photo via www.stormchasers.au.com
"The weather is variable
so are you;
but I can't do a thing
about the weather."
Howard Devoto/"About the Weather"
This post is a request for contributions to an informal, "alternative" biblography of non-fiction and fiction titles addressing nature/ecology/the environment.
Please post your recommendations (with notes if you'd like) in the comments, and I'll ammend this post as needed.
Just off the top of my head, I'm going to start with these titles:
The Burning World/J.G. Ballard
Ballard's vision (in slow motion) of a global drought, published in the early '60's.
The New Organic Grower/Eliot Coleman
The very well-written "bible" of organic farming; one could literally start their own farm based on the information here.
Typhoon/Josheph Conrad
A novella portraying the sea as implacable Other; do we really know nature differently today?
The Lives of Animals/J.M. Coetzee
An exploration of the ethical questions surrounding vegetarianism, with the emphasis on animal cruelty.
Stones of the Sky/Pablo Neruda
His final volume, written while he was dying of cancer, consists of these thirty love songs to the Earth. This book has stayed with me, over the years, in a way that few others have.
1 comment:
sort of related yet sort of off-topic:
"The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel."
first line from William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer.
this sentence was used to demonstrate in an article I recently read that there really are no rules regarding writing, i.e., "1. Never open a book with weather." that Elmore Leonard recently espoused.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE3DD103BF935A25754C0A9679C8B63
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