“Director’s Notes” are excerpts from our monthly email newsletter, “Stories from the Garden.” Subscribe here, and see past issues here.
Like you, we’re reading a lot these days. Here are a few of the books on the shelves and nightstands of Merwin Conservancy staff, directors, and advisors. Let us know which books you’re reading, in the comments below.
The Popol Vuh by Michael Bazzett (Translator)
The Tree by John Fowles
An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo
Summer Snow by Robert Hass
Ledger by Jane Hirshfield
The Story of More by Hope Jahren
Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson by W.S. Merwin (Translator)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Cast Away: Poems for Our Time by Naomi Shihab Nye
How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Spillover by David Quammen
Grief Works by Julia Samuel
The Murmur of Bees by Sofia Segovia
All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons by Jay Walljasper
Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
The Essential W.S. Merwin, edited by Michael Wiegers
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
Dark Mountain, Issue 17, Spring 2020 by multiple authors and artists
Gail Burlakoff says
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (translators; Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
for the first time (I’m 83!)–12 pages a night!
Among Friends, by M.F.K. Fisher
Silk Parachute, by John McPhee
The Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon
That wonderful photo of the Merwins’ library says it all, to me! I envy you!! Aloha and mahalo, Sara, for all you do!
Kitty Bergel says
The Mirror and the Light, by Hillary Mantel; I’m not sure I’ll finish this one–it’s really long and I yearn for something else.
Ray Cicetti says
I’m reading “The Great Enigma” by Tomas Transtromer.
and The Selected Poems of Tu Fu translated by David Hinton
Astrid Watanabe says
Swampland Flowers, The Letters and Lectures of Zen Master Ta Hui.
Naming Nature, The Clash Between Instinct and Science/ Carol Kaesuk Yoon.
The Master and Margarita/ Mikhail Bulgakoff.
The Secret Knowledge of Water/ Craig Childs
How Propaganda Works/ Jason Stanley (Princeton University Press)
The Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wildtending/ Kolibri terre Sonnenblume
The last two I have not read yet.
Janet Smith says
The Book of Fables by W.S. Merwin
Wired Ghost by Toby Neal
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
Ben Tilghman says
Greenwood, By Michael Christie (and it’s excellent)
Between Mountain and Sea: Poems from Assynt, by Norman MacCaig