say that I’m trying to win points with my boyfriend, who is a big Wilber fan.
In general, I read books not for self-improvement but because I love stories. Some of the best fiction I’ve read in the past year is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon, The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano and, though I’d read it before, Dune, by Frank Herbert.
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William Kittredge, essayist, fiction writer, and formerly a professor at the University of Montana, is author of The Next Rodeo, The Willow Field, and Hole in the Sky. His recent contribution to Orion, a review of Jim Harrison’s book The English Major, appeared in the March/April 2009 magazine.