Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama (Three Rivers Press, 2006)
The first thing that strikes you is how much this man loves life. He’s steeped in history, geography, philosophy, economics and law and he sees and responds passionately to the dignity of all people regardless of their political affiliations. To read this makes me feel humble. Barack makes it clear that he cares about the future of our country and wants to make a difference. When I had given up, like many Americans, on politicians, it’s heartening to know that Obama stubbornly soldiered on in spite of my cynicism.

The Wild Trees (or anything by Richard Preston) (Random House, 2007)
This writer claims my heart and soul in this book about a bunch of scruffy college kids who discover the tallest trees along the coast of California. A page-turner, this book of nonfiction reads like a novel. I couldn’t wait to go to bed every night to see what had transpired while I was away; the landscape is that vivid and the characters are that alive. I’ve since read Preston’s The Hot Zone, a harrowing account of the spread of a filovirus (ebola/AIDS), and the dry cave carved by elephant tusks and covered in guano where it all seems to have begun; The Cobra Event, a frightening “novel” filled with true facts about the secret of biological warfare; and First Light, a gaggle of star geeks dukin’ it out with the universe. Preston peels back the layers to reveal the inner workings of the Hale Telescope—I capitalize here because the Hale is a main character—are almost as exciting as the descriptions of quasars and quarks that pulse along the outskirts of the known universe. You couldn’t make an action/adventure movie as good as any of Preston’s nonfiction books. He specializes in real people caught up in extraordinary situations who are brave, selfless and true.

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall (W.W. Norton, 2001)
An intrepid half-Apache boy stumbles through the minefield of life with a Mormon foster family. Oddly uplifting and weirdly beautiful.

Perma Red, Debra Magpie Earling (Putnam, 2002)
Louise White Elk is a formidable female character in this story of love and betrayal on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Intimate, timeless, poetic.

The World Without Us, Alan Weisman (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007)
This book is a grand experiment of the imagination. Weisman creates a world of poetic jungle stillness that surrounds the earth after the people and machines that have dominated it have fallen by the wayside. Disquietingly beautiful.

Dog Years, Mark Doty (Harper Perennial, 2008)
I’ve taught Mark Doty’s poems in my college classes for years. Whenever I crack open one of his books and begin to read, my students, even the most recalcitrant, surly and bored among them, sit up in their chairs. They know they are being spoken to by someone who cares about them and about the world they live in, offering it up in all its unbearable brilliance. Now I find myself wanting to teach his memoir, Dog Years, not only because Doty’s prose reads like poetry, but because he speaks with unbridled and unashamed admiration for his beloved dogs. A darkly lovely book.

The First Word: A Search for the Origins of Language, Christine Kenneally (Penguin, 2008)
Fascinating fundamentals. Kenneally gives us a remarkably readable history of language that includes the work being done to date with all “speaking” species.

Poor Folk, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846)
This is Dostoevsky’s first novel. I came across it in a hotel room in Italy where I was teaching at a conference. It was one of two books in English and I was touched by the lives of these people who have so little and share everything. Of course it doesn’t turn out well for the main character, Makar Devushkin. Fascinating to read in these dire economic times.

Later the Same Day, Grace Paley (Penguin, 1986)
Short stories about tightly-knit communities of people who are all deeply involved with one another. Paley’s gift for dialogue makes these stories worthy of many re-readings.

In the Next Galaxy, Ruth Stone (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)
Winner of the National Book Award, this is one that deserves its honors.

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe (W.W. Norton, 2008)
Marie Howe is a poet of grand simplicity. Written post 9/11 from the streets of New York, these are “talking” poems. You often feel Howe is sitting with you over a cup of coffee telling you what it’s like to be alive.

One Secret Thing, Sharon Olds (Knopf, 2008)
That this poet has not yet received the Pulitzer for her body of work is a disgrace. The woman cannot write a bad poem. If you want to know what it’s like to be a wife, a mother, a lover, a woman, read anything by Sharon Olds and feel the world shift on its axis. Like Preston, I will read anything she writes. This one is still on order at my local bookstore.

