Books, Books, Books

Today, I expect to finish a re-read of Wade Davis' brilliant One River. This book, now about a decade old, is part ethno-botanical adventure story, part history of rubber production in the Andes, and part reverential biography of ethno-botanist / explorer extrodinaire, Richard Evans Schultes. Meanwhile, I have accumulated a number of books for reading in the new year. These are all gifts, some from Christmas, some from before....

The Golden Spruce, by John Vaillant
Tuffy gave me this one. This book is set on the Queen Charlotte Islands, an "extraordinary true story of obsession, destruction and survival, set on the outer reaches of Canada's Pacific Coast.

The Cheese Monkeys, by Chip Kidd.
This is a novel set in an art college in the 1950s.

The Founding Fish, by John McPhee
This is a story about the American shad.

His Other Half - Men Looking at Women through art, by Wendy Lesser
"Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artists inevitably misrepresent women. She builds this daring case compellingly through inquiry into many unexpected and delightfully germane subjects - Marilyn Monroe's walk, for instance, or the dwarf manicurist Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield, or the shoulder blades of Degas' bathers. Placing such particulars within the framework of Plato's myth of the divided beings and phsychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, Lesser sets out before us an art that responds to and even attempts to overcome division."

Southwest Stories - Tales from the desert (an anthology)
This book features pieces by D.H. Lawrence, Sandra Cisneros, Barry Gifford, Georgia O'Keefe, Carl Jung, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sam Shepard, Alison Moore, and Larry McMurtry. Edited by John Miller, with an introduction by Barbara Kingsolver.

What are you reading these days?