 |
|
|
|
|
I love stories and most of the time a book accompanies our outside adventures. I adore listening to someone read aloud, though I will take my turn if need be. We read in the car, at rest stops, over island lunches, through slow paddles, and even on the exhausted drive home. Here are the books that have recently come outside with us... |
||||||||
|
Canoeing With the Cree Eric Sevareid
This is a Great Story. These are two ordinary boys who accomplish the extraordinary. Easy to read, it would make a fine book report project. It is certainly the perfect canoe trip book. Note to young readers: Eric Sevareid wrote this book from notes he kept in a journal along the trip. He was eighteen when the book was finished. He went on to become a famous television/news journalist. This book has been recently reprinted by the Minnesota Historical Society. |
|||||||
|
Collected Stories of Sherlock Holmes By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Ben, our youngest neighbor, was given a summer school assignment to read the Collected Stories of Sherlock Holmes. He had also just finished an assignment to knit a pair of socks! Somehow the two assignments were stitched together and The Green Socks Mystery Club was born. Ben is the President and, weather permitting, he wears the Green Socks when we convene. That first summer we met on the porch to listen to Ian read aloud Holmes in his fabulous British accent. After listening to a few stories we collected numerous copies of the Collected Stories and divided the parts between us, each person reading their lines out loud, like a play. When summer ended the cool weather moved us inside. It can be hard to schedule a meeting with all of our complicated lives but somehow we finished most of the stories. Next we managed to find six used copies of The Hound of the Baskervilles and began to read this longer tale. It took us months! For the very last chapter we paddled to an island in the middle of Lake Johanna and finished the tale in the slanting July light of a summer afternoon. If you love mysteries, you’ll like this one—An old style story with a satisfyingly long development of the characters and great descriptions of the misty moors of England. |
||||||||
|
Great Expectations Charles Dickens
We took Jer’s suggestion and now Great Expectations has traveled with us down several rivers including the great Mississippi, which Dickens himself saw on his trip across the United States. The story is riveting—escaped prisoners, an old wedding dress clad woman who has not seen the light of day in decades, mysterious money, bad men, good men, beautiful, sometimes funny, description. Don’t let school spoil this book. (Too many tests had spoiled it for me.) How great to find out that, after all these years, it is a very good story. |
||||||||
|
Whatever We Touch Is Touching Us: Craft Art and a Deeper Sense of Ecology by Paulus Berensohn My dear friend and teacher, Paulus Berensohn, recently wrote a series of essays for the Haystack School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. I took it with me on the paddle across Gunflint Lake. Paulus is passionately concerned with the ecology of our beautiful planet. He sees artistic behavior and listening attentively to be our most important human skills to help us save the wider, non-human world.. Paulus is the most magical journal keeper I have ever met—by this I mean that he has the ability to take the daily events of life and transform them into windows onto the sublime through careful recording and playful responding inside the journal. It is truly remarkable. To order a copy of his essay, visit the Haystack Mountain School of Craft’s website, www.haystack-mtn.org/monographs. |
|||||||
|
Owls and Other Fantasies Mary Oliver
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, |
||||||||
|
|||
|
Outside Reading
Seventeen year old Eric Sevareid and his nineteen year old friend, Walt Port, have a boring day at the end of high school. In order to “have an adventure,” they decide to attempt to paddle from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Hudson Bay, Canada. They plan to travel the 2250 miles of northern rivers and lakes in a second-hand canvas canoe, hoping to arrive at York Factory, the old Hudson Bay Trading Post, before the waters begin to ice in September. They set off in July of 1935, later than they should...
Last year Ian and I read several classics out loud and I credit these long and glorious books for helping heal the great emptiness I felt after my mother’s death. We read Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Moby Dick, and Melville’s short stories. Jerry suggested Great Expectations, with the story of Pip and his mysterious benefactor. (Jerry has read dozens of books aloud to his family and he is a Tolkein expert. Here is a TRUE Jerry legend: Secretly open any of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy books. Read one sentence aloud. Given time, Jerry will be able to name the book, the chapter, and the event where the sentence is to be found. I once saw him figure out the following sentence, given to him by his son, Ben: “Frodo smiled.”)
in the family of things.To read Mary Oliver’s poems is to open a book and suddenly be outside in the natural world. We found this slim volume in a small, lovely bookstore called Birchbark Books & Gifts on Drury Lane, in Grand Marais, Minnesota. We read it during the long drive back from the Gunflint Trail and her words kept the water and sky alive in us a little longer.