Jason Logan, Creative Director (and rule breaker)
*None of these people came to Wordfest in 2020
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything (fed my soul soul) by Barbara Ehrenreich
In middle age, Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny – or as she later learned to call them, “mystical” – experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search.
Part memoir, part philosophical, and spiritual inquiry, Living with a Wild God brings an older woman’s wry and erudite perspective to a young girl’s uninhibited musings on the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. Ehrenreich’s most personal audiobook ever will spark a lively and heated conversation about religion and spirituality, science and morality, and the “meaning of life.”
Certain to be a classic, Living with a Wild God combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich’s singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement.
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Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books
The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting (delighted me) by Philip Hensher
The loop of an “l,” the chewed-on pen, letters tiny or expansive: what we’ve lost in the era of typing and texting.
When Philip Hensher realized that he didn’t know what a close friend’s handwriting looked like, he felt that something essential was missing from their friendship. It dawned on him that having abandoned pen and paper for keyboards, we have lost one of the ways by which we come to recognize and know another person: handwriting.
The Missing Ink tells the story of this endangered art. Hensher introduces us to the nineteenth-century handwriting evangelists who traveled across America to convert the masses to the moral worth of copperplate script; he examines the role handwriting plays in the novels of Charles Dickens; he investigates the claims made by the practitioners of graphology that penmanship can reveal personality.
But this is also a celebration of the physical act of writing: the treasured fountain pens, chewable ballpoints, and personal embellishments that we stand to lose. Hensher pays tribute to the warmth and personality of the handwritten love note, postcards sent home, and daily diary entries. With the teaching of handwriting now required in only five states and many expert typists barely able to hold a pen, the future of handwriting is in jeopardy. Or is it? Hugely entertaining, witty, and thought-provoking, The Missing Ink will inspire readers to pick up a pen and write.
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Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books
Jesus’ Son: Stories (intrigued me) by Denis Johnson
Jesus’ Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson’s prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.
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Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books
Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (engaged me) by Bruno Latour
The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people.
What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial.
The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders.
This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.
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Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books
Merlin Sheldrake: Entangled Life (made me curiouser)
Entangled Life (made me curiouser) by Merlin Sheldrake
Merlin Sheldrake’s marvelous tour of these diverse and extraordinary life forms is eye-opening on why humans should consider fungi among the greatest of earth’s marvels… Wondrous. – Time
A mind-bending journey into the hidden universe of fungi, “one of those rare books that can truly change the way you see the world around you” – Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND NEW STATESMAN
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
In Entangled Life, the brilliant young biologist Merlin Sheldrake shows us the world from a fungal point of view, providing an exhilarating change of perspective. Sheldrake’s vivid exploration takes us from yeast to psychedelics, to the fungi that range for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, to those that link plants together in complex networks known as the “Wood Wide Web,” to those that infiltrate and manipulate insect bodies with devastating precision.
Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works.
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