Nature Literature discussion

Hello everyone,

Please list your suggestions for the December Book of the Month here. I'll take nominations until next Saturday, when the poll will go up.

Thanks,
Becky

I suggest Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. I haven't read it but it sounds very interesting and is on my to-read list. Thank you.

Since I'm reading it anyway...

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller

How about Pondlife: A Swimmer's Journal?

I nominate John McPhee's book The Control of Nature
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...

The Forest Unseen by David Haskell
http://theforestunseen.com/reviews/

The forest unseen is a fabulous book

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I read Forest Unseen awhile back - great book

Hi Everyone- I would like to nominate _The Devils' Commorant_ by King see link

The Devil's Cormorant: A Natural History

Sher wrote: "Hi Everyone- I would like to nominate _The Devils' Commorant_ by King see link

The Devil's Cormorant: A Natural History"

I need to read this whether chosen or not. We have cormorants here and the state thinks there are too many. I found one caught in a net in Memphremagog one day but nobody would come help it (it finally did release itself but it was awful to watch). Vermont calls them invasive and they disrupt the nests on Champlain every year. I want to learn why.

Here and Nowhere Else; Late Seasons of a Farm and Family by Jane Brox. Although it is a book about an aging family farm the author's sense of place encompasses the natural history of place

Pam wrote: "Here and Nowhere Else; Late Seasons of a Farm and Family by Jane Brox. Although it is a book about an aging family farm the author's sense of place encompasses the natural history of place"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
love it, Pam

Ray wrote: "The forest unseen is a fabulous book"
It truly truly is fabulous, isn't it? A delicious book. Haskell writes like a gourmet chef and you want to slowly savor each phrase. The beauty of his prose is key to the blending of science and keen insight that results in a dessert that melts on the mouth. Whether you are lingering over the lives of chickadees, salamanders or moth, being enchanted by a lichen's way of surviving by surrender or vibrating along with Katydids, you find yourself enriched by Haskell, made whole, drawn to go forth and live with the same exquisite pace of stillness that allows such wonder to infuse your life.

I will indulge in one long quote that reveals the essence of Haskell's devotion to his subject, the wild. He rarely is caught waxing long on his opinions, but near the end of the book, as he revels in squirrels basking in the sun, he seems to need to share the depth of his passion as both biologist and empath:

"Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity."

"This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience that kinship implies."

"And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology."

Chrissy wrote: "Ray wrote: "The forest unseen is a fabulous book"
It truly truly is fabulous, isn't it? A delicious book. Haskell writes like a gourmet chef and you want to slowly savor each phrase. The beauty of ..."
Indeed, his work is a blend of poetry and landscape based narrative. I believe he has in fact published a few poems.