Looked today for Aldo Leopold's "Sand County Almanac." Awhile back, I enjoyed reading "Wilderness and the American Mind."

 On another tack, I'm now reading Masumoto's "Wisdom of the Last Farmer." It has the same elegiac quality as Larry Levis' poetry about growing up on a ranch in California's Central Valley--not surprising, as both men came from that region and are roughly contemporaries. Must find "Epitaph for a Peach."

This last July, I began a program of reading. Since I was surrounded with city and apartment noises and distractions, from train horns blasting, to sirens wailing, to nearby freeway and airport noises, as well as the sounds of door-slamming, car alarms, neighbor's arguments, and the tired and cranky baby crying downstairs, I decided to start with a book about silence and solitude--Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire."

It is a tough book, a beautiful book, a sometimes politically incorrect book. It is what used to be called "a man's book." Abbey works alone as a park ranger in the Utah desert, and records his thoughts about the harsh and stunning landscape. He describes a river trip down the Colorado before the advent of the Glen Canyon Dam. He recounts a tale of miner's greed and desperation in a lonely land that ends in murder. He describes a world of dark skies, forbidding canyons, and the desert's deceptive beauty and treachery. I enjoyed every page.

2010.

 This year, I resolve to read Arthur C. Clarke's "2010."

As usual, I'll get there by means of a thousand tangents. So, I am reading anything and everything but Clarke. Conrad, Twain, Melville, Hawthorne--short stories by John Muir, musings by Thoreau. But no science fiction, yet.

The Librivox audio books have been a delight to me, but Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables" is strangely hard to listen to. I will find myself a paper copy of the work.