Bruce Barcott, author of The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird (Random House, February 2008), writes regularly on environmental issues and outdoor adventure for Outside and the New York Times Magazine. His award-winning book, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, was recently reissued in a 10th anniversary edition. Although he and his family call Seattle home, they're temporarily camped out in the mountains outside Boulder, Colo., while Bruce writes and teaches at the University of Colorado. On your nightstand now:
This is where we're supposed to say The World Is Flat and other smart titles, yes? No. On my nightstand: Eating My Words by Mimi Sheraton; The Life of the Skies by Jonathan Rosen, A Man's Life by Mark Jenkins, The Next Rodeo by William Kittredge, and I swear to god, Moby-Dick. Trying to make my way through it. Not so bad, it turns out. Oh--and David Sedaris. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim sits there like a little over-the-counter Prozac. Taken when needed.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I was a big Encyclopedia Brown addict. Ran through the whole series when I was a kid in Alaska, then went back to the start and did them all over again. I was a sucker for the whole solution-at-the-end-of-the-book ploy. I think they ought to have books like that for adults. Encyclopedia Foxy Brown or something.
Your top five authors:
Ann Patchett, Ian Frazier, Susan Orlean, Aldo Leopold and Calvin Trillin. In my heaven, there's a bookshelf stocked with nothing but Calvin Trillin's crime writing.
Book you've faked reading:
Anything by Faulkner. Faked it in college, avoided the question in my 20s, owned up to it in my 30s and now I say to hell with all of it.
Book you are an evangelist for:
One that shows humanity at its worst, the other at its best.
- The Game by Neil Strauss. An entire book about pickup artists. Embarrassing, I know. But nothing published in the last decade can match its brilliant, creepy display of raw human impulses, ugliness and power politics. Some clown hit on my wife in a bar last month, and we both recognized the guy's Straussian gambits: "He's rolling game!"
- A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. You can't read this book and not become a conservationist. We shouldn't let kids out of high school until they've finished it.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Guinness Book of World Records 2008. Okay, it was for my daughter. But have you SEEN that holographic cover? It's like going to a Doors concert circa 1970. Freeeeaky.
Book that changed your life:
Are we going to make ourselves look good or are we going to be honest? Let's try honesty. It was Flashbacks, Timothy Leary's autobiography. Ugh. I know. But I came from a farm town, read it freshman year in college, and it introduced me to people who were . . . different. Led me to Kerouac, who led me to Gary Snyder, who led me to Wallace Stegner, and on down the line. Hey--you can't pick your relatives. Can't pick which books will be bricks thrown through your window, either. They just come a-crashing.
Favorite line from a book:
I'm not the world's biggest Ed Abbey fan, but this is a line of his that I love: "God bless America. Let's save some of it."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Great Plains by Ian Frazier. Now that I'm living on the edge of them, I'd love to have that feeling of discovery upon reading the first few pages of Frazier's book and just going wheeee-eeew! and ride the sucker all the way to the last page while driving across, say, Nebraska. Which you could pretty much do while reading a book.