2026 read #36: The Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo.*

The Travels of Marco Polo: A Modern Translation by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo*

Translated by Teresa Waugh from the Italian translation by Maria Bellonci

Photographs by Sergio Strizzi

207 pages

Published ca. 1300 (English translation published 1984)

Read from July 1 to July 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I call this a reread even though I never read this specific translation, which seems like a fair way to handle classics in translation. Whatever version I read as a kid was probably some standard midcentury edition. This one is a typically 1980s tie-in edition for an Italian docu-drama film, with color plates from the film’s production and extensive medieval and early modern illustrations, but no modern map, no glossary, and no endnotes. Context was not yet a priority, I guess.

I found this edition in the library a few months back, and was struck by two thoughts: I miss when nonfiction books were lavish, illustrated affairs, and also I want to read more weird old books wavering on the line between folklore and nonfiction to get more ideas for Sword & Sorcery stories. So that’s what we’re doing here.

Unfortunately for my purposes, Travels is more of a medieval gazetteer than an adventure story. It’s fascinating in historical context: what mattered more to their sensibilities was the information attributed to distant places rather than one person’s narrative of adventure (even if said information was extensively massaged and augmented to suit European expectations by romance writer Rustichello). When they get to itemizing every single province of Cathay, with the same three rudimentary bits of information, it becomes particularly tedious.

The most disturbing thing about reading this mix of just-so stories and Islamophobic screeds is the realization that, over 700 years later, a substantial number of my compatriots still literally believe in this “wicked Saracen” shit. It’s a lot like understanding that modern antisemitism is rooted in medieval economic politics. People are just that gullible, eager to believe made-up bullshit from the men in charge, whether those men be kings who owe money or trillionaire failsons who have an apartheid axe to grind. (The medieval sexism and colorism is just as awful.)

The gazetteer format makes it all the more jarring when a stray biographical detail — “Marco Polo was totally made a baron of this city, and the elder brothers Polo totally helped the Khan take this other city” — appear without any context. It’s pretty funny, in a way.

There are nuggets of potential world-building material here and there, like the rolling porcupines of Ishkasham, the palace of gilded reeds (bamboo?) at Xanadu, the lodging-houses for travelers of every nationality (including Lombards and Germans) at Khan-balik, mounted couriers and their post-houses, unmounted couriers with belts of bells, magic anti-beheading stones in Japan, and so on. How accurate any of it might be as anthropology is, of course, debatable. But we’re here to find inspiration for Sword & Sorcery, not history.

I want to reiterate my frustration with this particular edition: no effort was made to link the names Polo reported to any kind of historic location. I had to search online every time I wanted to know what, say, Kinsai relates to on the map of today. It would’ve been so easy to add a glossary, or even some footnotes.

2026 read #29: To Katahdin by George T. Sewall.

To Katahdin: The 1876 Adventures of Four Young Men and a Boat by George T. Sewall

Introduction by Neil Rolde 

Afterword by Irvin C. “Buzz” Caverly, Jr.

122 pages

Originally published as newspaper series in 1870s; book edition published 2000

Read from May 4 to May 7

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Having lived in upstate New York for a couple years now, my partner R and I have developed a little tradition of visiting a local book barn each spring, soon after it opens for the season. This past weekend, R found this book in the regional history section. It’s a charmingly presented trip journal, complete with pen-and-ink illustrations that accompanied the original newspaper serial. Seemed like it would be a good use of $4.50!

The three well-to-do Sewall brothers, plus their cousin Ned Hunt, undertook a late summer lark with the goal of climbing Katahdin, by then familiar to tourists but still retaining the mystique of the North Woods frontier. Thanks to the reprint press’s subtitle, one is inevitably reminded of Three Men in a Boat, only without Jerome K. Jerome’s self-effacing irony and charm. At least the pencil drawings (done, presumably, by one of the Sewalls) add an occasional touch of immediacy.

The narrative itself is fine. It’s more descriptive than poetic, a travelogue of summer woods and waters, steamer wharfs and remote farms, blueberries and wilderness hotels, a dry but fascinating glimpse into a lost world. I want more books about the early development of American tourism, whether they be modern histories or contemporary accounts. This certainly checks that box.

Naturally, this being the 1870s, literally any time writer Sewall encounters a woman, he simply can’t resist adding some disparaging comment or other. Maybe Jerome K. Jerome did the same thing; it’s been long enough since I read Three Men that I truly don’t remember. But it certainly soured my enjoyment here. Likewise, the boys can’t catch a glimpse of a waterfowl without hastening to shoot at it. Absolutely no inkling of a conservation ethos here, just some college bros taking their turn on the frontier before it vanished.

2025 read #86: The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher.

The Roads to Rome: A History of Imperial Expansion by Catherine Fletcher

311 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 10 to November 17

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We always have to step carefully around histories of Rome. As with histories of war, the topic tends to attract cryptofascists and bootlickers, glassy-eyed in their praise of power and empire and masculine control. Which is a shame; Rome lay at the center of a fascinating era, a period of cultural interchange and population movement. But no, so many histories want to grovel at the feet of the caesars.