All-American Poem, Matthew Dickman (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)
New kid on the block Matthew Dickman will give you faith in poetry’s future. Human, humane, humongous! A Whitmanesque ride through the streets of the crazed American mind written with velocity and verve. A book for a new generation of poets.

Dismantling the Hills, Michael McGriff (Pitt Poetry Prize, 2008)
McGriff is another terrific young poet in the vein of Philip Levine. Quietly hard-edged image-driven narratives about ordinary Americans struggling to survive in the small town logging town of Coos Bay, Oregon.

Good Friday Kiss, Michelle Bitting (C & R Press, 2008)
Bitting’s poems are exciting, enticing, and refreshingly straightforward. Published by a new small press worth keeping an eye on.

What Narcissism Means to Me, Tony Hoagland (Graywolf Press, 2003)
Seriously funny. An exploration of American psychology through the eyes of a quirky poet who can describe a sunset like it’s the first night on earth. 

The Human Line, Ellen Bass (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)
A female, lesbian, Jewish, west coast Billy Collins. Poems for every ordinary extraordinary occasion.

Old War, Alan Shapiro (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)
Tonight I’m reading Alan Shapiro’s latest book, Old War. It’s a strange and delicate thing, and a romp as well. The reader falls into the world of the poems, and that world is filled with mist, light, ghosts, but also egg rolls, dogs, and suspension bridges. The titles of many poems bleed into the first line, e.g.:

Where
will you go.
little vagabond…

Clear
and unavoidable, that’s how you have to see it ...

Now
my daughter on the swing explained,
doesn’t exist ...

These poems draw me in with the first line, like a hooked fish. One of my favorites is the final poem in the book, Open Mike Night in Heaven. Every bad joke ever written and by the last line you’re not sure why you’re crying. Domestic, human, profound, the poems work on you, and work you over.

Well, after watching Stephen Colbert I’ve just added Hope on a Tightrope, by Cornel West.

This is where TV comes in handy. I get some of my best book recommendations from Colbert and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. This economic downturn may bring people back to books and libraries.

http://www.livehopelove.com/
Poet Kwame Dawes and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting introduce HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica, a multimedia exploration of the epidemic’s human face. The interactive website combines Dawes’s poetry with original music, essays, documentaries and personal video recollections from those living with the disease and those who care for them. The work has been featured in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post and public television’s Foreign Exchange; it is also the subject of an hour-long radio documentary scheduled for release this December.

http://www.goodreads.com/
Founded by Otis Chandler in January of 2007, the online networking site enables you to list which books you’re reading, have read, or are about to read.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/
And of course, Orion. Though for this one, I’m much fonder of the print version. It’s a work of art.

But for the books—first, some poetry books I took out of the library. Mostly these are what was available in MacDowell’s own collection, but also a few from the Peterborough Public LIbrary, which kindly offers colony fellows a card for their stay’s duration. These are books I wanted with me so that my shelves would not be empty, so that my instrument felt surrounded by an orchestra, so that my mind, heart, and ear could be inspired, awakened, reminded, and tuned. Of these, a couple were newly read, the rest old companions I saw were there and simply wanted at hand.

Czeslaw Milosz, The Collected Poems

Wislawa Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog

Jane Cooper, The Flashboat: Collected Poems

Charles Simic, Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk

Rae Dalven, translator, Modern Greek Poetry

Galway Kinnell, A New Selected Poems

Robert Frost, Collected Poems

Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems

Frank X. Gaspar, Night of a Thousand Blossoms

Christina Davis, Forth a Raven (an astonishingly beautiful and strong first book)

Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous

William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems

Robert Hass, Human Wishes

Arthur Waley, translator, Translations from the Chinese

I also carry a large number of poems in my computer, in a folder titled “Other People’s Poems.” Of these, I drew strong sustenance from a small, rhymed poem by Robert Creeley, “End,” which I memorized; two poems by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade; a sheaf of Jack Gilbert’s work; and some works of the Portuguese poet Pessoa.

