Recommended Reading

In 2009, with little more than a glass cutter, LED flashlight, and a suitcase, young American Edwin Rist broke into the British Natural History Museum and ran off with 299 rare bird skins, including a few dozen prized king birds of paradise, which had been taken 150 years ago from the forests of New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago. Rist, it turns out, was motivated by an infatuation with fishing flies, but Johnson casts the story further into our relationship with feathers—from the Victorian era of Darwin and naturalist expeditions to fashion’s demands for ostriches and egrets to today’s anglers and their fly-tying recipe lore. Throughout, Johnson skillfully threads in questions about our desire to claim, collect, and categorize nature. In this Susan Orlean-meets-Agatha Christie true thriller, you’ll first be hooked on the unfurling mystery, then pulled in deep by an eccentric cast of plume hucksters, big game hunters, scientists, “shady dentists,” and extreme fly-tiers.

In the 30 years since this collection was released, Rick Bass’s name has become firmly lodged in American literature, especially in the canons of the environment and the West, yet too few know these three short pieces of fiction that stem from early in the petroleum geologist-turned-writer’s career. In “The Myth of Bears,” a wife tries to run away from her trapper husband and the harsh Yukon wilderness. With “Where the Sea Used to Be,” Wallis Featherstone and his dog Dudley search for oil in the Mississippi Delta: “Looking for the thing, the things no one else knew to look for yet, though he knew they would find it, and rip it into shreds. He considered falling in love.” And in “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” a woman explores a fierce intimacy with her family’s land in West Texas. At only 189 pages, this is a book best read by headlamp under a brightly lit, starkly beautiful, unsentimental night sky.

The story opens with a furious 14-year-old Jan Redford scrambling high up a chossy rock face, angry at her dad for keeping her out of the “men’s work” involved in moving the family to a rural cabin outside of Québec. The experience was both terrifying and liberating, and from that night onward her complicated love affair with mountains shaped her life, through losing her boyfriend in an avalanche and, later, a marriage that restrained and suffocated her. This is a coming-of-age memoir of a climber finding her way in the alpine and also of a woman and mother carving out her sense of identity in a masculine world. When do we set turnaround times in our everyday lives, and how do we sustain a healthy kinship with anger and fear? Redford often writes that she’s “chickenshit,” yet this book is anything but: Its moods gracefully swing from gritty humor to soul-searching agony to the unfettered, sweet freedom of climbing.