By Anne Kilgannon
My Adirondack chair with its wide arms—great for a glass of lemonade and some nibbles—is the perfect place to settle into summer reading. The birds are busy in nearby trees; the bees tumble in blooms clustered in pots and on my postage-stamp sized plot of front yard making a pleasantly soft soundtrack. So long as no neighbor decides to blow leaves about or power-wash a driveway, all is peaceful and ripe for page turning adventures. Summer reading is really half day-dreaming and mind traveling, after all.
This summer I might need a blanket to get me through the small pile of books I’ve chosen: unconsciously, I see I have assembled a challenging and chilly theme of books about the Arctic and the ice fields of Greenland. When I learned that one of my revered writers, Barry Lopez, had died, I began to read through some of his books I had been saving for the right moment. Arctic Dreams was nothing less than a stunning masterpiece, a spiritual and deeply intellectual questing to experience and understand a complicated land and its people, flora and fauna. Now I want to read Of Wolves and Men to continue my own exploration of the North and its wilds. I’m also hop-scotching my way through two of his essay collections, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life.
I also mean to get to a book I had searched out after watching Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” A Wilder Time: Notes From A Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice by William Glassley. I began it and then put it back on the shelf, not because I didn’t like it; no, it was so searingly beautiful I knew I needed a more open time for reading to give it its proper due. It will be a book to savor, to read slowly and absorb, to let it permeate my thoughts and make me gasp. Glassley writes about rocks and ice like a poet and a mystic without leaving the scientific ground he inhabits.
Lest I get too cold, I might skip over to England to read another book I’ve been saving for awhile, the rewilding “bible” by Isabella Tree, Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm. She writes about a conservation success story that unfolded when she and her husband nearly lost their farm from overuse of industrial agricultural methods; when they stopped using conventional—and ecologically harmful—ways of cropping, the land recovered itself and life crept back to health and diversity. A true “summer book” of renewal and hope!
While my thoughts are soaring, I also hope to read Scott Weidensaul’s 1999 book, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds. I heard him being interviewed on NPR about his work and was enthralled. I want to learn more about bird behavior and evolution; this book will address a huge chapter of many birds’ lives. He has a new book out that further explores the mysteries of migration; I need to catch up.
Other books pile up, new ones clamor for attention. I am open for suggestions. Happy reading! Happy summer adventures!
