On this upcoming family camping trip, there are so many things I should be reading. But what do I want to read? It must be something best consumed in brief snippets. I may take a volume of R H Blyth’s haiku translations. But even that is too much in the way of commentary (brilliant though it is) when what I want is something pared down to essentials, something crystalline, elemental, vivid, this-worldly. The only narrative I’m interested in is that of travel in this world.| Slant Books
This list is based partly on some reading I’ve been doing for a novel project now drawing near completion. Two themes govern the list. The more fun theme is that of adventure, romance, epic, enchantment—in a word, fantasy. The equally profound and urgent, if less obviously exciting theme, is that of georgics or the literary tradition that celebrates the cultivation of the earth, as well as its beauty and mystery and terror.| Slant Books
I pick books that I know exhibit a strong sense of place, and sometimes I choose to read something because I know it has to do with a certain city, country, region, climate, or landform. Recently I’ve been reading some literature that I’ve selected for what I can only call—to borrow a concept from quantum mechanics—its geopoetic entanglement. As I work on writing a novel set in the region of the upper Great Lakes, I’ve been looking to read literature set in a similar region.| Slant Books
Finding myself in another difficult season of life, needing to discover anew a Christian virtue ethics, I’m delighted that the Davenant Institute is publishing Traherne’s Christian Ethics, modernized and introduced by Colin Redemer, in four very portable volumes, of which the first two are now available.| Slant Books
A writer needs mythology. A writer cares about this world first, but he cares about representing it by means of signs and symbols which reveal this world to be both itself and more than itself: a fantasy or, better yet, a theophany. Some New World writers have not let the clear light of history stop them from building a new mythology. Though most people would not call it that, I would say that Thoreau was embarked on this task, teaching himself, especially in his posthumous books, to create t...| Slant Books