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. 

We read poetry aloud in our home (though not, my wife and daughter thank their lucky stars, my own compositions), and springtime, after the threat of frost is gone, is Frost-time. As in Robert, who put his trust in “insubordinate Americans,” bless his crotchety heart. North of Boston is my favorite of his books. I also dip into my cull 1858 copy of the Rufus Griswold-edited Poets and Poetry of America. Griswold was a pompous-ass anthologizer who made the fatal (to his posthumous reputation) mistake of taking on Poe, but this volume is filled with seasonal delights: “April” by Nathaniel Parker Willis, “Spring is Coming” by the deaf-mute poet James Nack, William D. Gallagher’s “May,” William Cullen Bryant’s “June,” and the doomed Charles Fenno Hoffman’s “To an Autumn Rose.”

Next month, my daughter and I will reenact our annual summer solstice reading of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, the loveliest evocation of a childhood summer I have ever read.

I like to read a baseball book to kick off (if I may mix sports metaphors) the spring. This year I finally got around to Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, the diary of an aging knuckleball pitcher on the sadsack expansion Seattle Pilots of 1969. An unflinchingly honest and melancholy delight.

Alan Pell Crawford’s new biography of Thomas Jefferson in his waning years (Twilight at Monticello) is sensitive and intelligent and gives deserved emphasis to the “ward republic” plan Jefferson drew up late in life—just the kind of radical decentralization we need in our Washington-Wall Street-Hollywood-centered nation.

Orion readers in particular will enjoy James Howard Kunstler’s new novel World Made by Hand, his dystopian—or is it utopian?--vision of an Upstate New York village after the bombs fall.

Finally, let me plug several of my favorite novels, books which never fail to refresh or amaze me: The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett; Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis; The Octopus by Frank Norris; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; Burr by Gore Vidal; and Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry.

Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism has just been published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan.

Having recently finished a new book of nonfiction, I am taking a vacation from the essay by writing a sequence of short stories.  This project has led me to read or reread fiction in which the characters and events are powerfully influenced by natural settings.  The works that have stirred me most deeply include Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Angle of Repose, and Crossing to Safety; Jim Harrison’s Dalva, True North, and Return to Earth; Wendell Berry’s A Place on Earth, Fidelity, and Jayber Crow; and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, which is a reworking of his trilogy, Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone.  I’ve also been rereading Chekhov’s stories, for the sake of his broad social vision and his compassionate treatment of characters, and I’ve been reading for the first time story collections by Charles Baxter. 

My thinking about the parlous state of the world has been clarified by Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and Edward O. Wilson’s The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.  My hopes for our species have been strengthened by Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World and by Robert Michael Pyle’s Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place.  I’ve also been heartened by In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens, a volume edited by Charles Goodrich, Kathleen Dean Moore, and Frederick J. Swanson. 

While I read articles about politics on-line, I read few books on the subject, because they tend to date quickly.  However, recently I did read with interest Road from Ar Ramadi by Camilo Meija, one of the first Iraq veterans to become a conscientious objector

Reading Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2003 by Robert Hass sent me back to reread his The Essential Haiku, which in turn sent me back to reread Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the North and Other Writings and David Hinton’s Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China.  These Asian or Asian-influenced poems set just the right mood for reading Gary Snyder’s recent collection of essays, Back on the Fire. 

Here’s what I have read recently, have been reading, or am hoping to crack open soon:

Lots of classic fairy tales to my three-and-a-half year old son at bedtime.  Lately he likes “Jack and the Beanstalk” (I probably read this tale once a week) whose young environmentally unconcerned protagonist seems to me quintessentially American: Into whose yard (life!) does the chopped-down beanstalk fall?  Since now he’s got the golden egg-laying hen, does this question (disaster!) worry Jack at all? 

There’s so much strong poetry being published these days that it’s difficult to mention just a few collections, but here are some newly released titles I’ve encountered in the past several months.  Chekhov said that for a description of the natural world to be truly useful in literature, the landscape must become a character itself, and be as well-drawn as any human figure in the work.  The books below, which cover collectively cover a fairly wide range of aesthetic territory, are written by poets who put Chekhov’s dictum brilliantly to work.

Circadian, Joanna Klink. 
A Thief of Strings, Donald Revell. 
Some Heaven, Todd Davis.
At the Drive-In Volcano, Amiee Nezhukumatathil.
As Is, James Galvin (galleys). 

Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born): Told in the voice of Trond Sander, a seventy-ish-year-old man in self-imposed exile in Norway’s deep woods, this remarkable novel immersed me in its deceptively spare prose and masterfully woven narrative threads.  A meditative/ contemplative book with plot (if such a combination is possible), Out Stealing Horses is best read slowly, aloud if possible, and with ample time set aside to mourn—not necessarily the story, but that there are no more pages left to turn—after finishing. 

The Known World, Edward P. Jones.  Late, as usual, coming to this debut novel, which won the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award.  Dubbed by many critics “instantly canonical” (a label which will probably frighten more readers than it attracts), the novel tells the story of Henry Townsed, an African-American farmer and former slave who is mentored by William Robbins, Manchester County (VA)’s most powerful figure.  Though epic and historical in scope, everything about this incredible book is original.

Li: Dynamic Form in Nature (Wooden Books, 2003), David Wade.  Wade is an architect who has spent years studying the “extraordinary families of surface patterns that nature throws up at every scale.” A sister science to Feng Shui, the study of these shapes was known in ancient China as Li.  Compelling illustrations of nature’s dynamic designs—wave patterns, leaf designs, vermiculated markings—and brief but detailed explications of the forms make this small book a great companion in the woods.

Rocky Mountain Natural History (Raven Editions, 2003), Daniel Matthews.  A field guide for those who go afield in fear of guides, this 656-page tome is by turns hilarious, stern, ominous, playful, instructive, instructed, and is more linguistically alive ("Sphagnum species specialize") than any member of the field guide family I’ve ever encountered. 

Real Sofistukashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, Tony Hoagland.  Winner of the Mark Twain Award from The Poetry Foundation for humor in poetry, Hoagland opens this provocative collection of essays with a piece that likens the charkas of kundalini yoga to specific energy centers in various poetic approaches, and closes with a piece called “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People.” In between these bookends, the acclaimed poet is equally perceptive, irreverent, dead-on, boisterous, and what any reader leery of Poetry (with a capital P) is likely looking for in criticism. 

Breaking the Alabaster Jar, Li-Young Lee: A collection of interviews with the cosmically-charged poet Lee.  In each of these interviews, there occurs a moment when Lee simply blows away/baffles/befuddles/knocks-into-the-stratosphere his interviewer with an answer, such as: “Sacred reality is the saturation of presence in the world.  Wind and trees and clouds and people and rocks and animals are all saturated with presence….I think that the saturated condition is the sacred condition.  There has always been only one subject—being.” This book is evidence of an incredible mind and soul at work in the outer reaches, and guaranteed to knock the reader off his/her rocker.

Complete Poetry and Letters, John Keats.  Sustenance.  And to accompany:

John Keats, W.Jackson Bate.  Bate, winner of the Pulitzer for this biography, cheated to write this book because he was actually Keats’ shadow in a previous incarnation—or so it seems.  The inspiring and daunting spirit of Keats is made palpable in this 700-page volume, which renders the details of Keats’ brief life so meticulously that it seems Bate knew even Keats’ facial expression when the poet penned: “The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party.”

Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest, Eric Nisenson.  A thorough and moving informal biography of Coltrane that details the virtuoso saxophonist’s intertwined artistic and spiritual quests.  At the root of Coltrane’s determined efforts to constantly expand his musical repertoire (even if it meant losing his audience) was his belief that artistic growth equaled spiritual growth, and thus a continued “efficient mastery” of music he had already succeeded with meant risking spiritual stagnancy.  Such a scenario was simply not acceptable to one of the most gifted musicians of his generation, who said: “You can improve as a player by improving as a human being.”

Chris Dombrowski’s Kana appeared in Orion‘s March/April 2008 issue.

American Crisis, Southern Solutions: Where We Stand Volume 2, edited by Tony Dunbar
Why I Came West: A Memoir, by Rick Bass
Our Stolen Future, by Theo Colburn et al
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam
Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Marquez
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

Periodicals:
Acres USA: A Voice for Eco-Agriculture (highly recommended)
Orion
The Nation
Georgia Farmers & Consumers Market Bulletin

In no order, then, some terrific tomes:

Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey. Best novel about Oregon ever. Rivers, rain, prickly independence, timber economy, moss, firs, muddled love affairs, the stuttering urge for community, and rain is the main character.

Wildmen, Wobblies, & Whistlepunks, by Stewart Holbrook. Best Oregon writer ever, all due respect to Barry Lopez and Ursula LeGuin and Ken Kesey and Beverly Cleary. Hilarious, penetrating, and unmatched for close attention to what Holbrook called lowbrow history—loggers, cops, thieves, con artists, prophets, and other mountebanks. And a verve and zest in his prose that make you happy to be American.