This book is a history of Roman roads, utilizing them as a means of examining imperialism and structures of power throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Fletcher breezes through the Classical Roman section of her history within 60 pages. The bulk of Roads is about how successive cultural moments engaged with (and mythologized) the memory and infrastructure of Rome. We wend through the medieval age of pilgrimage, the early modern Grand Tour, the encroachment of railroads, the imperialist myth-making of Fascism, and the romanticizing sheen of Hollywood and all-inclusive continental vacations.

Along the way, we sometimes get bogged down in recitations of politicians and authors who traveled a road, or who purposefully avoided a road. Fletcher interweaves her sources with her own post-lockdown travels across Europe and Asia Minor. Her contemporary journeys are enjoyably written, seasoned with an academic’s wariness of our decade’s resurgent national populism. Both the historic and modern narratives would have been enhanced with more maps, but publishers are cheap about illustrations these days.

One thing from Roads that will forever stick with me: the understanding that the “Great Man” style of history was “part of a wider European trend of history in service of the modern nation state,” crafting a narrative of national heroes and their patriotic deeds. It’s one of those observations that’s blatant in hindsight, but that our culture doesn’t tend to acknowledge.

2024 read #40: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.*

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson*

277 pages

Published 1998

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread. 

When I read this book at 16, way back in 1999, I was already fixated on hiking the Appalachian Trail. I had grown up living in the woods — or, more precisely, I had grown up on the road, which by age 12 had devolved into sleeping in the car in various parks and forests from the Adirondacks to the Cascades, from the Mogollon Rim to the Black Hills.

My father had, in his saner days, indulged in the Rocky Mountain High vibe of the ’70s. He harbored a glimmer of that even as he turned paranoid and violent with age, one dim spark of humanity lingering as he devolved into a monster. At one point in my tweens, he thrifted the February 1987 issue of National Geographic, which had the article “Appalachian Trail: A Tunnel Through Time.” I pored through it again and again, examining every photograph, imagining myself at this particular shelter, navigating that specific piece of trail, finding this certain wildflower. When I fantasized about leaving my father behind in my impending adulthood, it was natural that I couldn’t conceptualize anything beyond walking away into the woods. (I certainly couldn’t imagine integrating into human society.)

All of which is more depressing and confessional than what I meant to say, which is merely that, as an outdoor hipster, I was well acquainted with the Appalachian Trail long before I encountered this book on the Wal-Mart bestseller rack. For the public at large, though, I understand that A Walk in the Woods was a moment of discovery. It is often cited as one of the main reasons the AT became over-popularized, setting in motion what would ultimately become the “walking frat party” of the yearly thru-hiker bubble. (Browsing the shelves of used bookstores, where, to this day, 80% of the outdoor recreation section will be stacks of this book, lends its anecdotal support to this idea.) Like any treasured place, the AT was better loved when it was less famous.

All of that, of course, still lay in the future. A quarter-century ago, avoiding my father as best as I could from the passenger seat, I read and reread A Walk in the Woods with all the intensity of a religious text, a meditation. So much so that, like childhood staples The War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park, every word and every line is familiar to this day, which I wasn’t expecting when I picked it up again for this revisit. I had truly forgotten how much this book had meant to me, once upon a time.

That nostalgia gloss is an awkward reading companion today. Turns out I don’t really like Woods anymore. Living in a car, I didn’t pick up on Bryson’s casual misogyny. Most women who cross his path get lampooned: desperate, unattractive, fat, unintelligent, prattling, oblivious. The only men he caricatures with equal gusto are the Appalachian rural poor, because of course this book is classist as hell, too.

In general, Bryson’s humor feels stale and mean-spirited to me nowadays, reading like an uncomplicated normie sitcom from the ’90s: Everybody Loves Raymond, maybe, or The King of Queens, something with a lot of fat jokes and a scolding wife, with the character Katz as the larger-than-life neighbor who gets cheers from the studio audience. Sometimes Bryson indulges in moments of almost enjoying himself, but then it’s right back to whole chapters of complaining about fat people, hostels, mice, maps, gizmos, rain, rain gear, or the National Park Service. It’s exhausting far more often than it is charming. (In retrospect, it explains why On the Beaten Path would be published so quickly thereafter. Clearly, the publishers thought “cranky misanthrope on the Appalachian Trail” was a license to print money.)

2024 read #7: In the Land of Giants by Max Adams.

In the Land of Giants: A Journey through the Dark Ages by Max Adams

446 pages

Published 2016

Read from January 10 to January 15

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Regardless of any intent (or lack of it) from the respective publishers, I feel this book functions as a spiritual sequel to Charlotte Higgins' Under Another Sky. Where Higgins traveled Britain in search of its Roman history, Adams paces around the archipelago to encounter its early medieval history. Adam even begins his narrative at Hadrian’s Wall, a fittingly literal symbol for the end of Roman Britain.

The “Dark Ages” — locally defined as the five centuries between the end of Roman Britain and the death of Alfred the Great — are dubbed such because of the lack of contemporary written sources and readily dateable artifacts (such as coins or inscriptions), which makes it impossible to draw together any real narrative account. In Giants, Adams leans instead into an experiential approach, journeying on foot, by boat, and sometimes by motorbike through historically laden landscapes:

What counts, on this sort of journey, is the sense of place, the passing of time. There is no better way to insinuate oneself into the Dark Age mind than to camp close to the ramparts of an ancient fort on the edge of the limitless sea and ponder the spiritual and secular worlds of those who built it.