These are the prose books I read while there:

Tolstoy, War and Peace (I was three-fourths through re-reading this when I left for this trip, and the new translation was too heavy to carry; I finished it with an old translation from the Chicago Great Books series Mortimer Adler edited, taken from the Peterborough library’s basement storage—their newer copy was out. Except for the pure oddity of reading about “Prince Andrew” rather than “Andrei,” I found the change of translations an interestingly untroubling experience—the ideas, the human explorations and portraits, remained electrifying. On this reading, as opposed to the one undertaken at nineteen, even the didactic sections were magnetic, and his theory of history startlingly postmodern in the way he proposes it transcends theory itself. For Tolstoy, this leads to a proof of God’s existence—a conclusion from which I diverge—but the analysis is thrilling nonetheless, in its fidelity to the multiplicity of being. And Tolstoy’s compassion, his enormous capacity to name and encompass and include with warmth every facet of human behavior and feeling, is also something that I found breathes through yet independent of actual sentences. I doubt you could touch it if you took a sledgehammer to the words, that compassion is so strong.)

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (A book I have always meant to read but never had; after reading Coetzee’s magnificent and archetypal Waiting for the Barbarians a year or so ago, I wanted to read this book so clearly its forbear, but also because, as our country is so perilously considering at this time (it’s mid-September as I write this, and the polls show a Presidential race inexplicably close) what kind of future we—and the planet—will enter, I felt the necessity of reading a book so chastening, blistering, about what such choices truly mean.)

Doris Grumbach’s Chamber Music (A novel, but one that draws from the two foundation artist colonies in this country, MacDowell and Yaddo; I always like to read one book with an immediate connection to an artist colony while I’m in residence there.)

Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife: A Memoir (Donald was at MacDowell when I was, and read on his departure a rather brilliant story he’d just completed, his first new piece in three years; this is the book I’ve been saving for the plane ride home.)

Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (Someone had left this out on a table in the MacDowell library, and I’d recently read reviews of the new film based on it. Roth has lost none of his acuity as the chronicler of the contemporary American male, as viewed through the lens of eros.)

Magazines

I brought with me a large pile of unread back issues of The American Poetry Review and The Threepenny Review, and found innumerable treasures in each.

Boarding Call!

For my own writing work, I’m deep into questions of scale at the moment—trying to understand how we became such a gargantuan nation, and what that means for the future. My book table at the moment is piled high with accounts of the Articles of Confederation, all of them a little dry.

And I’ve got a stack of drafts from fellows in our Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism—these are early-career journalists who spend a couple of weeks of the year together, first in Vermont and then in California, working on ambitious pieces that connect with the (broadly-defined) topic of ‘the environment.’ For me, always cursed with more curiosity than time, it’s an excellent way to have ten fresh sets of eyes out in the world, looking hard at things.

People send me an awful lot of stuff to read and I actually try to give almost all of it a fair shake. Then there’s a category of books that I’d call “required reading,” which is basically homework for whatever I’m working on myself. Finally there are a few books I manage to read for my own enjoyment.

Right now I’m reading the not-yet-published manuscript of a book by a SUNY-Albany professor named Donna Armstrong. The title is Seducing Ourselves: Public Denial in a Declining Complex Society. It addresses one of the more amazing phenomena of our time, attempting to apply cognitive science to explain the obdurate cluelessness of the U.S. public in its current mood and situation. It is a much-needed book, though I’m not convinced that knowing why we’re so dumb-and-passive will prompt us to behave otherwise. But it’s nice to know.