Winter Count, by Barry Lopez. With total respect for his many other books, this one is magical—surfs beautifully along the line between fiction and not. Kind of a masterpiece.

Ellen Tibbets, by Beverly Cleary. Could have picked any of ten books by Cleary, and this leads to one of my favorite pub arguments: If the greatest virtue of books is that they wake up kids to a lifetime of reading, and the greatest kids’ writers in American history are Beverly Cleary and E.B. White and William Steig, than aren’t they the greatest writers in American history, making Faulkner and such look like pikers?

The Journals of Lewis and Clark. A basic text for Americans; the Iliad and Odyssey of our literature, as scholar Frank Bergon says. And a great read. They were mostly always wet, grizzlies wanted to eat them all the time, and there was a baby on board. Wow.

Every War Has Two Losers, by William Stafford. Another basic text for Americans. I am beginning to think that no one ever thought and spoke more clearly about the idiocy of violence than Twain and Stafford, and Stafford’s line violence is a failure of the imagination that ought to be tattooed on everyone’s forehead so we see it all day every day.

For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard. The greatest spiritual book I ever read, period. Odd, weird, dissonant in the beginning, but it builds and builds and it is as close to written genius as I have seen since I first read Robert Louis Stevenson.

Meditations from a Moveable Chair, by Andre Dubus. A wonderful short story writer, but his last two books were collections of astounding essays that catch, in lyrical and sometimes heart-rending fashion, the deep spirit of Catholic life. Haunted, penetrating, lyrical, mesmerizing.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather. About as lean and taut a story as I have ever read, and a deep shivering prayerfulness that resonates for a very long time after you finish. Bet you haven’t reread it for many years. Trust me—read it again.

Lions, Harts, Leaping Does, by J.F. Powers. With Flannery O’Connor, the great Catholic writer of the 20th century, and hardly known outside that ancient thorny brilliant cruel amazing church. But what an ear, what an eye, what gentle patience!

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott. In the way that William Faulkner and Eudora Welty caught Mississippi, and Joseph Mitchell caught New York City, and Walker Percy (a Catholic) caught Louisiana, and Edwin O’Connor (a Catholic) caught Boston, McDermott masters Irish Catholic New York, and in a real sense Irish Catholic America in the latter half of the twentieth century, which was a great deal of Catholic America. No one in fiction limns the dreams and drags, the grace and grit, of the urban American Irish Catholic experience with her resonance and power.

God Laughs & Plays, by David James Duncan. Hilarious, furious, piercing, howling, stunning. Wow.

The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes. Basic Australia text. First book to really poke into the convict economy and the reality of a history that England forgot and Australia chose to ignore for two centuries.

Cloudstreet, by Tim Winton. Masterpiece. Haunting novel of western Australia. And once you dive into Winton then you have to read The Turning, another terrific book, and then maybe his hilarious Lockie Leonard children’s books.

Remembering Babylon, by David Malouf. Perhaps the greatest of living Australian writers, with all due respect to Helen Garner and Peter Carey. Another haunting masterpiece. And Malouf, bless his heart, has written about five terrific novels—not to mention a new collected stories. And an opera. And a lean lovely memoir of growing up in Brisbane. Plus he’s a courtly gentleman. And he dresses beautifully. I hate Malouf.

Dancing With Strangers, by Inge Clendinnen. A meticulous and beautifully written account of the oddly sweet first year of white contact with aboriginal culture in what would be called Sydney. Just a lovely book.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation, by Helen Garner. A remarkable exploration of “the ragged hole between ethics and the law,” as Garner says. Famous as a novelist, Garner’s even better as a nonfiction writer.

The Game in Time of War, by Martin Flanagan. Ostensibly a sportswriter, Flanagan (whose brother is the novelist Richard Flanagan) is to my mind the most riveting of Australian writers, because he is the one most concerned and eloquent and angry and openhearted about public honesty and possibility, about who Australians really are and might be. In a sense the indispensable writer of his nation, for no one else keeps poking for solutions like he does, and he does so with a terrific eye for grace under duress.

