My 2024 Book List

Welcome! Each year at year’s end I write short-ish summaries of the books I read over the year. A small public service, because the society that reads together increases its chances of resisting fascism. Right?

In this year’s reading I came upon this story: A grandfather tells his granddaughter that inside every human there are two wild wolves in a constant fight with one another. One is an evil greedy wolf who only wants everything for himself and will stop at nothing to get it; the other is a kind, gentle wolf who has compassion for all beings and seeks to stop the first wolf from doing harm.

            “So, which wolf is stronger, and wins the fight?” the granddaughter asks.

The grandfather responds: “Whichever one you feed.”

            Clearly a parable for how one might choose to move through this tense and terrifying political and cultural moment. Bringing it home to my 2024 reading list, the books you choose to read – indeed, all the ways you might engage, nourish, entertain and distract yourself – reflect the inner and outer wolves you choose to feed – for those of us fortunate enough to have enough freedom to choose among the wolves. In a year dominated by genocide in Gaza and war spreading across the Middle East, war in Ukraine, profound unrest and violent conflict in Haiti, Mozambique, Sudan, Yemen; the rapid rise of techno-fascism and kleptocratic white supremacist Maga fascism in the U.S. and blood and soil nationalism in Europe, Argentina, elsewhere; the monstrous and unaccountable rise of Artificial Intelligence as the tech titans move from resisting government to taking over the government – the wolves of evil are in no short supply, and they are hungry. Nonetheless, this year’s reading list feeds diverse wolves, and strays all over the map. Sometimes the choices reflect intention and attention to contemporary realities; others, local interests; others still are arbitrary. I try to read a few novels each year. Whatever. Here are the books I read or listened to all or most of in Anno Domini 2024, more or less in the order in which I read them – first the straight list of titles, followed by a rather, well, overly long set of 31 mini-reviews. Take it as it lays…

• The City and the City, China Mieville (Fiction)
• My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe (Non-fiction, litcrit)
• How Music Works, David Byrne (Non-fiction)
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin (Non-fiction)
• The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki (Fiction)
• Train Dreams, Denis Johnson (Fiction)
• The Plover, Brian Doyle (Fiction)
• Melville, Jean Giono (Fiction)
• Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken (Non-fiction)
• The Wild Rose, Martin Prechtel (Non-fiction)
• The Canyon Wren, Martin Prechtel (Non-fiction)
• Everything and Nothing, Jorge Luis Borges (Fiction)
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Merlin Sheldrake (Non-fiction).
• Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin (Non-fiction)
• Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, Christine M Delucia (Non-fiction, academic)
• Magdalena, River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia, Wade Davis (Non-fiction).
• The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan (Poetry)
• James, Percival Everett (Fiction)
• We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, Jeff Chang (Essays).
• A Call to Farms: Some Thoughts on Food, Money and Nonviolence in Honor of Wendell Berry, Woody Tasch (Non-fiction)
• Earthborne Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life, Ali Aslam, David W. McIvor, and Joel Alden Schlosser (Non-fiction, academic)
• Popol Vuh: A Retelling, Ilan Stavans, with illustrations by Gabriela Larios (Myth).
• Praiseworthy, Alexis Wright (Fiction)
• The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi(Non-fiction)
• Surviving Autocracy, Masha Gessen (Non-fiction)
• White Birch, Red Hawthorn: A Memoir, Nora Murphy. (Memoir)
• How A Mountain Was Made, Greg Sarris (Stories)
• Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Non-fiction)
• The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain, Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv (Non-fiction)
• Poems of Paul Celan (Trans. Michael Hamburger) (Poetry)
• The Hungry Ghost Bread Book: An Offbeat Bakery’s Guide to Crafting Sourdough Loaves, Flatbreads, Crackers, Scones, and More, Jonathan Stevens,(Non-fiction)

And now, the micro-reviews, book by book. Apologies in advance! ….. ::

