Roger Housden

Roger Housden is the author of Ten Poems to Change Your Life. His latest book, How Rembrandt Reveals Your Beautiful, Imperfect Self, has just been published by Harmony Books.

Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer (Vintage, $13). A searingly funny and astute collection of essays charting Dyer’s wanderings around the planet in search of himself. It’s all there on the page—the self-deprecating Englishness, the all-too-recognizable petty neuroses, the stoned bewilderment, the romantic confusions, all laced with the most acute observations of life on earth, from Cambodia to Leptis Magna in Libya to the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada.

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New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver (Beacon, $16). A luminous collection from the most lyrical and direct American poet writing today. Nature is Oliver’s church. Her style is wonderfully accessible, not just in terms of language but also in her capacity to articulate layers of feeling that we all know but rarely find words for. She is all softness and rigor, and never less than challenging of the ways we live less fully than we are capable of.

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D.H. Lawrence and Italy (Penguin, $17). A collection of Lawrence’s three essays on his Italian journeys. Lawrence is looking for what he cannot find in the conventional bourgeois society of England—the primal life of a pre-industrial culture, raw feeling, a bodily, rather than an intellectual intelligence. Does he find it? Lawrence was not, by nature, a finder; and thereby hangs a tale.

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Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (Penguin, $8). A heart-rending story of fate, love, class, and the voluptuous English countryside. The timeless ways of the Dorset countryside are not only a backdrop here—they are a character in their own right, and a deeply seductive one.

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The Passion of the Western Mind by Rick Tarnas (Ballantine, $17). A sweeping and brilliant overview. This is a history, not of events, but of the ideas that shape the way we understand the world.

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The Birth of Venus

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