Looking for a way to connect to the outside while you’re inside? Our Book Group might be for you! Voices of the Land is a four month long winter book group series. We will read four books over four months and meet over zoom to discuss them every second Wednesday at 6pm. Each book is tied in to nature and the environment, creating connection with the outdoors without having to trudge through snow!

Book Descriptions

A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World
by John Rember

Through these ten essays, each further broken into ten smaller pieces, Rember examines the practical and ethical dilemmas of climate change, population, resource depletion, and mass extinction. At the same time, he never forgets those improbable connections between human beings that lead to moments of joy, empathy, and grace.  A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World attempts to find tolerable ethical positions in the face of barely tolerable events—and the real possibility of an intolerable future.

Description from University of New Mexico Press

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Description from Milkweed Press

A Year in the Maine Woods
by Bernd Heinrich

A professor of zoology at the University of Vermont, Heinrich recounts in ‘A Year in the Maine Woods’ a year he spent in the western Maine wilderness. With his pet raven Jack, he began his sojourn at the end of May. His cabin, without electricity or plumbing, sat in a clearing a half-mile up a steep brush-filled hill accessible only to four-wheel-drive vehicles. His mailbox was at the foot of the trail, and his nearest neighbors lived on the road beyond the mailbox. He takes us through his busy summer and fall of chopping wood and making repairs to the cabin, all the while observing the wildlife around him.

Description from Publishers Weekly

Entangled Life
by Merlin Sheldrake

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.

Description from Amazon Books

To sign up for the Voices of the Land Book Club please fill out this form. If you have questions about the book group and reading series please send them to Alison at alison.marchione@uvlt.org

Happy Reading!