Literary World
My Recommendations
100 Books I Can’t Live Without
(a work in progress)
AKHMATOVA, ANNA
Selected Poems
ALLENDE, ISABEL.
Eva Luna.
The Stories of Eva Luna.
AUSTIN, MARY.
Land of Little Rain.
“The Walking Woman” (short story)
BECKWITH, LILLIAN.
The Sea for Breakfast
BORLAND, HAL.
Hal Borland’s Book of Days.
Sun Dial of the Seasons
Twelve Moons of the Year
BRADLEY, MARION ZIMMER
The Mists of Avalon
CATHER, WILLA.
My Ántonia
One of Ours
The Professor’s House
Paul’s Case and Other Stories
CHESTERON, G. K.
The Ballad of the White Horse
COLETTE
Earthly Paradise
Evening Star
My Mother’s House and Sido
Retreat from Love
EISELEY, LOREN.
The Immense Journey
The Night Country
The Unexpected Universe
Fox at the Wood’s Edge (biography by Gale Christianson)
FISHER, M.F.K.
As They Were
Sister Age
Two Towns in Provence: Map of Another Town and a Considerable Town
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT.
The Great Gatsby.
GARCIA-MARQUEZ, GABRIEL.
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories.
GIONO, JEAN
The Solitude of Compassion. Seven Stories Press. NY, etc. 2002 (orig. pub. in France as Solitude la pitié 1973 Éditions Gallimard). Henry Miller’s long (pp.7-34) foreword to this collection of essays is worth the purchase price alone. Drawn from “The Books in My Life,” Miller’s studied recollection of Giono’s work (and Miller’s lifelong effort to have it translated for an American audience) perfectly prepares readers for the twenty essays that follow. Fans of The Whole Earth Catalog will surely remember Giono as the author of the now-famously embedded story of “The Man Who Planted Trees.” That story has become a set piece of Giono’s work but it provides a taste of what’s to come in longer, stronger efforts such as the novel The Song of the World. In the last essay of this collection Giono provides a glimpse of his intention to write such a novel.
But before we reach that final essay we are led up and down the forest and mountain paths that surround the author’s home ground of Manosque in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region of southeastern France. We meet animals, people, and the deepest parts of the hidden lives of both. While these essays focus on Giono’s chronic attachment to nature, they provide only a microscopic view into the world of this complicated and articulate writer whose work has to be described in two periods, separated by one transition; and whose literary models range from Homer to Stendhal. Giono was: a soldier, a pacifist, a naturalist, an observer of human nature and the natural world, a philosopher, a poet, a novelist, and the writer of essays. Reading this collection is a bit like staring at a street scene in front of you; the passers-by provide clues to their lives in everything they say and do, the way they look. Yet only an accomplished artist like Giono can draw us deeply into their lives, and by extension, into our own. This collection of essays is like reading a crystal ball. In it are contained all that is to come to fuller form in Giono’s life. Personally, “The Big (or Great) Fence” [it’s all in the translation!] (p.149) offered an act of forgiveness. “Prelude to Pan” (p.45) satisfied a constant yearning to experience the presence of this ultimate creature of Nature. A book that, even in its most disturbing moments—and there are plenty—provides both solitude and compassion along the way of the human journey.
GRUMBACH, DORIS.
Fifty Days of Solitude.
HAWKES, JACQUETTA.
The Land
HEANEY, SEAMUS.
Fieldwork.
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST.
A Moveable Feast.
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (short story)
HOGAN, LINDA.
Power.
Red Earth (poems).
HURSTON, ZORA NEALE
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
JOYCE, JAMES.
Dubliners (short stories)
“The Dead” (short story).
JOYCE, P. W.
A Social History of Ancient Ireland.
JUNG, CARL.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
KAVANGH, PATRICK.
Collected Poems.
KAZANTZAKIS, NIKOS.
Report to Greco.
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
Zorba the Greek.
KEANE, JOHN B.
The Bodhrán Makers
Owl Sandwiches and Other Stories.
KENYON, JANE.
Collected Poems.
One Hundred Daffodils (essays).
KOHL, JUDITH AND HERBERT
The View from the Oak: the Private Worlds of Other Creatures. Sierra Club/Charles Scribner’s Sons. NY/San Francisco. 1977. ISBN –684-15017-4 ($4.95 orig., $15.00 used).