I’ve been drawn lately to what might be loosely called classical studies—since my formal education was such a botch (admittedly at my end, since I was a poor student). So I’m reading The Peloponnesian War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Greece, by one Nigel Bagnall, a British military historian. Pretty dry stuff in his telling, but I didn’t have the enterprise to go back to Thucydides. I have also been reading a superficial survey history of the Roman Empire by one Robert Payne (e.g., it disposes of Julian the Apostate in about three sentences), but I wanted a basic outline, and that’s what I got.

Back in the spirit of my own book, The Long Emergency, I received a copy of Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil, by Zachary Nowak (Green Door Press), which is just out. Among many seemingly similar titles, this one is a very thoughtful and unhysterical survival handbook based on the premise that our living conditions will probably head toward the gnarly end of the scale pretty soon. It has a nice, calm tone and much very sound information about things like water and wild foods.

Since I am these days fascinated and preoccupied with the national spirit of techno-triumphalism, I’m reading a couple of books about technological failure and how exactly it occurs: The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations, by Dietrich Dorner, kind of a snore so far (and I’m not convinced that these errors are avoidable, anyway), and Flirting With Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental, by Marc Gerstein, which is a livelier treatment of similar material.

Just to keep my frontal lobes from completely shriveling, I have been reading a thoughtful novel titled Night Train To Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier, mainly because my publisher laid a free copy on me last time I was in their offices. It’s definitely a Euro story about claustrophobic little lives, but even so it’s a nice relief from wondering about the destiny of Crossgates Mall and all the other crap that clutters up my mind. For pure enjoyment I am also reading the latest installment of John Richardson’s Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917 - 1932. Even apart from old Pablo himself, I am fascinated with the period between the first and second World Wars.

Finally, I keep at hand the wonderful and illuminating Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, by Dmitry Orlov. Orlov, a consummately brilliant comic writer, grew up to age 12 in the old Soviet Union, had an American teen education, and later as an adult computer software engineer made many trips back to Russia as it entered its post-soviet implosion. This is a book I continually come back to as much for its sheer entertainment value as its insight.

Oh, please don’t send me any more stuff for a while, okay?

Most of my reading for the past year has been related to two things. First, a decision I made a few years ago that I didn’t really have that much more time left on the planet, and that there were certain books that would be a lasting disgrace to leave unread (even if, in my deathly absence, there was no one left to feel or care about the disgrace). So it’s been a sort of great books reading experience for the last few years. Second, that reading led to a writing project that I recently “finished” called The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money and the Crisis of Nature.

So at the top of the list goes:

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This is the origin of my interest in the idea of the barbaric. It is, literally, a book that took a full human life to create. What’s wonderful about the book is not only the wealth of still mostly accurate knowledge about the last years (or centuries) of the Empire, but the writing persona of Gibbon himself. The footnotes, where he buries his most outrageous and arch ideas, are a joy to read. Set aside a couple of months for this one. And feel free to touch down and lift off as the interest of the text dictates.

Tacitus, The Histories. The tale of the debacle that followed the death of Nero up to the re-establishment of the Empire under Vespasian. What’s great about this book is its pithy, cynical summaries of the folly of the participants. For example, of Galba, the people were “as much offended at his efficiency and honesty as if these had been criminal qualities.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. As much as I’ve loved Nietzsche, I somehow missed this, his first great work. The thing I love most about Nietzsche is that with each passage I feel a deep sensual pleasure in the style and the arresting power of his utter originality. Nietzsche is the model of the truth-teller.

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism. Freud is to be savored. He aspired to science, but he was really a philosopher and stylist in the Nietzschean mold who sought not the truth but the full realization of his ideas, as if it were a complex puzzle he had to piece together regardless of whether or not it was true. Moses is one of his most iconoclastic, and therefore typical, creations.

Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce. A deeply compelling and utterly human (as opposed to scholarly) history of the origins of capitalism in the 15-18^th centuries. Braudel makes the revealing claim that market economies and capitalism are not the same thing, never mind what every economics textbook tells you. For Braudel, capitalism is a hierarchical structure of power (whose primary weapon is money) that has colonized a normal human activity. Not a “great book,” but it should be.

