100 Books Like The Most Costly Journey

When I first read this book, I couldn’t stop marveling over how much I didn’t know about this beautiful, complicated state that I call home—and how much I learned in just 200 pages. Now, I return every time I want to reinforce my understanding of why there are so many abandoned stone walls in the mountains, why there are no billboards, and what happened to the Peregrine falcons.

The authors are teachers and know how to keep it interesting, even when discussing tedious subjects like tectonic plates, highway commissioners, and population statistics. Noting that Vermont as we know it has only been around for about 225 years, they begin with a chapter about the continent’s formation more than a billion years ago and the centuries under an ice sheet before bringing us up to date with the mountains and rivers we know and love.

This context, along with the details… show more.

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 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.

Various poetry collections have become important to me throughout my life, but if I had to choose a favorite poet and favorite book right now, it would be Voigt and Headwaters. Something new reveals itself each time I read this collection, and it is a particular thrill that so many aspects of a place I know show up in poems of such fierce beauty—the groundhogs and winter snows, the larch and birch and owls.

Voigt moves from one line to the next with such smooth velocity—not slowed down by a single piece of punctuation—that the tumbling forth of images, moods, memories, questions, and quips can create a whiplash effect of the most pleasing kind. A poem that begins with heavy frost and hibernation moves through insomnia, deception, and the pleasure of smoking, and by the end, I find myself marveling, how did we get here?

There’s really no point… show more.

There’s a valid argument to be made that Shadowland is perhaps more of a horror novel than fantasy, but it’s never really out-and-out scary.

It’s certainly more magical than bloody, concerning two friends in the 1950s who spend a hallucinatory summer at an uncle’s place in the Vermont woods. And man do things get weird.

After a long, lovely prelude at a boarding school, Tom and Del have to navigate their failing friendship and the strange happenings in the woods, but most of all they have to look out for Del’s uncle Cole, an old-school magician who, it turns out, is far from an avuncular old guardian.

Full of fairy tales and fables and wonderful digressions (with Straub, the digressions are often the point), Shadowland feels timeless in a way Stephen King never does. It might be the best book I’ve ever read.

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 read this book no less than five times, and it remains one of my all-time favorite books. Tartt’s literary style of writing is not only beautiful in its own right but becomes a tool to enrich the story that surrounds all things literary.

The idea of an exclusive New England college where you have the luxury of unabashedly studying the classics and taking school breaks in Italy is my ultimate idea of luxury. Where do I sign up?! Taking it a step further, the fact that these academic outcasts are stone-cold murderers hits my sweet spot.

This juxtaposition of elevation and depravation pulls me in every single time. When I went to college, I initially wanted to study criminal psychology, and this book is a perfect example of why.

This book has all of the same selling points as Carol Deppe's but is geared a bit more toward those with larger homesteads rather than a simple backyard plot. Even if you're an urban homesteader, though, the title is well worth a read to drum up outside-the-box ideas.

This Picoult novel, written close to the time I began to shape my book, asks whether we can love across time. While the theme is much more grounded in practical and natural circumstances, the fact that the question is teased out in this novel helps shape the same question my character, Adelyn, finds herself embroiled in. Is Innis capable of breaking the barrier using the strength of a first love?

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.