1. The City and the City, China Mieville (Fiction). A 2009 detective novel set in in two cities that exist side by side, each of whose citizens are forbidden to go into or acknowledge the other city. But when a foreigner is murdered after breaching the two cities, pulp noir meets weird fiction and the rules of the police investigation get bent in all kinds of ways. Mieville is always a favorite; I read this one at the start of 2024 because rumor had it The City and the City was a parable about Israel/Palestine – two territories that exist in the same space but violently refuse to recognize each other. Spoiler alert: it’s not. But it is gripping, and deeply wrought in its world-making, and a great read.
2. My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe (Non-fiction, litcrit) A strange lyrical, associative, directly poetic opening into Dickinson’s work, this classic and polarizing work gives one of the American nineteenth century’s most mystifying poets the intellectual and moral heft she merits, while resisting any fixed reading, much the way Dickinson herself resists same: “Narrative expanding contracting dissolving. Nearer to know less before afterward schism in sum. No hierarchy, no notion of polarity. Perception of an object means loosing it and losing it.” In the small town of Amherst where I reside, Emily’s ghost presides, virtually the only ‘tourist attraction,’ – a strange one, appealing to a strange demographic – but a town that honors its poets may just be safe place for intellectual dissidence to take root. The standard lazy prejudgment of Dickinson, casually dismissed as ‘the belle of Amherst,’ casts her in a misogynist light as a feeble, semi-autistic shut-in – a false portrait that serves to neuter and enfeeble a figure whose presence is as powerful and prescient as her contemporaries Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorn, Frederick Douglass. This masterwork by Susan Howe, an important thinker on New England cultural history and an outlying poet of great authority, should be visited by anyone with more than a passing interest in Dickinson and historical poetics.
3. How Music Works, David Byrne (Non-fiction) What a pleasure to listen to Byrne narrating his wide-ranging musical intelligence on audio. From his anecdotes about how the CBGB’s scene came about in the 1970’s Bowery to his deep insights into how audio technology changes the culture of music, Byrne dishes up a delight. The book is from 2012 – seems like only yesterday – but seemed to me totally fresh.
4. The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin (Non-fiction) From pioneering and dauntless hiphop producer to guru of the creative life, Rick Rubin has given gifts galore to the culture. Now he gives gently liberating instructions and how you, too, can do this at home. If you don’t have time to read or listen to this one, tune in to the episode of On Being, with Krista Tippett, and get the short version. Like Byrne, above, Rick Rubin has survived decades swimming with the sharks (and leaping with the porpoises) of the music business, and has emerged a generous, visionary elder.
5. The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki (Fiction). If you have neurodivergence in your life, you, like me, may find this a heartbreaking, haunting and ultimately redemptive and deeply rewarding read. The extremely prolific Ozeki is also a Buddhist Roshi and community activist. What she does here with the Mari Kondo craze, autism, and our common culture of trash and trauma, is astonishing, and magical. I can hardly wait to read her many other novels.
6. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson (Fiction). A powerful strange story packed into a tight novella: the tale of a lone man living out an isolated life in the vast forests of the American West. Like Ozeki above, I had not ever read Denis Johnson, and like Ozeki, I can hardly wait to read more.
7. The Plover, Brian Doyle (Fiction) – Glorious, tender, hilarious, stylistically original and engaging. Booklist calls it “a whimsical dreamscape of a nautical adventure about desolation and friendship.” My new friend Frida Kipar Bay told me I had to read the Plover and she pressed it into my hands. When I returned the book months later, with a deep bow of gratitude, Frida said, “Totally tragic that he died.” Damn. Doyle died rapidly, of a brain tumor, at 60 years old, not long after this book came out. The writing style and approach is as unique, playful, elegant, and quirky as Vonnegut. Powerful and true and thoroughly enjoyable.
