/lit/ - Literature

>>12200174
life is beautiful, anon. Take the greenpill instead.

Haha, wow. Just wrote a fucking novel on this in another thread. Here it is (abridged for length)

My erudition has a geographic bias, so bear with me, but I have very good suggestions in that area.

-Mary Austin writes beautifully about the inland California desert. I'd recommend "The Land of Little Rain." It is short, and broken up into independent essays so you don't have to read the whole thing either.
-Wallace Stegner has some greats, but I'd recommend "Thoughts In a Dry Land" as a jumping off point.
-Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" is a must-read in environmental literature. I won't even pick out specific essays for you to focus on because I feel it's a masterwork, so pick and choose as you go.
-If you like a more scientific bent, try reading anything by Joseph Wood Krutch. He's a naturalist and ecologist, but he does a fantastic job of anthropomorphizing and dramatizing wild life, which is a strategy that I generally don't enjoy but which he so well employs that I can't really hate. Either "The Desert Year" or "The Voice of the Desert" would be fantastic choices.
-Annie Dillard. Just do it. Got a great essay about making eye contact with a weasel.
-Ann Zwinger. Downcanyon or Run River, Run are both classics.
-I read a fantastic anthology which could also send you after more works from authors that you like in it. It is called "Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest." Again, it is broken up into discrete chunks. It has poetry, creative non-fiction, New Journalism status essays, fiction, etc. One of the best books that I have ever read. It is broken into four sections, and that filtering will aid you.
-Might sound weird, but try reading the first "Dune" book, by Frank Herbert. He does a great job of writing descriptively about the desert.
-Charles Bowden is great if you like journalism.
-If you want to break out of the high-school core books of Steinbeck, as this >>4163693
individual suggested, then read "The Log from the Sea of Cortez," which was a collaboration that he did with a marine biologist, Ed Ricketts.
-Hmmmm, total tangent here, but J.M. Coetzee has written beautiful descriptive passages of nature in some places. He had some winners in Disgrace. Beyond that, he's a fucking Nobel Prize winner, so y'know, might be worth a go.
-I always felt that Gabriel García Márquez described nature well. It's obviously not his emphasis, but environmental writers can tend toward suffocating myopia in their topics and philosophical conceits, so I'd read "Cien Años de Soledad" if you want to see how he integrates good narrative with beautiful descriptions of nature.

I have unending suggestions regarding books about nature, generally, but I tried to tailor this list to what came across as a need to write fiction.

>>4065819

Guize