There’s plenty more—I mean, Tim Flannery is the Australian Stephen Jay Gould but a much better writer than the late Stephen, and Richard Flanagan just wrote a really chilling prescient novel about the West’s paranoia about terrorism and what it means, and you could read all of Helen Garner and never find a dull sentence, but I have to get going, I am supposed to be making dinner, and I got all these kids, and…

The current guilty pleasure is the sprawling novel Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, wherein the head of the Mumbai mafia speculates on a cold-swept mountain of his native Afghanistan that light is not God, but that “light is the language of God. Light may be the way God speaks…. to us.” Nine hundred pages of metaphysical gangsters by an ex-con who escaped from jail and fled to India.

Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, by Mark Buchanan seems very apt right now given our inept leaders, corrupted policies, and our refusal to embrace science as being of service to governance and planning.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan reminds me that we need a manifesto as clear and elegant for forests, water, children, oceans, mothers, coral reefs, and deserts.

I am reading Scott Russell Sanders’s A Private History of Awe because it reminds one of the revelations of childhood that are too early or easily put aside.

I am reading for the first time Barbara Novak’s Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825-1875, which chronicles how the magnificence of the American landscape became conflated with God and destiny, only to be dismembered by the Civil War, Darwin, and technology.

I am reading the galleys of Forests Forever by John Berger to be published this year, a wonderful book that places the forests right into the hearth of civilization, what George Perkins Marsh and others have done before.

Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms describes the burgeoning world of social networks. Networks are like the atmosphere or water in that they are so familiar and yet we know so little about them. Networks become more mysterious the deeper you delve; yet it is critical to understand networks because the world is attempting to reorganize itself primarily from the bottom up.

First Democracy by Paul Woodruff offers a sobering assessment of what democracy really means, where it comes from, and what it means to enable and sustain one.

Finally, I am reading a pamphlet by The International Forum on Globalization entitled “Manifesto on Global Economic Transitions.” It is a sobering, concise call for global system change signed by some of the truly great thinkers of our time.

One pair is Little Heathens by Mildred Kalish and Horizontal World by Debra Marquart.  Both are about growing up on hard-scrabble, midwestern farms, but they couldn’t be more different in tone and style. Kalish finds contentment where Marquart finds burning restlessness. Marquart describes dairy farming as akin to slavery; Kalish’s childhood relationship to cows is downright transcendental. Both have plenty of experience with the cream separator in the milking parlor but use entirely different vocabularies to describe how the apparatus works. Both are wonderful books and manage to find beauty without sentimentality.

Another pair is The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis and Toxic Exposures by Phil Brown. These I just reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement. Davis’s book documents the ways in which evidence for environmental links to human cancer have been sidelined, buried, revised away, and discounted. Davis, who is a cancer epidemiologist with a long history in public service within the federal government, is a formidable authority on the topic. She argues that the war on cancer is little more than a cunning re-enactment. Phil Brown’s book looks at the ways that citizen activist groups have struggled to rescue this lost knowledge and create new knowledge about environmental health, albeit contested, with the help of progressive scientists.

My favorite story from Brown’s book is about the ways in which, during the 1960s, the Black Panthers and Young Lords insisted on lead paint abatement in housing even while the industry and government still denied that low-level lead poisoning was a problem for children. By so doing, scientists then had a population of children with declining lead levels and could scientifically demonstrate that, indeed, background lead exposure was harmful to children’s brains. Brown’s book made me realize that the precautionary principle is not just good for public health. It’s also good for science because, when enacted, precaution can provide researchers with unexposed control populations that make demonstrable proof possible.

Last Evening on Earth
by Roberto Bolano

The Curtain
by Milan Kundera

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant (galleys)
by Alexandra Fuller

Wizard of the Crow
by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman

Varieties of Disturbance
by Lydia Davis

Unbowed
by Wangari Maathai

Adam Zagajewski—New and Selected Poems

Frances Ponge—Selected Poems

The Age of American Unreason (galleys)
by Susan Jacoby

God Bless—A Political/Poetic Discourse
H.L. Hix

Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
by Gil Courtemanche and translated by Patricia Claxton

Falling Man
by Don DeLillo

Leaves of Hypnos
by Rene Char

Rock Me On the Water
by Renny Russell

Shallow Water Dictionary
by John R. Stilgoe

The Autobiography of an Egret
by E.A. McIllhenny

Cadillac Jukebox
by James Lee Burke

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz

Straw Dogs
by John Gray

The Open Road—The Global Journey of the XIVth Dalai Lama (galleys)
by Pico Iyer

Insecure At Last
by Eve Ensler

Evolution
by Jean-Baptiste De Panafieu, Patrick Gries, translated by Linda Asher