I’m embarrassed to say that this could go on for some time and not leave the last year. I’ve also read Cicero, Polybius, Thucydides, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Spinoza, much of Plato, Aeschylus’s Oresteia (the Ted Hughes translation is a miracle), and always more Nietzsche. The book that I put down in order to write this list is Karl Jaspers’s distillation of his spiritual existentialism, Way to Wisdom. Ah, the joys of being a professor locked into a Midwestern town surrounded by millions of acres of agricultural monoculture.

One more recommendation: Once I put The Barbaric Heart aside, I started filling in the gaps in my reading of Charles Dickens. If the above list seems too daunting, you can stay on my bookish path, laugh, and indulge your sense of outrage with businessmen, brutal teachers, rogues, and hypocrites by reading Nicholas Nickleby. 

For my research and writing:

Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, by Thomas de Zengotita. De Zengotita takes the idea that our lives are thoroughly mediated by technology and explores the consequences. Both brilliant and frustrating in the same way Marshall McLuhan’s writings were. He’s definitely onto something, but more thought provoking than convincing.

Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age, by Michael Bugeja. Another examination of the impact of technology on culture. This one stresses the ways that high technology has distorted and diminished the critical role of community in our lives. Having grown up in Iowa where corporate agriculture has pretty much demolished small town living, I find this an important issue to explore. It’s been done before, but Bugeja’s take on it is worth reading.

Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology, by Albert Borgmann. Anything Borgmann writes is worth reading. I particularly like this book because the contradictions between the teachings of the Gospels and the values inherent in our current relationship with technology are so rarely examined.

Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children from Birth to Age Five, by Lisa Guernsey. Sounds academic but it’s written for parents by a reporter. It’s actually the best compilation of research on the issue that I’ve found. It’s just the lessons she draws from that research that I often disagree with.

In response to a recent wave of advocacy for video games as educational tools, I’ve been asked by the Alliance for Childhood to write a critique of video games that takes those arguments into account. Two of the most thoughtful books promoting this idea come from two University of Wisconsin professors: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by Paul Gee, and How Computer Games Help Children Learn, by David Williamson Shaffer. In both cases, their diagnosis of what is wrong with American education is pretty good; their prescription for curing it is pretty bad. Their superficial dismissal of the critics of video game violence is deeply disappointing.

Everything that Stephen Talbott writes. Fortunately, much of it can be accessed through the Nature Institute website. See also http://www.netfuture.org/” title="Netfuture">Netfuture. I think Talbott is the best writer about our relationship with technology today.

For my teaching:

An Ethic of Excellence, by Ron Berger. I’ve been reading this short book with my students every semester for the last two years and constantly find new bits of practical wisdom in the stories told by this veteran sixth grade teacher/carpenter.

The Courage to Teach, by Parker Palmer. Another book I read over and over. Every semester I push two profound statements from this book at my beginning teacher education students: “Technique is what a you use until the real teacher shows up;” and “Good teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.”

Secret Spaces of Children, edited by Elizabeth Goodenough. Wonderful compilation of stories, essays and poetry reminding us of how important it is to provide children with a physical environment that they can make their own. Goodenough helped develop a PBS documentary on this theme that has just been released titled “Where the Children Play.”

For Curiosity:

Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben. My son (along with every other freshman entering Ohio Wesleyan University) has to read this book before classes start this fall. If only we could demand the same of the rest of our populace.

Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. This one hurts. I’m just working my way through this book. Having lived through the era and in the area when corn became king, this thorough investigation of the source of our food is filling in lots of blanks for me. It’s not a pretty picture so far, but it certainly strikes me as an accurate one.

For fun:

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, by Bill Bryson. The funniest book I’ve read in a long time. Bryson grew up in Des Moines but his stories about his youth should resonate with anyone who grew up (or wants to know what it was like for many of us to grow up) in the Fifties.