Adams presents a nice mix of historical reference and walking adventures, the latter more diligently detailed than some Appalachian Trail memoirs I could name. It is, in many ways, reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane’s travelogues, such as The Old Ways, though Adams’ prose (while solid enough) never reaches the poetic strata of Macfarlane’s finest. However, the chapters where Adams describes riding his motorcycle instead of hiking are much less interesting.

Landscape archaeology fascinates me. It aligns with my own interests in nature and how human societies integrate themselves into (or else bludgeon their way through) ecological systems and geological constraints. I particularly enjoyed how Adams underlined the usefulness of place-names in reconstructing histories of settlement and land management. Sadly, landscape archaeology was barely touched upon during my undergraduate career, amounting to maybe a single slide during an intro course, likely a single paper during a theory class. I’d love to read more about it, especially something that grounds it in testable hypotheses rather Adams’ penchant for vibes. (Though to be fair to him, it would be impossible in our capitalist world to get the funds and workforce needed to excavate or even survey a fraction of the sites we would need to study from this book alone.)

Giants’ historical content is of the space-saving school that assumes you’re already familiar with the outlines of the period (or, perhaps, might be motivated to look up various kings and kingdoms on your own time). At least there’s a chronology appended to the end, though it could use more detail, especially with a time period so dimly known even to those who study it.

2023 read #123: Under Another Sky by Charlotte Higgins.

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins

257 pages

Published 2013

Read from October 23 to October 24

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Recently, a meme of sorts has been circulating, exposing just how much your average cis-het white guy thinks about the Roman Empire on a daily basis. The underlying cause, like so much else in this modern hellscape, is a careful system of fascist indoctrination. Empires and conquest are masculine. Discipline and obedience to order are masculine. Marching into new lands and holding an eagle banner aloft are masculine. You don’t wanna be a fem, right, buddy?

I’ve always been a history girl, and here in America, Romans are always propagandistically positioned as our spiritual and political forebears. Athens had a (severely circumscribed) “democracy,” sure, but Romans? They had a republic. Landed men of breeding and prestige ruling over a rabble of mindless plebeians, as God and George Washington intended. A lost golden age for mediocre white dudes. And when Julius Caesar marched in like a main character and turned that republic into a dictatorship — well, sure it was a shame, but wasn’t it full of glory? So yeah. It isn’t any surprise to me that white American men think a lot about the Romans. Just look at how they vote.

It sucks how much the Romans are used as a tool of rightwing propaganda, because I find the Roman era fascinating for entirely different reasons: culture contact spanning parts of three continents, the movements of people and trade goods, people from all corners of the empire winding up in every other corner of the empire. Villas in Yorkshire, mystery cults in London, garum unloaded along the Thames, Iraqis and Algerians manning Hadrian’s Wall — that’s what interests me. Fuck empire, fuck emperors, fuck the legions. Tell me about the day-to-day.

Naturally I picked up this book the moment I saw it in a used book store. But it was equally natural that I should avoid reading it, given our current descent into fascism. (Recall the etymology of fascist.) I felt a sort of shame at the current associations of Rome, even though no one else really reads my reviews. Plus, with an era so heavily propagandized, you never know if an author is going to hit you with some rightwing bullshit. I’d just rather not, you know?

Under Another Sky is less about recovering a sense of what Roman Britain was like and more about the cultural process of interpretation, investigating the ways various eras have construed the Roman period as a reflection of their own mores and outlooks — “manifestations of the historical imaginations of those who described them,” as Higgins puts it in her introduction. She expands: “‘Britain’ was an idea for the Romans. For us, ‘Roman Britain’ is also an idea….”

Higgins’ narrative is constructed from her own travels, by foot and by VW camper van, across Roman Britain. The result is thoroughly readable but somewhat journalistic, full of colorful locals who pop in for two paragraphs to help Higgins make a point, followed by an equally brief anecdote of a rain-thwarted picnic to add atmosphere. Long segments are dedicated to pocket biographies of 19th century antiquarians and 20th century archaeologists, and how their personal biases shaped their interpretations. Pretty standard stuff for contemporary non-fiction, but it doesn’t give a sense of depth, either to history or to Higgins’ journeys.

At times, though, Higgins’ prose and imagery are quite beautiful. The chapter in which she walks around the surviving traces of Londinium is particularly good. Another Sky is far from an information-dense tome, but it works perfectly well for what it is.

2019 read #15: Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
429 pages
Published 2019
Read from September 24 to September 28
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I've long placed Macfarlane in the company of Helen Macdonald, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meloy, and Roger Deakin, practitioners of the English language's most affecting and gorgeous nature writing in recent years. He has his moments of transcendence here, whether expounding upon the philosophical weight of the geologic past or the disorienting new realities of climate change, plastic pollution, and nuclear waste disposal. Despite that, I feel this isn't Macfarlane's best effort.

Underland flourishes when Macfarlane makes connections between disparate concepts, forming a coherent and powerful teleology of meaning for those of us adrift in the Anthropocene, such as when the "atomic priesthood" conceptualized by Thomas Sebeok, tasked with relaying warnings of nuclear waste into the far future using folklore and myth, disconcertingly mirrors the warnings in the Kalevala concerning a deeply buried cache of powerful spells and objects, which can only be approached while armored in copper and iron, and must never be loosed upon the surface world.