8. Melville, Jean Giono (Fiction) – A fine twentieth century French novelist rooted in the foothills of Haute Provence, Giono is best known in the Anglophone world for his ecological fable, The Man Who Planted Trees. But, as I learned from reading this 100-page novella, among his distinctions is having translated Moby Dick into French in the 1930’s. We learn from the preface to Melville that, after completing the herculaean task of translating that whale of a book, Giono’s publisher asked him to write a preface for it. Resisting the demand to opine on Melville’s epic, Giono chose instead to tell an entirely made-up story: he dreams up a fictional trip that Melville takes to England, where he is enchanted by a young woman devoted to the treasonous task of smuggling wheat into Ireland to relieve the potato famine of 1842; simultaneously, Melville is accosted by an angel who challenges him to use his poetic gifts to wrestle with God. It was these events, in Giono’s telling, that inspired Melville to return home and set himself up in a farmstead in the Berkshires and work himself into the years’-long frenzy that resulted in the greatest of Great American novels. Melville is a strange little tale filled with mystical moments and astonishing details about events that never actually took place. In its way, a nice accompaniment to My Emily Dickinson, above, as a surreal approach to 19^th Century American cultural history.
9. Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken (Non-fiction) – Even before the MAGA Kleptocrats and the Oligarchs and tech Nazis stage the coup of anger and ignorance that in 2025 will change American democracy forever, the current house of Representatives voted up HR 9495 – the mendaciously named “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.” Among the bill’s designs is to “terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” Ultimately the determination, to be made at the discretion of the Treasury Secretary, could be used to suppress free speech, target political opponents, and punish disfavored groups across the political spectrum. The bill is especially odious, as its broad target is the protected class of non-governmental organizations that collectively represent what we call “civil society” – a vast and vastly under-appreciated strata of society whose broad function is to safeguard civil liberties and free association. Such an attack demonstrated the critical service that Paul Hawken undertook a handful of years ago, by mapping, and celebrating, the vast and uncountable number of civil society civil society movements across the planet – “humanity’s immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation.” One result is a tremendous clarity that organized civil society is the best protection we have against both planetary destruction and tyranny.
10. The Wild Rose, Martin Prechtel (Non-fiction). Martin Prechtel is unparalleled, unrivaled, and deeply, inveterately wild. Along with The Mare and the Mouse (see my 2023 list) and The Canyon Wren, below, this book forms the center of Prechtel’s Stories of My Horses, produced in gorgeous, timeless editions by the gracious people of North Star Press of Minnesota. I am not up to the challenge of summarizing or doing much beyond simply heaping praise on these books: Martin Prechtel is too grand, and his living, rhizomatic prose and too-true-to-be-made up stories too layered to dehydrate in a pithy review. You may have looked at horses, but you have never seen a horse until you’ve heard or Martin Prechtels’ Stories of My Horses. And if you have never thought about horses – or just haven’t heard a good wild west tale for a while – read these books and be struck down with awe and amazement.
11. The Canyon Wren, Martin Prechtel non-fiction). Cf: Awe and amazement.
12. Everything and Nothing, Jorge Luis Borges (Fiction). I was long overdue to return to Borges, a staple of modernist literature, a giant of world literature, and always entirely unique and strange. It was an odd conjunction of an allusion in Ruth Ozeki’s Book of Form and Emptiness, and some post by Rebecca Solnit, that shoved me down the forking path back the Borges this year. This is a little pocket-sized collection of his 11 most anthologized stories that I bought for my teen and read for myself. If Borges had not existed, another writer – Julio Cortazar perhaps, or Italo Calvino – would have had to invent him. In Blindness, the closing essay in the collection, Borges tells how he was appointed Director of Argentina’s National Library precisely at the point where his blindness became complete and he lost the ability to read. Not just that, he was the third director of that library who was blind. “Two is a mere coincidence; three a confirmation,” he writes. “A confirmation of ternary order, a divine or theological confirmation.”

