Books

Independence Days
by Sharon Astyk

Sharon Astyk is a modern day pioneer in the area of self-sufficiency. A mother of four, she is a passionate and intelligent advocate of making sure that your family has everything it needs to survive in the case of an emergency, as well as reducing our energy footprint, reducing or eliminating waste, and building stronger communities. Essentially, she is a proponent for permaculture in the home. Independence Days explores some of the reasons for self-sufficiency (her book Depletion and Abundance goes into great detail on this) and then tells you how, teaching step-by-step techniques, sharing recipes, offering suggestions and a wealth of resources. This book left me feeling inspired and empowered.

"The rhubarb is up. And it has me thinking about democracy, justice and what to have for dinner... through most of human history 'Who eat?' and 'What's for dinner?' have, in fact, been the central questions about justice. If we've forgotten that, I think part of the reason is that we've been kidding ourselves in our conviction that dinner is only dinner."

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
by Barbara Kingsolver

I've deeply enjoyed reading Kingsolver's fiction in the past, but now that I've read this, I must say I think her non-fiction takes the cake. In this gem of a book, she relates the experience of a year in the life of her family. Having recently relocated to a rural area in the Appalachian Mountains, she and her husband and children decide that they will live a full year eating only local produce, what the grow themselves, or just learn to live without. Her prose sparkles with wit and intelligence, and she delves into issues of agriculture, politics, economy, and culture with gusto. I was left inspired and exhilarated - this book will be a proud addition to my library and I look forward to re-reading it many times over.

"I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January."

Lavondyss
by Robert Holdstock

I'll start with a disclaimer. Lavondyss is actually the second installation in the Mythago Wood series. I loved the first book, it is a fabulous read, but Lavondyss took my breath away. So read the first book, and then read this one. The premise: Ryhope Wood is a mysterious forest in England that is much more than it appears from the outside. Populated by people and places out of legend and archetypes from mankind's subconscience, young Tallis feels drawn from a young age to forest beyond the fields. Building her own strange world of magic and vision, she ultimately must enter the wood in search of her long-lost brother whom she believes has become trapped inside. My summary does not begin to do this book justice, so you're just going to have to take my word for it - you won't be sorry.

"It was an odd feeling for the man who listened. All of the ingredients of the story were familiar to him, and yet this story was unfamiliar. It was unlike anything he had ever heard, and this was perhaps as much to do with the manner and nature of its presentation. At its heart it was just a fairy tale; but Tallis had invested it with something from herself which was so intriguing that it marked the journey as something quite different. There was so much that was implied by the story. Whole years, whole sequences of action had been covered by the girl's mysterious words: Many years passed. Years without vision."

Ahab's Wife, or The Star Gazer
by Sena Jeter Naslund

The novel opens:
"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last."
Naslund weaves seamlessly around the reader an epic story of intricate pattern. Literary and historical figures, frontier life and sea voyages and all the bounty of a life fully-lived, swell from one page to the next. This is a book with which to take your time, savor every sensual detail.

"I was so horrified by the whale's deliberate charge that I could not move. Then my own name flew up from below like a spear: 'Una!' Giles' voice broke my trance, and I scrambled down the rigging. No sooner did my foot touch the deck than there was such a lurch that I fell to my face. I heard and felt the boards break below the waterline, the copper sheathing nothing but decorative foil. The whole ship shuddered. A death throe."

Fluke
by Christopher Moore

I enjoy a good chuckle as much as the next person, but it's not every day that a book gets me to laugh out loud. This is the first book I ever read by Mr. Moore, and I laughed till I cried (no, that's not just a figure of speech). Although all of his books are hilarious, irreverent, and bizarre, this one holds a special place in my heart. As a side note, it's also responsible for some "colorful" additions to my everyday vocabulary. Read this one, then read everything else he's ever written. Over and over and over again.