Oddly, Macfarlane's writing was at its worst when simply describing the scenery. Here he adopts a terse prose, clipped of its subject and flattened into present tense, a mechanical printout of sensory information without anyone to experience it. Perhaps this was a conscious choice reflecting the solastalgia of a world falling apart in our hands. Regardless of intent, it became repetitive and didn't match the fluent, beautiful nature writing Macfarlane has displayed in the past.

2019 read #12: Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett.

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
295 pages
Published 2015
Read from August 8 to August 16
Rating: 3 out of 5

Did I really just go three months without finishing a book, again? Damn.

After making a bit of progress getting myself back into the reading habit this past winter, I find that my attention span and motivation have foundered once again. Time to gather myself up and make another go at it, from scratch.

Non-fiction often seems easier to read when I get into this book lapses. There isn't the requirement to invest emotional energy into characters and their intimate tragedies. On the other hand, the rewards from non-fiction -- especially this sort of journalistic pop natural history that provides a sweeping but shallow overview of a large topic -- are more meager than those found in a well-written novel.

I found Rain to be a straightforwardly enjoyable example of its type, though it left me unsatisfied, as such surface-level reportage tends to be. I want something more substantial than a few illustrative anecdotes; I don't feel like I really learned anything. But Rain was a nice way to break my recent reading drought, pun entirely intended.

2018 read #17: The Age of the Horse by Susanna Forrest.

The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History by Susanna Forrest
370 pages
Published 2016
Read from September 22 to October 1
Rating: 4 out of 5

I think it's fair to say that this book taught me to love horses. Or at least to better understand those people who do love horses. I'd always viewed horses and horse people with lower-class skepticism, narrowing my eyes and making (possibly) unfair assumptions about anyone with the monetary resources to maintain an equine hobby. Through Forrest's sensitive, discerning prose and wide-ranging horse's-eye-view of our commensal history, I grew fond of the horse's profound empathy and heartbroken over my species' millennia of mistreatment and abuse of these sensitive animals. I feel no desire to enter a life of subsistence farming alongside a plowhorse, myself, but while reading Age of the Horse, I found myself wishing that we could democratize (which really means to socialize and to redistribute) access to horses. Not the sort of access that amounts to sticking your kid on a pony at a petting zoo, nor even the therapeutic post-traumatic riding covered in the final chapter, but something longer term, a richer emotional bond of patience and mutual benefit.

Oh well. An idle dream, like so much else that would do good in this world.

Most likely it was due to my own lack of reading practice these last two years, but at times I felt that Forrest's exquisitely turned phrases could get in the way of actually conveying her meaning. I often had to stop and reread sentences and grew only fuzzier each time I did so. Again, that's probably because my brain has gotten so slack of late. I also felt that the chapter exploring the horse's position in Chinese history strayed a bit in the direction of exoticism and otherizing, with its emphasis on the obscenely rich main beneficiaries of modern China's totalitarian capitalism and their obscene displays of wealth. (Why did the chapter on the superrich also have to be the chapter on China? I'm sure our own domestic superrich have their own baffling, alien quirks to quietly anthropologize.) Aside from that, Age of the Horse is simply lovely, full of the same gentle empathy that we could all stand to learn from Forrest's horses.

2018 read #14: From the Forest by Sara Maitland.

From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales by Sara Maitland
354 pages
Published 2012
Read from August 5 to September 4
Rating: 3 out of 5

Once again I've let a few months go by without reading much of anything. When I began this book I was brimming with enthusiasm, finishing the first half within a couple days, but somewhere along the way my interest drained away, leaving the rest of the book something of a dry trudge. Anyone expecting a modern classic of British nature writing, along the lines of H is for Hawk, Wildwood, or The Wild Places, will be disappointed. Maitland's writing lacks the poetry of Macdonald's, Deakin's, and Macfarlane's, and From the Forest seems to have been edited in haste; lines repeat themselves paragraphs later, seemingly less for emphasis than for want of a polished draft.

Maitland's guiding thesis -- that the fairy tales we know arose from an ancient tradition of storytelling in the great Northern European forests, and reflect the mores and concerns of forest-dwelling life -- is flimsy. Successive chapters don't build up the thesis so much as repeat it in different contexts. One underlying flaw in her argument is the fact that, as a British author, she is writing about British forests yet using German folktales to illustrate her "forest culture" arguments. Traditional British folktales were largely lost before they could be recorded, but Maitland justifies using the Brothers Grimm by positing a sweeping pan-Germanic cultural continuity that includes Anglo-Saxon peoples, even though mainland Germanic and Anglo-Germanic cultures diverged some thirteen centuries ago. She treats the cultural contexts of the Grimm stories as interchangeable with the forest yeomanry of England, despite vastly different histories, modes of government, traditions, and notions of labor.

The perils of this sort of thinking become apparent when Maitland decries a culture in which young British children grow up without "blackberry" and "conker" in their Oxford Junior Dictionaries: "The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured." One can see what she was getting at, but coming as it does in a book embracing a myth of pan-Germanic cultural identity, it feels a bit iffy. Robert Macfarlane made the same point far more elegantly (and at greater length) in his Landmarks.

