This hill, this valley Book

The “gentle reads” description definitely applies to this charmer, written back in the fifties by the naturalist Hal Borland. As the dust jacket says, this book is “one of the true classics of American nature writing” that “recounts the cycle of a year on Borland’s hill-country farm in north-western Connecticut” with “a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s sense of wonder.”

What more can I say? I loved this book. It’s the absolute antidote to the ills of our over-information age and its depressing news cycle. You can feel your heart rate slow and a feeling of well-being emerge just by reading segments like this:

“Today I took a walk up the mountainside and found that though a hundred things be wrong, a thousand things are right and completely in order.

“The right things are so obvious. Water still runs downhill, making brooks that sing and rivers that flow seaward. Grass still sends up green shoots in the pasture. Robins strut the lawn and sing their mating call from the trees. Daffodils come to blossom. Maples begin to open wine-red bloom ...

“The world is all right. The quarrels are among men. Men who forget that ideas have their roots in one of two places, in the earth or in the stars. April invites a conference on the open hillside to investigate the state of affairs at their common source.”

Don’t you feel better, just reading this? I do.