I read this book a section at a time over several days, like a commonplace book. If we care in the least bit for life on Earth, none of us should be able to live without its wisdom. Based on an essay by Jacob von Uexkull titled A Stroll Through the World of Animals and Men, this work examines the umvelt—a German word created by Uexkull to define “the world around a living thing as that creature experiences it.” (p.14). The book explores these views in five ways: Worlds; Having a Place in the World; Time and Change; Tone, Mood, and Response; Views from the Oak.
If you are one of those daydreaming wonderers and observers of nature—in however small or large a way—if you have ever wondered, for example, how a bee (or a tick) sees the world, or what a moment of time is like to a bean plant, a snail, or a spider, you will want to go exploring here. The work provides scientific information (two tiny pits above a rattlesnake’s mouth are sensitive to minute temperature changes, for example) (p.39) grounded in a philosophical world view that transcends human perception.
The book is cataloged as “juvenile literature”. Perhaps that was true thirty years ago. These days, I would question whether many adults, even those attuned to nature, have the knowledge contained here. And if we are in the Age of the Last Child in the Woods, we should all have a read of this work, which can help restore a connection to what we think of as only our world. One suggestion: Read the last section first. It really sets the tone for the book and the view it encourages. Exercises throughout the text would be fairly easy to recreate as school projects or family events—or, just on your own. Still-useful bibliography included. For “passionate observers” everywhere.
KRAMER, SAMUEL NOAH & WOLKSTEIN, DIANE.
Inanna, Queen of Heaven
LEAST-HEAT MOON, WILLIAM.
Prairyerth.
LEVERTOV, DENISE.
Collected Poems.
Tesserae (memoir)
MOMADAY, N. SCOTT.
The Way to Rainy Mountain.
O’CONNOR, FRANK.
Complete Short Stories.
OLIVER, MARY.
At Blackwater Pond.
Selected Poems.
PAGNOL, MARCEL.
Jean de Florette & Manon of the Springs.
MARCEL PAGNOL. tr. W. E. van Heyningen. North Point Press. San Francisco: 1988.
ISBN 0-86547-311-0. $30.00 clothbound.
Perhaps one of the greatest love stories—and tragedies—ever told.
PEATTIE, DONALD CULROSS.
An Almanac for Moderns.
A Book of Hours
PYLE, ROBERT MICHAEL.
The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. Oregon State University Press. Corvallis, OR: 2011 (1993). rev. ed. ISBN 978-0-87071-602-7
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM.
Sonnets.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
“Romeo and Juliet”
“The Tempest”
SILKO, LESLIE MARMON.
Ceremony.
Garden in the Dunes.
SOBIN, GUSTAF. Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc
(University of California Press: 2000). $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780520222458
TAPOHONSO, LUCY
Blue Horses Rush In
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID.
Walden
The Journals (a lifetime’s worth of reading!)
VAN DER POST, LAURENS.
Jung and the Story of Our Time
The Heart of the Hunter
Venture to the Interior
Walk with a White Bushman
WALTON, EVANGELINE
The Books of the Welsh Mabinogion: Prince of Annwn; The Children of Llyr; The Song of Rhiannon; The Island of the Mighty
My Favorite Bookstores
I support independent booksellers. To that end, I try not to purchase books from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. The big chains don’t need my business—but my local bookseller probably does. And if I need a new book I can’t get from the library, they’ll know where to find it.
The Denver Post made it easy by writing an article about eight Denver indies. My favorites among them include The Book Bar, The Hermitage, The Printed Page, The Tattered Cover, and West Side Books.
https://www.denverpost.com/2017/04/28/best-bookstores-denver/
Here are three stores in Lincoln, Nebraska I like to frequent.
Badger’s Bookshop https://www.facebook.com/Badgers-Bookshop-432720110249701/
Bluestem Books http://bluestembooks.com/
Indigo Bridge Books https://indigobridgebooks.com/
A NoveI Idea Bookstore http://anovelideabookstore.com/
Two in Ireland:
An Café Liteartha, Dingle, Co. Kerry not giving away much on the web site, you’ll just have to visit!
5-1 Dykegate St, Dingle, Co. Kerry, V92 EE36, Ireland
Kenny’s Bookshop, Galway https://www.kennys.ie/
And one owned and operated by my old friend Jim Carroll in Paris:
San Francisco Book Company