The urge to read is mysterious and fickle. Sometimes I’ll go months without reading anything but the Dr. Bronner’s soap label while I’m in the shower. Then a book finds me, or I find it, and the next thing I know it’s nine hours later and I’m still on the couch, swaddled in a crumb-dusted blanket and surrounded by empty seltzer cans like a raccoon in its trash nest.
The trash-nest state is depressingly elusive for me, because there are simply too many books one could read, and it’s impossible to live inside all of them at once. That’s not how time works. And then a great sense of futility creeps in.
I cannot offer you a time machine to address this problem in your own life. But I can offer you some book recommendations from three Vermont writers — state poet laureate Bianca Stone, National Book Award-winning novelist M.T. Anderson and Kirkus Prize-winning author Ken Cadow — to help you pass the 7,000 years of winter still ahead of us.
Bianca Stone recommends…
The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society by Carl Jung, Berkley, 128 pages. $12.95.
A plea after the devastations of World War II, psychoanalyst Carl Jung emphasizes the urgency of self-reflection in the overwhelming and seductive sway of mass society. The illusion of statistical “truths” in which we stand in awe and our predisposition to blindly follow ideologies and societal trends all lead to a lack of critical thinking and loss of individuality. The all-too-familiar situation of projecting evil onto the other and avoiding uncomfortable aspects of our own psyche comes at a devastating cost — on a micro and macro scale. To Jung, the way forward must be a personal encounter between individuals, with nothing less than dogged, steadfast soul-searching to make the unconscious conscious.
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry by Edward Hirsch, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pages. $18.95.
Edward Hirsch’s stunning, accessible book on poetry is appropriate for all levels of experience. Hirsch emphasizes the relationality of poetry: “It is the social act of a solitary maker,” Hirsch notes. Deepening our engagement with poetry is, in fact, a vital act of self-discovery and discovery of one another. Hirsch shows poetry as it is: a vividly enjoyable experience that makes bearable the unbearable truths and mysteries of existence.
Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated by Stephanie McCarter, Penguin Classics, 608 pages. $22.
The interesting thing about myths (and all great poetry) is that they keep offering up more, even thousands of years later. We should continue to read the great epic poems because their stories continue to speak to the human condition. Translator Stephanie McCarter notes in her introduction that at the heart of this poem lies one constant theme: power and how it transforms us, both those who have it and those who don’t. We can see how important this issue remains!
Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences for Astronauts by Dara Barrois/Dixon, Conduit Books & Ephemera, 80 pages. $18.
Strangeness, feeling and a subtle, dark hilarity — any book by Dara Barrois/Dixon is a win, but this latest has all the innovative, uncanny wisdom you can hope for. Here is a poet having fun (the title says it all), reveling in rich play, delighting in the mischievousness of language — but with distinct grief and complexity of emotion. Reading these poems, one feels … well, not less alone. But more OK with that immense, crushing, innate human loneliness we carry around.
Bianca Stone is Vermont’s poet laureate. She lives in Brandon. Her most recent poetry collection is What Is Otherwise Infinite. She is the creative director of the Ruth Stone House, an organization dedicated to fostering poetry, poetic study, the arts, and the preservation of her grandmother Ruth Stone’s legacy and house in Goshen.
M.T. Anderson recommends…
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Courtesy of Erin Thompson
- M.T. Anderson
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, Saga Press, 224 pages. $16.99.
Two assassins assigned to kill each other during a war fought throughout history on many worlds slowly come to realize that they might be in love. It’s a psychopathic sci-fi meet-cute, lushly poetic, richly imagined and sly. Yes, poetic sci-fi. It can happen.
This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David J. Silverman, Bloomsbury Publishing, 528 pages. $22.
Famously, the Wampanoag sachem we call Massasoit extended hospitality to the starving Plymouth settlers and saved them from famine. Four decades later, those settlers hunted down Massasoit’s son Metacomet and slaughtered him in the midst of one of the bloodiest wars in our history. This nonfiction book forces us as New Englanders to ask what caused this shift from cautious friendship to violent conflict — and what this stain on our nation’s history means today.
The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Persephone Books, 240 pages. $38.
It’s World War II, and Lucia Holley’s husband is off fighting while she tries to hold together the home front and the family. She writes cheery letters to keep her husband’s spirits up — he doesn’t like to be bothered — but there’s a little problem: Her aged father has accidentally killed a man, and Lucia has been forced to hide the body. Soon, she attracts the attention of both a mobster and an investigating detective. Are they hitting on her or threatening her family? Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s thrillers always play off the claustrophobic demands of midcentury femininity; this one will have you sweating bullets.
Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day by Dan Nott, Random House Graphic, 272 pages. $23.99.
This nonfiction graphic novel for young people won a Vermont Book Award this year, and it’s easy to see why. In simple drawings and thoughtful text, Dan Nott reintroduces us to utilities we take for granted, demystifying them, giving us some history, explaining how they work, and pointing out how the way we think about them blinds us to both their real costs and their miraculous benefits.
National Book Award winner M.T. Anderson is the author of Newbery Honor book Elf Dog & Owl Head and of Nicked, one of NPR’s best books of 2024. He lives in East Calais.
Ken Cadow recommends…
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File: Justin Cash
- Ken Cadow
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages. $28.
What is the story of how the education system has narrowed its focus to recognize — and celebrate — a tinier and tinier spectrum of actual learning? And what is the cost to democracy? How might our citizenry feel if mandatory schooling placed equal value on developing a person’s capacity to contribute, in addition to maintaining the hope that they’ll get into Harvard? Is our definition of “equality” that everyone deserves an equal chance to get into a top school and join the leisure class? Michael J. Sandel explains the need for American society to better laud the dignity of work, and the worker, at every level, and he offers profoundly possible solutions to make this shift.
James by Percival Everett, Doubleday, 320 pages. $28.
What a book. Such a page-turner from beginning to end. You begin to imagine what it must have been like never to be able to let your guard down or pause for a breath. James, aka “Jim” from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells his story, a story of slavery and repression just before the Civil War.
One Man’s Meat by E.B. White, Tilbury House Publishers, 296 pages. $16.95.
I have inscribed this book to myself: “This is Ken’s 4th copy of this book. Please do not let him loan it to you. Thank you.” This is a collection of essays and musings of the goings-on of the complexities of simple life on a small farm in a small Maine town, set against a backdrop of regular seasons and the irregularity of World War II. It may be hard to see the point of some of these essays, occasionally, except that the thoughts within them are of a world and people worth musing about. It’s nice to know that someone capable of such grand but simple eloquence also wrote for children. I do not like to be without it. Please do not let me loan it to you. Go buy your own.
How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World by Ethan Tapper, Broadleaf Books, 229 pages. $28.99.
Knowledge and know-how do not have to be two roads that diverge in a wood, be it yellow or any other color. This is a beautifully written account of a young man who is passionate about forestry and the planet but still manages to hunt and have a chain saw.
Ken Cadow’s debut young adult novel, Gather, won the 2023 Kirkus Prize and was a National Book Award finalist. He lives in Norwich and is coprincipal of Oxbow High School.
This post was originally published on here
