Reading Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry may be the author I enjoy more than any other, on the whole. And I love me some reading. He’s an uncannily gifted novelist and poet. I’m hard to please in this department, and very fiction work of his I’ve began has been thoroughly completed.

It’s his non-fiction that really captures my heart, though. The Unsettling of America is required reading for anyone who asks me. As I read his works, I find at least one thing I want to quote on nearly every page, and end up saying, “Everyone just needs to read all of this…”

I’m currently reading through his compilation of essays Bringing It to the Table and highlighting every other paragraph. This time reading him is particularly striking, as the collection is about food, farming, and farmers, and it’s my first time with Berry while being a full time farmer.

The section that is warming me up most is on farmers, anyone in or aspiring to agriculture will greatly benefit from these short profiles of small, remarkable producers. He gets deep into detail about how each grow food regeneratively, and hearing all the nitty gritty makes me feel like I’m hanging out at the general store “in town” with wise old farmers, gleaning their tricks and observations from a lifetime of caring for the land.

I’m giving thanks for Wendell tonight.