Maitland's retellings of the fairy tales themselves leave much to be desired. They are grim and gritty in the worst tradition of the 1990s. Seemingly every male point-of-view character, for instance, thinks of a female character as "that bitch." Her excursions into English and Scottish woodlands, on the other hand, are often interesting, segueing thematically into bygone aspects of life in the forests -- hunting, coppicing, mining, leisure -- and how they are practiced (or not) in modern times. I would have preferred a more focused book that explored the cultural histories and uses of supposedly "wild" British forests, perhaps with fairy tales relegated to their own chapter.

2018 read #11: Walking with Spring by Earl V. Shaffer.

Walking with Spring: The First Thru-Hike of the Appalachian Trail by Earl V. Shaffer
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.

As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.

That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.

2016 read #76: Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Translated by Lewis Galantière
229 pages
Published 1939
Read from September 30 to October 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

On one hand, it is fascinating to observe the enduring themes and imagery of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince -- childish openness to wonder and imagination, the delicate beauty and sorrow of mortality, individual beings adrift about the universe on isolated planets -- anticipated here in his memoirs, arising from his experiences in the air and on the ground in the years between the World Wars. On the other hand, Wind, Sand and Stars precipitates the inevitable disillusionment that comes from discovering that an author was the product of his time, mummified in the same casual racial and gendered prejudices of his contemporaries.

Stars is most engaging when Saint-Exupéry is in flight, with his precise descriptions of night navigation and the upper wilderness of clouds suggesting the universe of tiny planets explored by the Little Prince. The closing chapter, a series of sketches from the Spanish Civil War illustrating his philosophy of that ineffable "Spirit," the sense of wonderment and awareness, that turns men into men, is effective stuff as well -- even if his philosophy is little more than a weedy patch of Romanticism, blooming late in the Modernist age, decrying the soulless world of clerks and factories and extolling the virtues of science, art, and rural peasantry. What sets Saint-Exupéry apart from most romantics (in my admittedly meager experience) is his esthetic and philosophical appreciation for invention. An airplane or a locomotive or a factory is merely a tool, its value or its worthlessness determined by how well it serves a man and Man -- and to what ends.

The language is, of course, purposefully gendered: Women, in Saint-Exupéry's proto-Hemingwayan world, are coquettes and objects to be won, hearth-tenders to come home to, beacons for the lost adventurers to find their way home. Observing two women fortifying a Communist roadblock in Spain, he makes sure to note that they don't seem to know how to hold their rifles. The chapter on "Men of the Desert" indulges in some colonialist notions, including a long description of the "contentment" an enslaved Senegalese man feels. I take that a tiny bit out of context -- the passage is part of a larger philosophical musing on the "crippling" effects of a "humdrum life" and captivity, relating to depictions of commuting clerks at either end of the book -- but the stench of colonial power pervades the entire chapter.

2016 read #68: The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Translated by Alexandra Keeble
Prefaces by Aleida Guevara March, introduction by Cintio Vitier
175 pages
Published 1995; English translation published 2003
Read from August 29 to September 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

My first exposure to Che was in a Hot Topic. It was 2002, and I was 19; having gone directly from an abusive childhood into the army, self-expression was still a new concept for me. One weekend, on break from training, I went with my then-friend to the mall, and after our customary Saturday Cinnabon I ventured into the Hot Topic, where I saw a shirt in a blinding shade of red, emblazoned with the cliched image of Che's face. I was struck by, but at that age unable to articulate, the fine irony of a symbol of rebellion and revolution commoditized and sold to teenagers from a franchise shopfront. That was my rationale for purchasing it over the protests and disbelief of my army friend (who would, of course, go on to be a racist conservative asshole later in life). Over the ensuing months, after my own political awakening, I wore it with proud new layers of irony on the army bases where I was stationed -- a further irony, one I didn't appreciate until later, being my own utter ignorance of Che.

Che himself, as a man and as a symbol, was someone I hadn't thought much about beyond that initial set of ironies. His existence, actions, and ideology seem to be crushed beneath the weight of Che the symbol. To the regressives of the world, he's a hypocrite and a war criminal, guilty of vast (and usually vague) atrocities; to certain segments of the ever-divided left, he's a martyred saint, his every word dissected for hidden wisdom, as in the hagiographic introduction to this volume. Not to get all "the truth is in the middle" here, but in this instance, I'm pretty sure the reality is not close to either of those extremes.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating introduction to the young man who existed before the myth, a polished and edited "journal" of a bumbling expedition, by motorbike and by hitch, across several Latin American nations in 1952. The formative effect this had upon young Che's outlook, priorities, and ideology are obvious, though kept mostly between the lines; Che's tight-lipped indignation at the appalling poverty and class structures he encounters are the most interesting, and affecting, sections of the book. The rest, sadly, has something of a superficial feel to it. Despite the editorial efforts of an older Che (or possibly others), it feels obvious that this was a young student's travel diary, its tone alternately flippant and philosophical -- it would be easy to imagine, say, a college radio DJ writing something similar today, after a summer spent in search of "authenticity." Like a college dude, Che drops casual bits of homophobia and racial prejudice -- though, equally apropos, we could say "Like any dude in the 1950s." The travel portions tend toward the repetitive, fascinating interludes abbreviated in favor of enumerations of hunger, bad drivers, sleeping in police stations, and caging meals from reluctant, or naively enthusiastic, strangers.