“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.”

Oh, and: if you’re mad enough to have this deep into this booklist, you may be mad enough to want to read Susan Sontag’s Letter to Borges, a powerful paean to literature and prescient indictment of the digital age.

13. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Merlin Sheldrake (Non-fiction). Mushrooms! Ever fascinating, ever wild – Sheldrake joins the ranks of David Abrams, Suzanne Simard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Quamman, Robert MacFarlane, Elizabeth Kolbert and many other scientific seekers with inimitable story-weaving skills, to bring us down into the soil to see the mycelial fabric within which we all are woven. The story of Sheldrake’s renegade adventure to ferment cider from Newton’s apples at Cambridge is a tale for the ages.

14. Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin (Non-fiction) I wish I’d read this before my now-17-year-old kid was born, but time waits for no one, and the time was now. With decades of experience holding vision quests for people in nature, of all ages, Plotkin developed a sort of depth psychology guide to the stages of human development, carefully outlining the ingredients, rites, rituals and intuitive understandings that can put a human on a path of integrity, wholeness and peace. If you’re a parent with a mythic sensibility, a desire to better understand life’s developmental stages, and a will to create some rites for key passages, Nature and the Human Soul will serve you well.

15. Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, Christine M Delucia (Non-fiction, academic) A sensitive, deeply researched, scholarly look at the acts and patterns of violence that made up the colonial settlement of much of New England, centered on Massachusetts – and how these patterns have been written onto the landscapes that New Englanders inhabit today. Together with Lisa Brooks’ Our Beloved Kin, and Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England by Jean O’Brien, you have an incredible trilogy of recent books by feminist scholars with an ear to the land’s bounteous and bloody histories and a bent towards restorying these old places.

16. Magdalena, River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia, Wade Davis (Non-fiction). In October of 2024 I joined multiple delegations to the 16^th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Cali, Colombia. And because just preparing to advocate for financial resources and attention to flow towards ending the war on nature wasn’t enough work for me, I spent 16 thrilling and devastating hours listening to Davis narrate the tragedies and triumphs that make up one of the most culturally and ecologically diverse nations on earth. Wade Davis is a global explorer and author of multiple breathtaking works – and Colombia is his country of origin and first love, making this book an essential read for anyone seeking an understanding of this tortured, beautiful land and culture.

17. The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan (Poetry). The poetry has the fragmented lyricism that’s become a feature of contemporary North American poetry since the 1980s or so: narratives spun through disjunctive collages of phrases and associative leaps, linguistic games that veer between the abstract and the deeply intimate; personal memories – of miscarriages, cancers, displacements in place and in time – constructed of recollected moments haunted by the erasure of what’s not written. Powerful, troubling, smart, moving poems by a Palestinian-American writer and clinical psychologist.

18. James, Percival Everett (Fiction) – The tale of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim. This is a story that needed to be written, and probably needed the century and a half sleep before we were ready for it. If you’ve read Huckleberry Finn at all it was probably in High School, and having been required to read it along with Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Catcher in the Rye, you may have never given Twain’s great tale its due. Here is a chance to revisit one of the foundational stories of the violent tangle of race in U.S. America. While the original is unmistakenly about race, as Huck Finn, a young white boy growing into manhood in a world where the rules make no sense, travels the Mississippi River with his companion Jim, an escaping slave. Huck’s innocence and good-heartedness expose and illuminate the absurd violence of slavery, the violent notion that some are human and others not. By centering the Black man and by liberating his voice and agency, Everett’s James takes the essential story at the heart of Huck Finn, and transforms it into a stark tale of dehumanization and rehumanization – and the cost of liberation. But James is not just Huck Finn told from the point of view of the enslaved. For a good half the novel, James, nee Jim, travels apart from Huck, building a narrative free from Twain’s original. And, as the suspense builds events unfold that transform the essential relationship between Huck and Jim, revealing secrets we couldn’t have known were contained in Twain’s original. As a tale about friendship between a white boy and Black man, written in vernacular and revealing the ugly truths of American racism, Huckleberry Finn may be one of the most banned books in our literature (first banned as soon as it came off the printing presses in 1884). But if the censors knew the taboo secret at the heart of Huck and Jim’s relationship, and the real story of Jim’s liberation, as hauntingly revealed in Everett’s great tale, they would no doubt have worked even harder to rid the American canon of this transgressive and ultimately revolutionary tale. Everett’s novel works like a liberatory time machine – by going back and showing us what really lies beneath Huck and Jim’s immortal flight to freedom, Everett changes the history of American letters, and in some sense, changes history itself.

19. We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, Jeff Chang (Essays). It’s always the right time to read our cultural critics and scholars on race and racism in US America, because the construction and reconstruction of racial division is always and undeniably a key current of the US national project. It’s something I think about, a lot – and still, the term “resegregation,” in Chang’s 2016 essay collection took me by surprise. Resegregation refers to the political, economic and cultural trend of reinstating, and re-institutionalizing, U.S.-American apartheid in the years since desegregation of the 1960’s. The clarity with which Chang foregrounds the concept, and backs it up with data, is a powerful counter to the idea of a ‘post-racial’ America that was erroneously declared the moment Barack Obama moved into the White House, all those years ago.