Life of Pi
by Yann Martel

Following the Ulyssean journey of a small boy, Martel has given us a tale of man and nature, life and death, and the resilience of a childlike mind. One of the most provocative stories I've had the pleasure of reading, it is rich with spiritual and philosophical insight and serves as a literary bastion against the cynicism of a dog-eat-dog world:

"To chose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

The Best of Edward Abbey

I have a certain fondness for curmudgeons, and Edward Abbey is no exception. Perhaps best known for such controversial novels as The Monkeywrench Gang, I prefer by far his nonfiction essays and letters, many of which are collected here. Abbey fondly rages about the dangers and doldrums of the desert, the peaks and pitfalls of the mountains, and don't even get him started on Big City Life. Opinionated and caustic, his passionate love affair with this world shines through all the ranting, only brighter for the contrast. From "Science with a Human Face":

"Walking up the trail to my lookout tower last night, I saw the new moon emerge from a shoal of clouds and hang for a time beyond the black silhouette of a shaggy, giant Douglas fir. I stopped to look. And what I saw was the moon - the moon itself, nothing else; and the tree, alive and conscious in its own spiral of time; and my hands, palms upward, raised toward the sky. We were there. We are. That is what we know. This is all we can know. And each such moment holds all that we could possibly need - if only we can see."

Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is a literary symphony, a collection of seemingly unrelated stories and themes that, as you get farther and farther along, you realize couldn't possibly exist without each other. Mitchell takes the reader on a journey through the written word, in its various forms, through the lives of six characters, each in a different place and time. With an impeccable ability to speak in each of his characters' true voices, he explores the cycles of time, of nature, and of civilization. This story is nothing short of stunning.

"Dr. Goose shook his head, knotted loose his 'kerchief & displayed its contents with clear pride. 'Teeth, sir, are the enameled grails of the quest in hand. In days gone by this Arcadian strand was a cannibals' banqueting hall, yes, where the strong engorged themselves on the weak. The teeth, they spat out, as you or I would expel cherry stones. But these base molars, sir, shall be transmuted to gold & how? An artisan of Picadilly who fashions denture sets for the nobility pays handsomely for human gnashers.'"

Balkan Ghosts
by Robert D. Kaplan

Part travelogue, part socio-political history, Kaplan travels through the Balkan region, painting a picture of the past, present, and future, of these war-torn nations. A devastating topic by any estimation, Kaplan slices through the political rhetoric with keen insight and an uncanny ability to understand the mental workings of another culture, one of both profound beauty and ecstatic violence. Instead of just reciting dates and "facts", he helps the reader to fathom the question of why. From his essay on Croatia, "Just So They Could Go to Heaven":

"The past in Zagreb was underfoot: a soft, thick carpet of leaves, soggy from rain, that my feet sank in and out of, confusing with the present. Leaving the railway station, I walked through curtains of fog tinted yellow by coal fires, the chemical equivalent of burning memories. The fog moved swiftly and was rent by holes, a fragment of wrought iron or baroque dome appeared momentarily in fine focus. There. That too was the past, I realized: a hole in the fog you could see right through."

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer

A precocious young boy in New York City has lost his father in the World Trade Center attack. One day, he finds a key in his father's closet and sets out on an impossible quest to find the lock it will fit. The book is caught between past and present, ideas and reality, memories and wishes, and it had me laughing aloud one moment and crying the next. Foer's is a huge talent, using all the tools at his disposal to move the reader in sympathy. A quote from our young hero:

"I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was."

Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden

You may have seen the film, and as visually stunning as it was, it falls flat when compared with the rich narrative that Golden spun in this book. Written in the first-person voice of a successful geisha looking back over the course of her life, his use of color, texture, and myriad intricate details, serve to mirror the aesthetic ideal of the Japanese culture at the time. The geisha have long been misconstrued in the west as being ostentatious prostitutes, but Golden deftly paints them as cherished works of living art, all the while examining the essential nature of beauty itself.