Category: Stop! Look! Listen!

I took Cormac McCarthy camping with me: five nights together on Lake Superior’s rugged north shore. That is, I took McCarthy’s The Road with me.

Sure enough, contemporary philosophies of posthumanism and ecophenomenology, challenging human-centered frameworks and exploring the embodied reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world, circulate—if at all— in the back eddies of popular consciousness.

There should be a word for books that show up in your life when you need them. Books which obliterate fears or seemingly by magic connect some of the disparate dots of a lifetime. Dots that you maybe didn’t even realize existed, let alone had an awareness that they could use an alignment, call for a needle and thread.

I recently revisited Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, a book I first read nearly twenty years ago when I had just moved to a new city for graduate school.

While staying in rural Saskatchewan at the oldest monastery in Canada I read Karen Russell’s latest book The Antidote. So, perhaps it was not a wonder that the first thing that grabbed me about it were its descriptions of the Nebraska prairies.

Some albums create their own little universes.

Carol Off’s At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage (2024), highly recommended, begins with a preamble about Robert MacFarlane’s The Lost Words: A Spell Book.

Yes, a 1,000-page biography may look daunting, but I found myself unable to put down Pessoa by Richard Zenith, which examines the short life of the Portuguese poet, critic, translator and publisher Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935).