#read2015

Literature read in 2015: Othello by William Shakespeare [50 / ?]

John Francis, The Ragged Edge of Silence Francis made a personal commitment to avoid car travel, and then to stop speaking, and so did neither for most of two decades. Dismissive and skeptical during the first few chapters, I slowly found myself quieted and calmed by Francis' voice, and this book more than any other became the spiritual framework for my PCT trek. Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher The setup for this biography is a sociologist trying to prove the point about how academics study what they do, in large part, because of internal or external narratives about themselves. Which is just a way of saying that like all other humans, they are not driven by purely logical or rational motives but by stories about themselves and the world. Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art, A Material and Techniques Handbook A slim primer to socially engaged art and how it might change the way we think about art education. Read when I helped out on the fellowship selection committee for A Blade of Grass. Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Strengths-Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow Reading for work, but useful – how do you use your particular set of actual strengths to lead, rather than trying to fit some stereotype of 'the leader'?

Maggie Nelson, Bluets Routinely recommended by fellow booksellers, I often picked this up and put it down after the first page, until a member of my poetry workshop this year read my work and said, "I think you're trying to do something like this..." Poetry, essay, some play on the latter, drawing on the spirit of the former – yes, that seems right. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius Biography is a typical way for me to enter the work of a philosopher with whom I'm not overly familiar, and that was my goal here. Monk's writing never quite held me, though, and I found myself snoozing as often as not toward the end of this. Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking Palmer is a public personality, the type that people love to hate, and I found myself subtly adopting that dislike without any real justification. So I read her book to see what I thought for myself. Doing so not only made me like Palmer (it did), but turned out to be, in fact, a transformative book for me, helping me confront an entire nexus of fears and realize what could be gained by just asking for help. Asking doesn't mark dependency and weakness, it sets up the possibility for creation and collaboration. Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions Daily meditations for those who take despair seriously. Damien Echols, Life After Death I was trying to expand my prison memoir reading (a genre I've read substantially more of than I would have expected) beyond those just by political prisoners. Echols' story is sad and unfortunate, but there's not much about the book that's particularly noteworthy. It does serve as an example of how ignorant and excessive police interference can also destroy the lives of poor white people. Ernest Herbert Williams, The Nature Handbook: A Guide to Observing the Great Outdoors Most guidebooks to plants and animals focus on learning names of species and how to distinguish one from another. This book, rather, teaches ways of observing and highlights types of patterns for which to look, and helps one to ask questions about the landscape. Why are all those desert plants so light in color? What causes trees to have needles rather than leaves? I found it a more useful way to train my eyes, to learn to see what is around me, and to engage in evolutionary thinking as part of daily life.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts How do we rebuild the ship of our lives, and the ship of their representation (the same boat, after all) in the midst of our very sailing? The Argonauts is not just the telling of a life attempting to answer this question, but an experimentation with storytelling whose form and methods seek to ask and answer it at the same time. John McPhee, Assembling California Photos would have made this book so much more useful to me while I was hiking through the landscape it described. As it is right now, gabbro and andesite are hopelessly confused in my mind. But I do know I have no interest in living anywhere on the San Andreas fault.

Chad Wriglesworth, ed., Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder How do you integrate poetry and forestry, political action and the writing life, the slow with the fast, all of these with care for the land? I feel like Berry and Snyder gave me some possible answers in this collection of their correspondence, and possible models for how I might live in the future. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild Nature and culture are not opposed – theyr'e interconnected and playing with one another, culture rising from nature and reflecting back on it, mirroring and mimicking. By Snyder's definitions, we can never lose nature, but we might lose the wild and our own wildness, and hence lose the best part of our culture, too. Or perhaps we make a practice of the wild, and forgo such loss. 

Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder Borrowed from another hiker during my time with Hike the Pipe. Some of Kingsolver's essays in this 2002 collection are dated now, but many are not, full of science, sanity, and moral hope. 

Jonathan Crary, 24/7 In a world where capital seeks to exploit every last second of the day, the biological necessity of sleep may be the most revolutionary force. James Baldwin/Richard Avedon, nothing personal A fascinating historical object, with Baldwin's text framing the photos of major personalities taken by one of last century’s major fashion photographers. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me Certainly the year's most relevant book, reading it has led, for me, to lots of conversations about being part of this lineage of “people who believe they are white” and what it means to no longer believe that.

John Dewey, Freedom and Culture If only Dewey’s prose style was as timeless as the set of questions he asks about how we care for and cultivate freedom, liberty, and a love of both, I would be putting this into everyone’s hands. Written in 1939, his concerns about a rise in fascism feel contemporary in 2015. David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening Not as detailed or as rigorous as I would have liked, but a nice overview for thinking about sound and silence and their different cultural meanings throughout history. Hendy hammers home the point that the past as some quieter, calmer time is a myth.

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me The title essay never gets old. Or maybe I should say instead: I hope sometime I no longer have occasion to reread these essays of Solnit's, and my voice is not doubted and scrutinized and silenced simply because it is female. I hope the title essay gets old.