Reader’s Corner

COME, THIEF IS A LARGE and compassionate gift to the reader. Such a gift comes at great cost, for the contemplative life is one of unique and unending sacrifice, and it is said in Buddhism that the mind is a mirror that must be cleaned daily. The revelations are grand but fleeting, requiring as they do the renewing of faith. Hirshfield makes a public renewal of faith here in a collection of poems that sparkle with the Zen of things that cannot be uttered but are. The poet extends to us the many rewards of the contemplative life in this marvelous book that is as much a work of beauty and simplicity as it is the evidence of an elevated mind. 

In Come, Thief, Hirshfield takes on the task of establishing the present in a form that is, by nature, vulnerable to time,…

My confession is this: it’s easy for me to keep a reading list, easy to suggest lots of titles to Orion‘s readership, easy for me to feel passionate about whatever titles/authors/subjects/genres find their way onto the list.  It is easy for the list to change, to ever-change; easy for the list to grow longer, always longer; it never shrinks. 

My confession is this: it is easy for me to list, but not to read my list. How rarely I fully immerse in one book at a time, or in a whole book over time in such a way that I feel I’ve done it right, in such a way that the author’s breath and experience become part of mine.  I love it when a book changes the way I breathe! I love it when a book makes me disappear, when a book says, or gestures…

Insects fascinate, repulse, and transfix us all at once. Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia is a delightful and utterly surprising tour of the vast world that buzzes, squirms, and lives all around (and with) us.

Did you know that a spider can ride a breeze 15,000 feet into the sky—and control how, when, and where it lands? That aphids have been spotted climbing ice floes in the Arctic Ocean? That in Shanghai, crickets are trained to battle like prizefighters?

Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia is full of bewildering insights like these, and it opens with a well-chosen epigraph: “The minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.” That world—the insect world—is incomprehensibly strange and diverse. In an effort, perhaps,… Read More