Why am I passionate about this?
As a lifelong weirdo, I’m intrigued by nonstandard choices. When I was eleven, slightly precocious (and slightly obnoxious), I dropped out of school—with the support of my parents, and against the advice of everyone else. After a year of homeschooling, I started attending university. This was the first in a sequence of unusual decisions. Some worked out better than others! I continue to wonder what motivates a person to step off the well-trodden, well-lit path. When is conventional advice likely to lead to fulfillment, and when should it be modified or ignored outright? I love a story (like these five) where someone tries something completely different.
Norah's book list on taking on a new adventure
Why Norah loves this book
Although Edward Abbey warns you right off the bat not to visit the places in this book—they don’t exist anymore, not the way they were when he was there—twenty pages in, I wanted to go.
I wanted to risk my car’s axles crossing boulder-strewn washes. I wanted to rip my jeans, shoving through canyon-bottom scrub. I wanted to rise early and sit, steaming coffee in hand, to watch the sun break through the pinyon pine. I wanted to hang out and shoot the shit with Edward Abbey.
Whenever I pick up this book, I feel a genuine longing for the American Southwest in the ’60s. And a longing like that, even one that can never be satisfied, is a pleasure all unto itself.
18 authors picked Desert Solitaire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
'My favourite book about the wilderness' Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
In this shimmering masterpiece of American nature writing, Edward Abbey ventures alone into the canyonlands of Moab, Utah, to work as a seasonal ranger for the United States National Park Service.
Living out of a trailer, Abbey captures in rapt, poetic prose the landscape of the desert; a world of terracotta earth, empty skies, arching rock formations, cliffrose, juniper, pinyon pine and sand sage. His summers become spirit quests, taking him in search of wild horses and Ancient Puebloan petroglyphs, up mountains and across tribal lands, and…