It's a shame that Soviet-style Communism, in its day, was as corrupt and oligarchic, as reliant upon hegemonic colonialism, as capitalism has always tended to be. Through his writings, at least, it seems Che was a genuine revolutionary, a believer in the ideals he fought and eventually died for. This edition's appendix, taken from a speech Che gave to Havana medical students in 1960, is flush with revolutionary fervor, with utopian visions of "the new kinds of human beings born in Cuba." Like Che himself, the balance between social organization and individualism is ambiguous, multifaceted, perhaps impossible to resolve -- and certainly too ambitious for me to tackle in a simple book review.

2016 read #65: Mountains of the Heart by Scott Weidensaul.

Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians by Scott Weidensaul
266 pages
Published 1994
Read from August 24 to August 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

At heart I've always considered myself a Rocky Mountains boy. Born in Ohio, a mere two generations removed from the Appalachian plateau country of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, by happenstance my consecutive, autobiographical memories began when I lived in Colorado Springs, and much of my peripatetic minor years were spent in Colorado, New Mexico, and Montana. Just the other day I was reminded of how deep this connection runs, when I heard "Rocky Mountain High" for the first time in years and felt a visceral music-memory association with being 5 or 6 years old and feeling proprietary and proud that such a classic song would be sung about my home. 

I've lived in New York a dozen years now, and have resisted any sense of feeling at home here. (I live in the dreadful suburbs of Long Island, not the city -- a crucial distinction often lost on people from outside New York.) Yet all the same, since I began hiking the mainland hills about five years back, I've developed a creeping sort of fondness for the Hudson Highlands, the Catskills, the Kittatinny Ridge of New Jersey, a sort of pride in my orographic province, a pride I've become aware of only recently. The first time I realized this pride was while watching a hiking vlogger named Red Beard enjoy the Appalachian Trail through New Jersey and New York, and in recent months, planning and sometimes even hiking my own AT adventures, I've become positively fixated on the charms of "my" modest mid-Atlantic ranges.

Scott Weidensaul is an author I've enjoyed, from the hills I've grown fond of, and once I learned he'd written a natural history of the Appalachians, it climbed to near the top of my to-read list. His Return to Wild America was a minor disappointment, but here, writing about the high country he's known his whole life, Weidensaul avoids the tedious journalistic format that dulled Return and permits his unabashed delight for the trees, the birds, and the wild spaces of his native range to warm his prose. This book makes an excellent companion to Weidensaul's The First Frontier, a speculative history of culture contact along the Eastern seaboard, and reminded me at times of Steve Nicholls' exquisite, mournful Paradise Found. They form a loose, obviously unofficial trilogy of sorts, sketching in an archaeological and biological memory-picture of the lost, pre-Columbian magnificence of the Eastern half of the continent.

Weidensaul's science is of course dated (the last two decades have seen explosive progress in the biological sciences), and also not nearly as pessimistic as more recent natural histories (the last two decades have also seen an explosion in invasive pests and diseases, exurban sprawl, climate change, and other cataclysmic alterations of the natural world). In that sense reading it now is a bit like reading Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters -- it's hard to tell just how reliable some of its assertions may be. And as with almost all other popular science books, I personally found myself bored with the inevitable beginner's level explanations of everything from plate tectonics and ice ages to Paleoindian settlement of the New World (which chapter is, as one might expect, particularly out of date). In fact the geology chapter made me wish for an entirely separate book altogether, a thorough and readable geological history of eastern North America. Geology seems even sparser on popular science shelves than the other natural sciences, which is to say almost nonexistent, so I'm probably out of luck -- but a nerd can dream.

2016 read #62: Return to Wild America by Scott Weidensaul.

Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Wild Soul by Scott Weidensaul
365 pages
Published 2005
Read from July 31 to August 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I first encountered Scott Weidensaul in The First Frontier, an overly speculative but winsome history of early culture contact along the Eastern Seaboard. So it was something of a surprise to discover that his main line is in natural history writing; when I first found Return to Wild America on my library's scrimpy science shelves, it took me days to place Weidensaul's name. This, of course, was a couple years ago -- I put the book back after checking the jacket flap, resolved to read the original Wild America that Weidensaul was returning to first, which I only got around to doing last month.

After that long wait, and after my disappointment at finding Peterson and Fisher's Wild America to be little more than a lengthy birding checklist mixed with a '50s travelogue, I'm not surprised that Return is merely adequate. Weidensaul is a competent but uninspired writer, someone I would have appreciated a lot more before I encountered the likes of Roger Deakin, Helen Macdonald, and Robert Macfarlane. Weidensaul's chapters tend to follow a formula, opening with him either in the thick of a wildlife refuge or approaching one by air or by car, segueing into background information and a broader topic in conservation that relates to the place in question, filled in with color quotes from naturalists and refuge biologists showing him around, before hitting with the heavy shit about how the given ecosystem has been stripped and altered and despoiled, and how perilous its future prospects are.

