You’ll have to excuse me. I am not going to tell you about one of
my favorite books this time. Instead, it’s an entire library of good reading
from one of the finest writers of our (or any) time.
Wendell Berry loves the land. For years, he farmed the
old-fashioned way in Kentucky, with horses and hand tools and husbandry that is
about as far removed from modern “agribusiness” as you can get. He’s an
outstanding poet, but we’ll leave that for another time. He writes some of the
most incisive essays and social commentary you’ll ever read, but we’ll leave
that for another time, as well.
His novels and stories of what he calls the “Port William
Membership” are more than worth reading. Every one of them, and there are at
least a dozen of them (I don’t have an exact count, because some of the novels
stand alone but are also included in short novel collections), is worth
reading.
Port William is a fictional small town in Kentucky, surrounded by
land farmed through generations by the Catletts, Coulters, Penns, Feltners, and
others. They are deceptively deep, touching, realistic stories of people and
land, loves and friendships, work and play. Sometimes tragic, sometimes
humorous, and always beautiful, Berry’s stories can make you wonder why we let
the world change the way it has.
Read Wendell Berry. He writes every word of every book with pencil
and paper—handcrafted prose in every sense of the word.
Wendell Berry is a great human being that saw clearly the value of the natural world and worked with nature not against it.
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