20. A Call to Farms: Some Thoughts on Food, Money and Nonviolence in Honor of Wendell Berry, Woody Tasch (Non-fiction). A slim 70 pages of pocket-sized manifesto, this little treatise by slow money founder Woody Tasch brings poetry and passion to his call for a deep shift from globalist thinking (“Think globally, act virtually?”) to building local food economies: “In the 21^st century, we need to put some of our money, and lots of our intention, and meaningful chunks of our time, into a new kind of investing – putting money to work near where we live, in things that we understand, starting with food, not with any eye toward how much money we might make, but toward how effectively we promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity, community, resilience, health and peace.” It’s way past time, Tasch tells us, to listen less to global financiers and listen more to local farmers. Hallelujah, Woody!

21. Earthborne Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life, Ali Aslam, David W. McIvor, and Joel Alden Schlosser (Non-fiction, academic). The ecological crisis facing humanity, is also of course, a crisis of human governance, and is twinned with what appears to be the death-throes of 250 years of the American democratic experiment. What the authors of this tightly written academic treatise explore is that “democracy” as such is not, as we are taught, a political system devised by the Athenian Greeks, made over by the Enlightenment French, and perfected by the framers of the United States constitution. Rather, they argue, it is a form of human engagement with roots deep in time and broad in scope and scale, which re-emerges throughout history in different forms to meet the moment. A friend and movement leader, Gopal Dayaneni, is fond of saying, “our ability to win is constrained by our inability to govern.” This little treatise doesn’t exactly tell us how to govern, but it places the urge towards democratic governance that some of us aspire to in a field of depth psychology, ecology and metaphysics, in ways that are, if not necessarily useful as an organizing method, certainly engaging as an intellectual call-to-arms. Using the concept of “morphic resonance,” developed by Rupert Sheldrake (father of Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life, above, strongly echoed in this title), they argue that there are fields of thought/action that are hydrated into life from time to time through mysterious channels, akin to the manifestation of archetypes in the human consciousness, and what we call ‘democracy,’ is one of these: like a fever that overtakes human communities at various points in history. They further argue that prior theories of democracy – including the vast field of work in David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent opus The Dawn of Everything – fail to account for a critical aspect of the human imaginary – the fact that all societiesnecessarily develop in relation to their ecologies and, to use David Abram’s phrase, the more-than-human world. For an academic work of political theory, I found this engaging and iconoclastic in taking ideas from the edges of academic political theory, and melding them together to form, perhaps, an emergent field of thought, very ripe for our moment.

22. Popol Vuh: A Retelling, Ilan Stavans, with illustrations by Gabriela Larios (Myth). Over the years I’ve read a few versions of the Popul Vuh, the council book of the Kiche Maya, though I won’t claim to “understand” it in any real way. Translated from Mayan glyphs into the Roman alphabet by a Franciscan friar during the conflagration of the Spanish conquest, this legend of the beginnings (and endings?) of the Mayan world is one of the great documents of the indigenous Americas and of the human spiritual imagination. This particular edition is a beautiful small hardbound version with delightful illustrations, published by Restless Books, founded and edited by Ilan Stavans, a massively prolific author, translator and critic. I came upon it because Restless Books happens to have just opened a shop in the little college town I call home. In any case, having read scholarly editions (notably Dennis Tedlock’s ‘authoritative’ version) which tend to dry out the story in order to interpret it in light of archeology, anthropology, Guatemalan spiritual geography, I found this version refreshing in its brevity and its charm, and its punctuation by Gabriela Larios’ gorgeous, playful paintings of the animals and peoples that populate this magical little tome. Easy to read, a treasure for the eyes, if you are to read one English version of the Popul Vuh, and are not planning to write your doctoral thesis on it, make it this the one.

23. Praiseworthy, Alexis Wright (Fiction) 650 pages of wave after wave of timebending epic: an Australian aboriginal odyssey of assimilation, ecological apocalypse and cosmovision collision. While Aboriginal Soveriegnty seeks to drown himself in the rising sea, his father roams Country building a donkey transport industry to save the land from fossil fuels, his mother dreams a world-story of insects in flight, and his brother throws himself at Australia’s most powerful white woman, seeking security in the dream of the White Nation. All the while, a mysterious haze engulfs Country heralding an ancestral reclamation or ultimate climate collapse, or both. This is an enormous feast of a book written in a sumptuous tongue versed in indigenous mind. I’m less than halfway through at this writing; this seems a book to be read across years, not weeks or months. The Author, Alexis Wright, is of the Waanyi Nation on Australia’s Gulf of Carpenteria, and has arrived with several epic works, just on time.

24. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi(Non-fiction) Over the past year the world has been forced to watch the real-time horror of genocide in Gaza on a daily basis. The most contested and unresolved conflict on the world stage justifiably ignites anger on all sides – though very few have informed awareness of the history, especially from the Palestinian side. I personally heard way too often this year the notion that the current conflict was started by Hamas on October 7 – a willful neglect of the structural violence and systematic dispossession of the Palestinian people, and of the right-wing authoritarian militarism of Netanyahu, disavowed by a large number of Israeli Jews. The antidote to ignorance, and speculation, and confusion, is studying history, and if you have not versed yourself in the history of the Israel-Palestine struggle, the colonialist origins of the Zionist project, and the geopolitics of power in this most divisive, millenarian conflict – Khalidi’s book is a fantastic start, rich in detail, studiously non-polemical and deeply informed by the author’s personal family ties going back, literally, a hundred years.

25. Surviving Autocracy, Masha Gessen (Non-fiction). Getting prepared for Trump2.0? If you want to know how to do battle, you need to understand the terrain – and this is a great book for that, along with everything by Timothy Snyder. Gessen has written for two decades about Soviet Russia, Hungary and Israel, and, as the NYTimes writes in its review, “When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” She lays out a critical memory of what Trump and his gang of kleptocrats did during their first administration, and shows in crystal clear terms how the Trumpification of American democracy is nothing less than the rapid establishment of a full-on autocratic regime.

26. White Birch, Red Hawthorn: A Memoir, Nora Murphy (Memoir) Descending from a family who fled the Irish potato famine and settled in the forests of Minnesota, Murphy comes to recognize that her family was directly responsible for displacing the Dakota, Ojibwe and Ho-Chunk Peoples whose lands they settled. In an honest and vulnerable account, Murphy retrieves stories of her family’s role in driving the wounds of the past, and gets to work creating the possibility of healing. A beautiful guide to the question of how to engage in reparations and redress for ancestral harms, with humility and respect.

27. How A Mountain Was Made, Greg Sarris (Stories) Greg Sarris is the longstanding Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in Sonoma County, California, and a man whose leadership and vision has served that local land and its people in the most admirable of ways. He is also an impressive story-keeper and story-teller. I’ve been slowly reading the stories in How A Mountain Was Made at bedtime to my seven-year-old, and will continue until we’ve read the whole book. As I’m not yet through it, your best introduction to this beautifully designed book is the publisher’s copy from the  Berkeley’s inestimable HeyDay Press: “In sixteen interconnected original stories, the twin crows Question Woman and Answer Woman take us through a world unlike yet oddly reminiscent of our own: one which blooms bright with poppies, lupines, and clover; one in which Water Bug kidnaps an entire creek; in which songs have the power to enchant; in which Rain is a beautiful woman who keeps people’s memories in stones. Inspired by traditional Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo creation tales, these stories are timeless in their wisdom and beauty, and because of this timelessness their messages are vital and immediate. The figures in these stories ponder the meaning of leadership, of their place within the landscape and their community. In these stories we find a model for how we can all come home again. At once ancient and contemporary, How a Mountain Was Made is equally at home in modern letters as the ancient story cycle. Sarris infuses his stories with a prose stylist’s creativity and inventiveness, moving American Indian literature in a new and emergent direction.”

28. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Non-fiction) What if the polycrisis facing humanity is caused not by fixable glitches in our political and economic systems, but by modernity itself, a near-universal impulse towards separation and dominance of the more-than-human world; a social programming to take more than we give, to extract, exploit, dig, drill, dump and burn our way out of the fear, insecurity and bottomless desire that hold us in thrall? If this is the case, what of attempts at economic reform, policy change, social protest, civic engagement? Vanessa Machada de Oliveira, in a profound workbook for social activists to address the question, does not dismiss the need for harm reduction to make things less worse; but her essential message is that modernity itself is in its suicidal death throes and the task for our time is to stay with the troubles and let modernity die, while poising ourselves to midwife into being a time beyond our own. So – let’s get to it.

29. The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain, Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv (Non-fiction). All pain is real, Gordon and Ziv assure us, but much chronic pain does not originate in structural issues of the body, but in the brain – neuroplastic pain they call it – and thus can only be addressed by putting the brain in charge. After years of careful clinical studies, the authors present a straightforward approach to managing and reducing neuroplastic pain. The book comes highly recommended by chronic pain sufferers. The proof will be in the pudding.