It's basic twenty-first century nature writing with few frills, reading like a series of National Geographic articles from back when they still published articles (so, maybe the mid-1990s?). And like magazine articles, Weidensaul's chapter-essays can't escape a tendency to reduce complex issues into a couple paragraphs, summarizing details and nuance and tricky perspectives into oblivion. A self-described rural Oregon hippie I know objected to the paragraph Weidensaul devoted to the problems of thinning stands of Western timber left packed with fuel after decades of fire-suppression and forest mismanagement -- I can only imagine he waxed glib about any number of convoluted issues in other chapters.

I'm entirely on the side of conservation, myself. Edward Abbey may have been something of a jerk, but I agree with his dictum that "compromise" between development and conservation should begin with half of all the land (and sea) set aside as wilderness. So here in our latter days of armed occupation of wildlife refuges and devious boondoggles to steal our public land for the benefit of some well-placed industry cronies, Weidensaul's doom-and-gloomsaying from the Dubya era seems almost quaint, his optimism about the future of the conservation movement sadly misplaced. All nature books seemingly have to end on that note of optimism, which gets more depressing the more time has passed since some author confidently predicted that "the tide has turned" in our (and our planet's) favor.

2016 read #59: Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane.

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from July 22 to July 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Much of the critical coverage I've seen relating to this book emphasized its role as a "word-hoard." At least one review gently chided Macfarlane for producing what at times amounts to a topographic dictionary; I put off reading Landmarks for months, in fact, persuaded that it sounded more apt as a reference volume than an edifying read. The word-hoards, however, make up only half of the raison d'être of this volume. Landmarks is equally if not more so a wayfinding exercise through Macfarlane's influences as a writer, a protracted argument by example in support of a particular school of nature writing. Many of the chapters began life as introductions to the foundational texts (and authors) Macfarlane visits. The visits range from moving epitaphs (the chapter on Roger Deakin) to cursory overviews that quickly veer away to different authors altogether (the "North-Minded" chapter begins as an ostensible examination of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams but spends far more words introducing Peter Davidson). Macfarlane produces some of his most precise and elegant prose in pursuit of these authors, but its beauty is often pulled up short by his subject matter -- a guided tour of a writer's favorite books, no matter how elegantly worded, is always going to carry the stigma of a listicle.

The word-hoard, in its turn, is fascinating, but so loaded with Gaelic words and regional synonyms for general terms that its usefulness to an outside writer is limited, except in its role as a prompt to imagination and specificity. Which, after all, is Macfarlane's central argument throughout Landmarks. Great nature writing demands precision of meaning; the culture-wide drain of that precise awareness of the natural world is what Macfarlane, in his own way, hopes to avert, or at least delay.

2016 read #57: Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher.

Wild America: The Record of a 30,000 Mile Journey Around the Continent by a Distinguished Naturalist and His British Colleague by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher
427 pages
Published 1955
Read from July 17 to July 22
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

In my library's meager science section, there are few books that interest me that I haven't yet read. There are a fair number of primers on space or maths or volcanoes, quite a few pop-science cash-ins from journalists on the mediagenic controversies of the past fifteen years, and of course the inevitable pile of science biographies, but informative and non-sensationalized texts on life science, non-volcanic geology and Earth history, weather and climate, and so on are rather lacking (or, in some cases, merely outdated). It's a systemic problem in modern publishing, from what I can gather; the thirty-seventh book dissecting the personal theology of Charles Darwin will move more copies than an erudite and educational overview of plant and insect coevolution, because general readers are ignorant and have poor taste. (Sorry, the 2016 Republican National Convention just happened, and I'm feeling particularly gloomy about the wherewithal of the common American.)

One of the few interesting books I haven't already gobbled down is called Return to Wild America, by Scott Weidensaul, author of the overly imaginative yet compelling history The First Frontier. Weidensaul's Return was a Bush-era follow-up to none other than this here volume, commemorating its fiftieth anniversary. I'm something of a stickler (or stick in the mud) when it comes to doing my homework; I felt obligated to read Peterson and Fisher before I permitted myself Weidensaul. It wasn't merely a desire to do my due diligence, either -- an ecology book that merited a book-length revisit on its fiftieth anniversary sounded right up my alley, perhaps a classic work up there with A Sand County Almanac (or, at the very least, A Natural History of North American Trees).

Plus, how could I say no to reading a book that shared a title with my favorite PBS nature serial of the late 1980s?

It turns out that Wild America is... not very illuminating. The book is more of a 1950s road trip memoir, something like Travels with Charley but with birds instead of social commentary. The two authors play cute with some minor odd couple hijinks, run a running joke about Coca-Cola into the ground, offer some spiffy gee-whiz optimism about newfangled audio tours in museums and newfangled "rational exploitation" of fur seals in their breeding grounds, and in general careen about like two well-to-do white guys with a brand new car and three months to spare chasing birds for a living.

A good ecology book would tell you, the general reader, something about how each species might fit into its environment or make a broader point of scientific interest from the specific example. Even the aforementioned Natural History of American Trees delved into the ecology and life cycles of its subjects in fascinating ways, despite being little more than an extended index of tree species. Wild America, by contrast, offers little more than lists and basic descriptions of the birds the authors saw. There are times when the description of nature or scenery is evocative, almost seeming to deserve a revisit fifty years later, but for the most part, it reads like a birding checklist padded out with incidents of travel and casual condescension toward women, Indians, and Inuit. The result is very 1950s, like a prolonged National Geographic piece, a curious relic rather than a document with much to say to the present.

