Bianca Stone’s Winter Book Picks
The urge to read is mysterious and fickle. Sometimes I’ll go months without reading anything but the Dr. Bronner’s soap label while I’m in the shower. Then a book finds me, or I find it, and the next thing I know it’s nine hours later and I’m still on the couch, swaddled in a crumb-dusted blanket and surrounded by empty seltzer cans like a raccoon in its trash nest.
The trash-nest state is depressingly elusive for me, because there are simply too many books one could read, and it’s impossible to live inside all of them at once. That’s not how time works. And then a great sense of futility creeps in.
I cannot offer you a time machine to address this problem in your own life. But I can offer you some book recommendations from three Vermont writers — state poet laureate Bianca Stone, National Book Award-winning novelist M.T. Anderson and Kirkus Prize-winning author Ken Cadow — to help you pass the 7,000 years of winter still ahead of us.
Bianca Stone recommends…
– **The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society by Carl Jung**
A plea after the devastations of World War II, psychoanalyst Carl Jung emphasizes the urgency of self-reflection in the overwhelming and seductive sway of mass society. The illusion of statistical “truths” in which we stand in awe and our predisposition to blindly follow ideologies and societal trends all lead to a lack of critical thinking and loss of individuality.
– **How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry by Edward Hirsch**
Edward Hirsch’s stunning, accessible book on poetry is appropriate for all levels of experience. Hirsch emphasizes the relationality of poetry, deepening our engagement with poetry as a vital act of self-discovery and discovery of one another.
– **Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated by Stephanie McCarter**
The interesting thing about myths (and all great poetry) is that they keep offering up more, even thousands of years later. Translator Stephanie McCarter notes in her introduction that at the heart of this poem lies one constant theme: power and how it transforms us, both those who have it and those who don’t.
– **Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences for Astronauts by Dara Barrois/Dixon**
Strangeness, feeling, and a subtle, dark hilarity — any book by Dara Barrois/Dixon is a win, but this latest has all the innovative, uncanny wisdom you can hope for.
Bianca Stone is Vermont’s poet laureate. She lives in Brandon and is the creative director of the Ruth Stone House, dedicated to fostering poetry, poetic study, the arts, and the preservation of her grandmother Ruth Stone’s legacy and house in Goshen.
M.T. Anderson’s Winter Book Picks
M.T. Anderson, National Book Award winner and author of Newbery Honor book “Elf Dog & Owl Head”, offers his winter book picks:
– **This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone**
Two assassins assigned to kill each other during a war fought throughout history on many worlds slowly come to realize that they might be in love. It’s a psychopathic sci-fi meet-cute, lushly poetic, richly imagined, and sly.
– **This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David J. Silverman**
Famously, the Wampanoag sachem we call Massasoit extended hospitality to the starving Plymouth settlers and saved them from famine. Four decades later, those settlers hunted down Massasoit’s son Metacomet and slaughtered him in the midst of one of the bloodiest wars in our history.
– **The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding**
It’s World War II, and Lucia Holley’s husband is off fighting while she tries to hold together the home front and the family. Soon, she attracts the attention of both a mobster and an investigating detective.
– **Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day by Dan Nott**
This nonfiction graphic novel for young people reintroduces us to utilities we take for granted, demystifying them, giving us some history, explaining how they work, and pointing out how the way we think about them blinds us to both their real costs and their miraculous benefits.
M.T. Anderson lives in East Calais.
Ken Cadow’s Winter Book Picks
Ken Cadow, author of the Kirkus Prize-winning “Gather”, offers his winter book picks:
– **The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel**
Michael J. Sandel explains the need for American society to better laud the dignity of work, and the worker, at every level, and he offers profoundly possible solutions to make this shift.
– **James by Percival Everett**
James, aka “Jim” from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells his story, a story of slavery and repression just before the Civil War.
– **One Man’s Meat by E.B. White**
A collection of essays and musings of the complexities of simple life on a small farm in a small Maine town, set against a backdrop of regular seasons and the irregularity of World War II.
– **How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World by Ethan Tapper**
A beautifully written account of a young man passionate about forestry and the planet but still manages to hunt and have a chainsaw.
Ken Cadow lives in Norwich and is coprincipal of Oxbow High School.
