Welcome!

I'm very excited about this blog, which is an expansion of my original venture into the blogosphere, Morning Glory Garden (morning-glory-garden.blogspot.com). That blog, as the title suggests, focuses on gardens, gardening, the lovely things that come from the garden - vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruits - and other associated creative ventures, from cooking to various arts and crafts.

For a while, after I discovered Blogging for Books (bloggingforbooks.com), it also included the occasional book review. For an ardent book lover like me, Blogging for Books seemed like a sort of miracle. You sign up, choose a book, and they send you a free review copy. All they ask is that you read it, write an honest review for their site, and also post the review on your own blog. If you go to Morning Glory Garden you'll see that recently reviews have pretty much been all I've posted, and except, perhaps, for the cookbooks, they don't really fit with the theme(s) of that blog, so here we are. This will be the place for all things literary from now on. Including cookbooks. And maybe posts of my own poetry during April (National Poetry Month). Things like that.

I actually have a new cookbook awaiting review, but since I haven't read it yet, I want to talk about something else: book groups, specifically the book group that I attend every month. Reading may seem like a solitary pursuit, but talking about books with other readers, even when we disagree (and that sometimes - well, okay, often - happens in this group) is also a great pleasure. Just last month, for example, I came away from the group with a greater appreciation for Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which I didn't actively dislike, but didn't find quite as compelling as some other readers did.

Our group reads a wide variety of things, both fiction and non-fiction, and the book for this month is Edward Abbey's 1968 masterpiece (that is not a word I use lightly), Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness.

His fourth book (following three novels), Desert Solitaire is, as the subtitle suggests, a chronicle of the time Abbey spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah. Based mostly on his journals from those seasons, April to September for two years (he later returned for a third), he conveys in lyrical, sometimes angry, often humorous prose what he found to love in the desert southwest and how he believed we should live in relation to it so as not to destroy it. Readers who admire Thoreau and Aldo Leopold will certainly respond to Abbey's passionate environmentalism, while others, perhaps new to the genre, will also enjoy the experience. "Enjoy the experience" - such a flat, namby-pamby phrase to apply to this book that many of my students have said changed their lives, though to be fair, some others (a very small number) got quite angry with Abbey (though even they could not say he wasn't an excellent writer).

Here's what Edwin Way Teale wrote in the New York Times Book Review:

This book may well seem like a ride on a bucking bronco. It is rough, 

tough, combative. The author is a rebel and an eloquent loner. 

His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book. 

It has philosophy. It has humor. It has its share of nerve-tingling 

adventures . . . set down in a lean, racing prose, 

in a close-knit style of power and beauty.

I knew next to nothing about Edward Abbey when I arrived at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1992. He had taught there, in the creative writing department, until his death a few years before I arrived, and I heard later from some of his students how kind and good a teacher he could be, despite his cantankerous reputation.

As a grad student in the English department I taught composition, and one of my students asked me if she could bring her mother, who was visiting her, to class. I said "sure." I don't remember what the topic was that day, but after class the student and her mother came up to talk to me. "Have you read Desert Solitaire?" the mother asked. I had to admit I hadn't even heard of it. "You would love it," she said. "It is absolutely my favorite book."

So I read it, and then I taught it in several courses. And now I have the pleasure of re-reading it yet again, and looking forward to a lively discussion. Recently I was talking with the rector of our church, another Abbey aficionado, and I said that if I could only have one book on a desert island and had to choose between the Bible and Desert Solitaire, it would be very, very difficult. He just nodded in understanding.