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Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
James Mustich
Written in the middle of the 1960s, yet composed largely from journals kept a decade earlier during the author’s summers as a backcountry ranger at the Arches National Monument (“among,” as he puts it, “the hoodoo rocks and voodoo silence of the Utah wilderness”), Desert Solitaire evokes the paradox...show more
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Flatland
Edwin A. Abbott
A novel of mathematical whimsy, Flatland is set in the peculiar world that provides the book’s name and is home to its putative author, A. Square, a two-dimensional being in a world inhabited by lines, triangles, circles, and polygons. Ingeniously composed as a kind of dystopian memoir, Flatland is ...show more
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander
Many years ago my wife and I spent a week walking through Umbria, from hilltown to hilltown, marveling at many things, not least the distinctive beauty of each town. Reading Christopher Alexander’s provocative theory of architecture, elaborated in this rich and philosophic book, has given me words t...show more
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
On January 8, 1981, journalist and former television host Isabel Allende, a Chilean political exile, sat down in Venezuela to write a letter to her nearly 100-year-old grandfather in an attempt to bridge the distance between her present and her family’s past. She began with an anecdote he had told h...show more
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
Dr. Elizabeth Renee Fajardo was runner-up in our virtual Battle with Denver Public Library on January 16, 2021 with her advocacy of Rudolfo Anaya's novel Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya was a self-taught writer who lived and breathed the culture, history, and landscape of the southwest. "Godfather of Chican...show more
The Arabian Nights
Is there an entry in the annals of story more charming than the tale of the brave and brilliant Shahrazad, who, by dint of cunning and invention, puts off her death at the hands of King Shahryār for a thousand and one nights? Bewitching the king with a nightly dose of suspenseful storytelling, she s...show more
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
Robert Macfarlane
Exploration through a landscape within the landscape, with lyrical and moving writing to entrance and inspire.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey
Robert Macfarlane
An extraordinary journey into landscapes and what lies beneath them, in relation to humans through deep time. Exquisite writing and explorations of the core issues of our time.
The Wild Places
Robert Macfarlane
An exploration of wilderness within our developed world, and what it means to humans to sustain it, experience it, and be moved by it. With writing that inspires and uplifts one's heart and mind.