30. Poems of Paul Celan (Trans. Michael Hamburger) (Poetry). If you’re looking for a poet of vast psychological depth and historical gravity, but whose words are stretched taught until they break, rent apart until they surrender, so that they function as impressions in wet concrete, almost as shadows of words, you can do no better than spend some quiet hours with Paul Celan. A Romanian-born German Jew who survived the Holocaust and wrote for some decades in France before taking his life in 1970, Celan had, in his translator’s words “an obvious preoccupation with the mass killings he had physically survived but could never recover from; and a not so obvious immersion in Jewish history and religious (mystical) tradition.” Gloomy stuff, it must be said, but no gloomier than the news headlines, and more beautiful: a bitter cup of tea for the soul. So: in the year 2024, when the Jewish religion is tragically tied up in the Israeli state’s relentless genocide against the Palestinian people – a frenzy of ethno-nationalist violence that is itself a terrible, and terribly perverse, legacy of the Holocaust’s long shadow – it’s a year to visit the hauntingly strange, grief-stricken poems of Celan.

Zurich, The Stork Inn

Of too much was our talk, of

too little. Of the You

and You-Again, of

Jewishness, of

Your God.

Of

that.

On the day of an ascension, the

Minster stood over there, it sent

some gold across the water.

Of your God was our talk, I spoke

against him, I

let the heart that I had

hope:

for

his highest, death-rattled, his

quarrelling word –

Your eye looked on, looked away,

your mouth

spoke its way to the eye, and I heard:

We

don’t know, you know,

we

don’t know, do we?,

what counts.

            ***

The conversational tone, a reminiscence, leading to an admission, a soul-query: are we missing the point?

Why, when I could be trying to grock Taylor Swift, or following the stock market, would I read the shadowy death-rattled quarrelling words of this cosmic downer of a poet? For one, I’ve had this book in my collection for decades but had never read most of it (see last year’s minute review of Rilke’s Duino Elegies – another German mystic poet, but from before the greatest tragedies the twentieth century would unleash); and for two, because one way to bear the weltschmerz – the world pain – of this moment when the banality of evil is in full effect, is to metabolize it through the mode of poetry.

31. The Hungry Ghost Bread Book: An Offbeat Bakery’s Guide to Crafting Sourdough Loaves, Flatbreads, Crackers, Scones, and More, Jonathan Stevens,(Non-fiction)This new cookbook from a venerable bakery in Northampton, MA prompts a story: I moved to rural Western MA is 2021, with Northampton being the “big town” we go to for the fruits of civilization; but I was first told of the Hungry Ghost Bakery while visiting a farm an hour north of London in the UK where John Letts, a Canadian farmer devoted to breeding and growing heirloom European grains, grows Emer Wheat, Orkney Barley, Einkorn, Scottish Rye and other plantcestors of the enslaved industrialized wheat we mostly eat nowadays. Letts heralded this local-to-me-establishment as one of the few bakeries in the U.S. to bake its breads from solely local wheats (Quebecois wheat, driven about 6 hours from field to bakery, it turns out). So, back home, I found the place, and now no trip to the big town is complete without bringing home a loaf of Hungry Ghost French Batard.

Which tells you nothing about this lovely little bread book. A few days after getting ahold of the book I baked my own first few loaves of Hungry Ghost Batard, following the recipe to the letter – not my usual practice. And… it worked! Diving into the book I was delighted to find that Hungry Ghost is an offshoot of a storied lineage: the West Coast artisanal bread tradition has roots and branches that run through the Tassajara Bakery, associated with California’s Tassajara and Green Gulch Zen communities where, thanks to Suzuki Roshi, Buddhism found its first firm footing in the U.S. Though not a direct descendant, Jonathan Stevens who built Hungry Ghost, is a practicing Buddhist who broke his first crust on the Tassajara recipes and later threw himself into building a bakery after joining the monks of Nipponzan Miyohoji in constructing the New England Peace Pagoda in nearby Leverett, MA.

The book, as noted, is lovely. I expect the years of breads I bake under Hungry Ghost’s artisanal tutelage will be as well.

Hasta la proxima!