2016 read #53: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
259 pages
Published 2005
Read from June 22 to June 23
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Another thoroughly engaging history book / travel memoir / snarky NPR segment from Vowell, this one tracing the physical sites associated with (and the coincidental connections between) assassinations of three nineteenth century presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Along the way we learn about the Oneida Community and the slow diminution of the Republican party, from the grand old party of Lincoln to the Southern Strategists of the Bush/Rove/Ashcroft era. As with all Vowell books, the central draw is more the entertainment value than the depth of didacticism; nevertheless, I feel like I learned quite a bit. My tastes in history tend toward the ancient and the primeval -- when it comes to American history, I check out around the close of the Seven Years' War -- so I was unexpectedly engrossed by Vowell's breezy overview of the naked corruption and boss politics of the Gilded Age, an era I really should learn more about.

2016 read #49: Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
293 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 11 to June 14
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Way back when I first began this blogging project / reading more project, one of the first books to make a powerful impression on me was Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. At the time, dazed by her elegant fluency and my emotional resonance, my sense of kinship, with her ruminations on life, love, and the American West, I marveled, "Solnit, more so than almost any other author whose words I've happened upon, speaks to me, articulating thoughts and feelings my fingers are too clumsy to share." I stand by that initial enthusiasm for Getting Lost, despite three subsequent years of books both wondrous and inane, but nowadays I might add the caution that it was Getting Lost as a work, as a statement I interpreted through my own filters of background and experience, rather than Solnit as an author, that spoke to me so meaningfully.

My to-read list is crowded with Solnit's other works and essay collections, yet it's taken me until now to read another. I wasn't avoiding her work, precisely; I attempted The Faraway Nearby but, at the time, found myself confounded by the literary density of what I faced. I opted for some disposable fantasy novel or other in its place, and just haven't gotten around to trying again. Perhaps there was some half-conscious pessimism involved, a suspicion that Getting Lost was an anomaly, an accidental congruence of outlook and identification, irreproducible, an island microenvironment isolated at the crest of a desert range.

Where do I begin with Wanderlust? It is a work of tremendous ambition and erudition, a marvelous display of traced connections and cogent inferences. The chapter on mountaineering alone nearly made Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind superfluous three years before its publication, sketching in much the same history with the addition of non-Western perspectives, such as the Japanese tradition of Shugendō, which Macfarlane (so far as I can recall) didn't even mention. But Solnit explores so much more than the cultural history -- from Wordsworth to Thoreau to Muir, from formal gardens to English gardens to walking clubs -- of Romantic nature-worship and Anglophone conceptualizations of the virtue of outdoor recreation. She swerves into compelling tangents on gender and sexuality, on cultural partitions of "acceptable" spaces, on histories of public assembly and revolution. Why is it that, despite all the histories I've read that have touched on the French Revolution, I didn't learn about the march of the market women on October 5, 1789, until I found it in a history of walking? Why is it, for that matter, that I never heard of the popular protests and demonstrations against the First Gulf War until now? With the Orlando massacre and the threatened ascendancy of reactionary fascists in the public sphere, the poignancy and eloquence of Solnit's passages on oppression and resistance sank deep into me.

As with any conceptual history of such breadth and ambition, there were inevitably some chapters that didn't interest me much, various passages of dry material between my particular highlights. Nonetheless, this book is a tremendous achievement and a compelling thesis on the vital importance of public spaces and civic pedestrianism. Despite the more recent social movements toward "walkable cities," Solnit's closing chapters on the automotive deserts of suburbia remain as direly insightful as they were sixteen years ago.

2016 read #45: Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane.

Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit by Robert Macfarlane
282 pages
Published 2003
Read from May 22 to May 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

After several false starts and abandoned novels in the second half of this month (so much for that splendid pace I'd been setting!), I was more than eager to get started on this one. I've been trying to obtain Mountains of the Mind for well over a year now, probably ever since I finished The Old Ways and felt myself hankering for more from Macfarlane. I'm somewhat impressed by his works, primarily The Wild Places, and everything I knew about Mountains suggested it would be a worthwhile read. A sociological history on how people (well, Western Europeans, at any rate) conceptualize and respond to mountainous terrain intrigued both my anthropological side and my outdoorsy side; Macfarlane's byline promised the cachet of his often-fluent nature writing. That extra year or so while I waited for the library network to act upon my book request only added to my anticipation.

For all that buildup, Mountain proves to be... pretty much alright? The thesis statement of the bold opening chapter, promising nothing less than a history of landscape perception across several centuries, is the best part of the book -- an appropriate parallel to Macfarlane's theme of the romantic pull of the unknown, mystery and suggestion rendering to the imagination scenes to which reality is a disappointing substitute. He covers the West's progression of concepts and ideas regarding mountains well enough, chapter by chapter, but the book as a whole feels somewhat lacking, little serving to distinguish it from any number of history books. Macfarlane's later prose brilliance is only suggested here in the occasional bit of wordplay.