Vermont discussion

Who has a book about Vermont? Or set in Vermont? Or just mentions Vermont? (Especially if it's in an interesting way?)

I'm always intrigued by how VT appears in literature. David Foster Wallace casts it in Infinite Jest as part of the Great Concavity. In Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut talks about a plan crashing into Smuggler's Notch*. I read something else in the last year or two where it showed up as one of two secessionist states in the union (though my memory is cheating me out of the specifics right now).

So what've you got?





* I may have that one screwed up a bit...

Good subject! And it took me all of 10 seconds to remember a great recommendation I was given when I moved to Vermont. Noel Perrin wrote a series of 3 books, First Person Rural, Second Person Rural and Third Person Rural. Actually, there's a 4th titled Last Person Rural. These essays are the funny and brilliant anecdotes of a New Yorker turned Vermont Organic Farmer. How to buy a truck, tap a maple tree, milk a cow, etc. His experiences are real which makes them even more hilarious. I could NOT recommend these books more. I read the first three and now, with this reminder, will search out the last.
Peace............

Robert Newton Peck's "A Day No Pigs Would Die" is the quintessential Vermont boy's coming-of-age story. I read it when I was growing up in Vermont and identified with it greatly on many levels. The sequel "A Part of the Sky" is also highly recommended. Learning, Vermont isn't on the map. I checked.

I do remember reading one of Noel Perrin's books (not sure which one it was - maybe the first) and he is the Garrison Keillor of Vermont, for certain.

Finally, any book of poems by Robert Frost should do you.

@Scott: when it comes to poetry, I'll see your Robert Frost and raise you Galway Kinnell! ;-)

@Rob - OK I will check out Galway Kinnell? What do you recommend first? Nightmares?

@Scott: Sure thing. Nightmares is a good place to start. I'm particularly fond of a piece of his called "The Road Between Here and There" but I can't recall what collection I first saw it in.

No one mentioned Joe Citro . . .

hope this revives the group !

here's a list:

http://www.goodreads.com/search/searc...

A War of the People: Vermont Civil War Letters


is non-fiction and i am looking forward to finding this book to read.

Kenneth Roberts wrote a book that mentions the Green Mountain Boys, set around the time of the American Revolution, called "Arundel". It has a sequel "Rabble in Arms", but I haven't read that yet. "Arundel" is very good, though it's 4 or 500 pages. :)

Walking to Vermont

I'm just finishing this book. It's non-fiction so I did something I never do - I read the Vermont section first, though the whole book focuses on it.
The descriptions of the Long Trail are fun. The trail and the people he encounters.
This summer I want to walk the section from Bromley mountain to Danby...but you won't find me swimming naked in that pond !

Flee

I'm re-reading Evan Dara's "Flee," which is one of the best books of this decade and perhaps the great Vermont novel. It takes place within a fictionalized version of Burlington (which he's renamed Anderburg), where, over the course of the book, the population flees. Despite the name change, many of the landmarks of Burlington remain (Seven Days, Fletcher Free Library, and Crow Books: "—Now please please no please don’t tell me now Crow Books, too…?  I loved that place, the paperbacks shoved behind the other paperbacks on the metal racks because there wasn’t space, the mostly sense that they just want to have all those nice books in there for you, waiting for you if you want - need - to discover something, and the bad lighting, and the rumply chair with its bottom rupturing stuff, and Mr. Shelling and his rectangular mustache and no employee recommendations and discovering Denis Johnson and Virgin Suicides and I just can’t, I can’t—").

Dara keeps an incredibly low profile (I joke that he makes Ferrante and Pynchon look like Truman Capote), but I'm still surprised that so few people in the Green Mountain State have heard about this one. In terms of style and level of invention, Dara compares favorably with David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis. It's a book that sweeps you away on a wave of voices.

Jddown wrote: "In terms of style and level of invention, Dara compares favorably with David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis....

And I thought I was using strong words today to compare C.E. Morgan with Lawrence Durrell! I may have to look for Dara.

"Crow Books" has been a favorite of a friend. I hope your "loved" doesn't imply past tense.

JDD -- thks for showing up on this "dead" board to alert us to this writer. (I just looked at some of his reviews.)

Sure thing, Lily. I actually contacted Seven Days and some of the Burlington bookstores mentioned in the book, but they hadn't heard of it either. Regardless, it's a good one!