100 Books Like Catching Murphy

Pioneer Species is a book of poems by friend and farmer-poet Ross Thurber. A small vineyard I work with in southern Vermont, my own agricultural essay and investigation on a sense of place different than my own, is part of Ross’s Lilac Ridge Farm. Like Mary Oliver, Ross is intensely bound to the natural and cultivated world of his farm in which he lives and his poems capture a language that brings forward the light, the shadow, the fog, the till, the butterfly, the flower, the cow. I am constantly inspired by his poems to be out in my own fields and to contemplate and communicate my own place in them. A delicious collection about a deeply personal and lyrical view of farm life.

I’ve been reading Castle Freeman’s stories and novels for many years, and I always go back for more of his small-town settings, his sheriffs and loggers, and the lingering sense of menace he brings to every situation. But most of all, I go back for the dialogue, which is particularly funny, absurd, and even sometimes wise in this short, propulsive novel.

There’s something of Beckett in how these characters’ talk goes nowhere and everywhere at once. In the closed-down mill of the Dead River Chair Company, a handful of retired or otherwise unemployed men provide commentary and insight on the fast-developing plot, in which a young woman comes to them for information about a man who’s been stalking her and eluding the law.

They set her up with a couple of seemingly hapless locals, who together track him down in an abandoned logging camp in the dark woods. Freeman grew… show more.

I love to explore all aspects of family drama and strife, but sometimes I prefer something with more light and hope rather than darkness and despair.

I thought this one would fit the bill. In many ways, it did. But that doesn’t mean there was a lack of tears and angst. Who wouldn’t want three wishes? And what would we do if we had them? This story explores that and more.

Moreover, it left an indelible stain on my heart while also proving all is not over after a loss. It’s an odd mix of sad and joyful… bittersweet, but elevated to another level. 

I began my career in education as a student teacher in rural Vermont. Like many beginners, I started off as a terrible teacher, and I was desperate for resources. Yet I found very little about rural teaching specifically—until I happened upon this book.

It was like Keizer was speaking directly to me. As a teacher in rural Vermont, he writes with humor and grace about the challenges and possibilities of rural teaching.

He is definitely an outsider to the Northeast Kingdom, and, occasionally, his descriptions have an air of condescension—and, today, they certainly read as dated. But this book has a special place in my heart—it got me through my first few years of rural teaching.

I’ve always been a Thomas Perry fan going all the way back to The Butcher’s Boy, and thoroughly enjoyed his Jane Whitefield series. His novel, The Old Man, was recently adapted for television, starring Jeff Bridges, who’s perfect as the protagonist. The thing I’ve always appreciated about Perry’s books is his careful plotting and attention to detail, which is particularly noticeable in the Jane Whitefield books.  The other thing about his books is the way he can turn a villain —like the Butcher’s Boy—into a likable protagonist.  

This is a feel-good book with just enough punch to keep it from being cute.

It comes with a building project, some hurricane-induced drama, a bit of romance, and two dogs.

Cooper and Bubba are the canines who wind themselves around the main characters, as most dogs do in real life. Cooper is everyone’s friend, and he orchestrates introductions.

But he’s also a bolter who gets lost just as flooding begins and evacuation becomes unavoidable.

Catherine Drake’s books are always a respite between heavier reading, and this one is one of the best.

This book was short-listed for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. It features ex-soldier Mercy Carr and retired military K-9 Elvis, who were both traumatized when Mercy’s fiancé—also Elvis’s handler—was killed on their last deployment.

Paula Munier is another author with a deep connection to the natural world. She is studying for a naturalist certificate in her home state of Vermont, and the books are full of great details.

I dream of one day walking the entire Long Trail, biking the back roads, and paddling a canoe across Lake Champlain, but in the meantime, Leath Tonino has done all that and more. He brings a friendly curiosity, scrounged-up equipment, and a high tolerance, or even yearning, for discomfort and solitude as he explores “the wilderness of home.”

And because he’s also always reading books—the title comes from Aristotle, and his literary heroes are many—his perspective is a little more philosophical than you might expect from a collection of reports about often-challenging outdoor adventures. Mainly written for the magazines that helped fund his modest expeditions, these short pieces explore defunct logging camps, slippery waterfalls, ice-kayaking societies, cormorant colonies, and the little-seen railroad tracks of Vermont.

In the title selection, the native Vermonter traverses the state in seven different ways: biking, walking, swimming, skiing, hitchhiking, flying, and paddling. For Tonino, it’s… show more.

The masculine voice in this novel is absolutely masterful. It’s tender, nuanced, earnest, and intelligent. Stegner offers a sweeping, unflinching story about friendships, marriage, the human ego, and the passage of time with a set of characters who are flawed, fragile, and therefore, very believable.

I’ve read this book more than once, and discover something new and lovely each time. This book honors a reader’s intelligence and heart. Again, the complexity in the characters and how they relate to one another gets me every time.  

A childless couple adopts a chimpanzee named Looee, and you already know from reading that sentence that it will lead to trouble and heartbreak. After a few pages, I didn’t care. In McAdam’s skilled hands, the inevitable sadness doesn’t matter, because the delicately handled point of view perfectly captures a doomed creature trapped between two opposing identities. In contrast, we also meet Podo, an alpha chimp at a research facility seeking to test the intelligence of primates. Podo is fully ape, but he is turning into something more. Their paths soon join, taking them deeper into a gray area between human and animal that I had never seen rendered on the page so vividly before.