Staff Picks Highlighted : Brett's Shelf

  

Summer is a great time to read!  Winter is nice beside the woodstove, but there’s also nothing like reading after a vigorous day in the garden or swimming in a spring-fed lake.  Akhil Sharma’s Family Life is hands-down one of the best novels I’ve read in years.  Utterly unsentimental, written in beautiful and economic prose, this novel is a gem nine years in the writing.  

Jeffrey Lent’s In the Fall remains one of my favorite novels, and certainly what I would call the quintessential Vermont novel.  Steeped in history, love of landscape, and deftly written, this novel has depth and beauty like few others.  I would love to read this novel for the first time again.  

Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick inspired me to read Moby-Dick again.  Philbrick, of Mayflower fame, has written a little book to accompany a very large book, and whether you read the large book or not, Philbrick’s little one is a pleasure for any lover of literature.  On the subject of classics, I’d like to put in a plug for our growing shelf of classic literature in the fiction section.  Many of this novels – Grapes of Wrath, Jane Eyre, Lolita – have already generated so much discussion in the bookstore.  Of particular interest to me was the Bronte versus Austen debate.

Don’t let this pristine and lovely summer pass by without reading poetry.  Vermont’s David Budbill writes,

Summer’s here and we can hike the peaks again,

have lunch on the mountaintops, look down

on the backs of circling hawks and laze away

the afternoon watching blue-hazy, distant hills.

Budbill’s poems capture the grit and beauty of living in these mountains.  While We’ve Still Got Feet is one of a number of Budbill’s books in the Galaxy.  Janisse Ray’s A House of Branches is a fine book of poetry, but I especially want to point readers to her last poem in the collection, “Courage,” with a loon metaphor.  

Last, let me put in a word for various works of literature well-worth the read:  for fiction, Laxness’s Icelandic novel Independent People, True Grit, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Road, and Catch-22. For non-fiction aficionados, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Brain on Fire.  My fifteen-year-old daughter is reading Twelve Years a Slave and my nine-year-old daughter Roald Dahl.  How’s that for diversity?  Come in and share your own favorites.  We’re always happy to hear what people are reading!