Taking their place are my new friends, a growing stack pertaining to my next nonfiction project. They include Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City; Andro Linklater, The Fabric of America, James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere, Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight; Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, David Halberstam, The Fifties; Joel Garreau: Edge City: Life on the New Frontier; John Stilgoe: Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the American Landscape; Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation and Tom Lewis: Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life. As I read these I will make notes about other books I need to acquire, and the tower will grow.

I am addicted to reference books. In addition to the usual collection of dictionaries, foreign language dictionaries, thesauri, and style manuals, I have a stack of field guides I consider so indispensable, they live on my desk. They are: Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape (a fantastic resource!); Leslie Day: Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City (with beautiful drawings by Mark Klingler); Dolores Hayden: A Field Guide to Sprawl; Roger M. Knutson: Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets and Highways; Kate Ascher: The Works: Anatomy of a City; Virginia Mcalester and Lee Mcalester: A Field Guide to North American Houses; Marcia Reiss: Architectural Details (I love architectural terms like “inglenook” or “jerkin-head"); and Gerald Foster, A Field Guide to Trains of North America (which was a gift and was eventually banned from weekend holidays by Bob, who declared it “just too geeky.")

In my free time, I recently finished a few really stellar books. Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy made me rethink a lot of assumptions about how the world should work. Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine was a brilliant screed against the fraudulent notion that the internet equals democracy. Terese Svoboda’s memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent had me totally gripped by her journey into her uncle’s traumatic WW II memories. And I was completely surprised by the totally fun and smart window onto the world of “urbex,” or urban exploration in L.B. Deyo and David “Lefty” Liebowitz, Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York.

So I try to be careful. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, travel, in particular, emphasizes the importance of choosing books warily. You don’t want to find yourself in Kenya for six months with a crappy novel in your backpack. I start thinking early about what I want to carry on a trip: a good trip book needs to be thick, but not over, say, three pounds, and most importantly by far: it has to be a sure thing.

I’ve failed often enough, but here are six of my recent successes:

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth. Supposedly when slave traders finally would take on their last slave and raise the sails and wait for the wind to carry them away from the West African coast, a terrible, collective moan would rise up from the people imprisoned below deck. Sacred Hunger is about imagining, in utterly convincing detail, the moment to moment particulars of the slave trade; it’s also about being human, about single-mindedness, about how people find systems and rules very comforting. I’m so glad I found Sacred Hunger; it is an under-acknowledged masterpiece.

Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life, by Carl Zimmer. At a time when scientists can grow human insulin inside the bodies of bacteria, or tiny, perfectly-operable human kidneys inside mice, when practically every handsoap on supermarket shelves is marketed as “anti-bacterial,” when more and more microbes are evolving resistances to antibiotics, when synthetic biologists are trying to create a kind of E. coli that can transform solar energy into fuel, we’re learning more and more that we are inextricably linked to our ancestors and neighbors, all the way down to our genome, even to the trillions of microscopic bacteria and viruses that swim in our guts. This is a terrific, timely book.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008: I try to read the O. Henry anthology every year. It is consistently excellent and its editor, Laura Furman, is superhuman: every single year she reads every short story published in every magazine that publishes stories in English. Then she picks her favorite 20 and, around May, Anchor puts them together in a book. There are some masters in the 2008 edition: Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, William Trevor, but there are also very good stories by very good writers you might not know: Olaf Olafsson, Yiyun Li, Rose Tremain. You can’t go wrong with this collection.

Michel Fourniret is a serial killer known as the Ogre of the Ardennes. Michel Tournier is a novelist, a frighteningly good one, and I’m in the middle of a translation of his 1970 novel titled The Ogre. Its protagonist is a big, creepy guy remembering his wartime adolescence. It’s dark as hell, poetic, and stuffed with obsessions and strangeness.

