I was surprised Proulx was into this and had a book on it. It has some good reviews on the river site and elsewhere. The New Yorker has an excerpt and an audio version of it.
Proulx has a list of non fiction titles having to do with botany, gardening, etc. It was good to see. I started her Barkskins once but didn’t get far. Novels are tough for me to get into when there is so much nonfiction of interest. I was astonished to see just now that there was a Barkskins (TV_series). It didn’t last but I never would have guessed TV would be interested in such a premise.
I mentioned this book before, last fall, as seen above.
I was surprised it was in the library system here and I have been reading it. Proulx does her usual well researched good job on an obscure topic. I never would have guessed it would be her that was into this.
Valerius Geist claimed we are a desert adapted species. Some say a lot of his ideas have been discredited. I haven’t heard anything more on this one’s plausibility but it does speak to our revulsion for wetlands. We have been messing with them at our peril since they are critical ecosystems. Life and water are tied together which is Proulx’s overarching point.
Her book is a good little summary worth a read. I will report more when I finish it.
Drain the Metaphor: Why the Media Needs to Rethink the Way It Talks About Swamps
Likely part of her motivation for writing it.
“The Forest by Alexander Nemerov is one of the richest books ever to come my way. In deeply beautiful, achingly painful, and astonishingly tender prose, he describes the rape and taking of the American forests and the destruction of the country’s natural ecology. Nemerov is a master craftsman who constructs shapely sentences and paragraphs like handsome architecture.”—Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Shipping News
She laid it on thick for this one. It may be good. Another book undermined by its cover. It is called The Forest and shows a plantation.
It turns out he is an art historian at Yale with a thing for trees. I am going to see if I can read it later.
Mar 18, 2023
The Toxic Threat in Thawing Permafrost
A timely piece on bogs from Hakai magazine. Proulx called the mag brilliant in her book acknowledgements.
I finished her bog book last night. A fun read. She was into it. More later. Out of time.
This tidbit really stood out. A bit of humiliation, not even seen in something like Game of Thrones.
I agree, I can’t get into her fiction but her non fiction is wonderful. Add Bird Cloud to your list, about her building a house in southern Wyoming.
I read Bird Cloud years ago.