For thirty years, one of our best living American poets, Stanley Plumly, has worked on re-imagining the life and death, and life-after-death of John Keats. What is a poet’s ambition? What is poetic immortality? I’m not done with Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography yet; it’s dense, and it’s sort of a new kind of form: it’s a biography that assumes privilege to Keats’ thoughts and the moment-by-moment condition of his health and heart. If you like poetry, if you like the Romantics, if you like Plumly and/or Keats: this is a book worth checking out.

Wolves and Honey, by Susan Brind Morrow, is a regional history of the Finger Lakes region of New York, but that makes it sound sort of boring and this book is quietly transcendent. Morrow is one of our most underrated attention-payers: from beavers to coyotes, to a history of grafting, to an absolutely beautiful chapter on the lives of bees, her memoir consistently subverts the “I” in favor of tracing the infinite connections between the modern self and the larger world outside it. And she watches her language down to its rootlets: nectar, we learn, comes from Nek tar, “that which overcomes death” (91). Atom means “that which cannot be cut up” (76). Religio, the root of religion, literally means “tied up” (76). If you like Annie Dillard or Aldo Leopold or Mary Oliver, give Morrow a look.

There are books on that table and a single drawer beneath them. The march of books marks my days too: Seven Centuries of Verse, All the Pretty Horses, Walden, A Sand County Almanac, The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and a biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who never lost a cavalry fight. But the top book remains the same, The King James Version.  I’m continuously inspired by the Old Testament’s thunderous poetry, and I hold the Gospel in my heart as a vision of hope in a badly broken world.

And beneath the books, in the single drawer atop my socks and my great-great grandfather’s Mexican War medals, is a big-ass pistol, which I took to sleeping with several years ago, when I led a raggedy band of locals into federal court to challenge plans for a high rise condo along the beach.  It’s a deadly weapon, yes, but a lot less dangerous than the books I read.

Bonk, by Mary Roach. Funny science writing is a rare and precious thing, and Mary Roach reliably pulls it off—in this new book, about sex research, she finds her most, er, fertile ground yet. 

The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston. I missed this when it first came out, but when I opened it up this spring, I sucked it down in a couple of sittings. Irresistible narrative. 

The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy. I’m expecting my first child in September, and this is one of the very few general pregnancy guides I’ve found that speaks to women in a way that acknowledges both their brains and their choices. I don’t agree with everything in it, but it’s a good starting place.  The new edition of

Natural Acts, by David Quammen. David Quammen is an inspiration, and I’m happy to see this book of essays reissued and expanded. 

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, by George Johnson. George Johnson writes about science, especially physics, with so much grace and whimsy—I’m looking forward to reading his latest. 

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. I spent a couple of months crisscrossing Turkey two years ago, and since then I’ve been savoring Pamuk’s works—fascinating stories that probe the Turkish mindset. 

To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. My county in western Colorado chose this for a recent “Big Read” event, so I picked it up for the first time since ninth grade. Some of the lines, I realized, had been lodged in the back of my brain for decades—they’re so powerful that I recognized them immediately. 

High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver. A friend recommended I revisit this book of essays, published more than a decade ago, for Kingsolver’s wise thoughts on motherhood and writing. 

Disturbance-loving Species, by Peter Chilson. A powerful and unsettling book of stories about Americans in West Africa, and West Africans in the United States. 

The American West as Living Space, by Wallace Stegner. If you’re a writer in the western U.S., Wallace Stegner’s perspective can seem to permeate the very dirt. When my father-in-law sent me this little book, I realized that I hadn’t actually read any Stegner in years, and the three lectures reprinted here make me appreciate him all over again—for his humor, stubbornness, iconoclasm, and complicated love of the whole crazy region. 

The Sun magazine. As a magazine writer, I’m prone to skim magazines by the crateload, but I always take time to read The Sun. Like a good conversation, it wanders down plenty of side roads, and sometimes finds dead ends, but always touches on something profound.