Margie Ruddick’s Book List 10 books and 0 comments
These books have stayed with me for many years, or in some cases almost my entire life—they have formed me, changed my way of thinking, shocked me. All of them have some relation to landscape—that is not because I am so narrowly focused (although I kind of am), but because landscape is everything.
Novels and poetry have more power to convey landscape ideas than do textbooks, which, honestly, I have never ever really read. Histories like Frederick Turner’s Beyond Geography or Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind work because they are great stories. If I had to give one piece of advice to a high school student wanting to become a landscape designer or landscape architect, I would say: “Major in literature, of any kind.”
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10 books
One of the great histories of the human relationship with the land.
I must have read this book several hundred times as a child—a pure escape from, and then restoration to, urban life; a mix of love and loss and landscape.
One of the great books of poems of the North American landscape.
It seems as if I read this book a thousand times as a child. A Cockney girl finds an alternate reality after jumping into a reflecting pool in Berkeley Square, travels through an underwater purgatory of lost children, meets fairies, bests evil spirits in the underworld, and ultimately sacrifices it all to help a blind boy. Sob.
Brought to life a city and landscape I had never been in—and the people in it—so vividly that when I visited New Orleans for the first time I felt I had always known it. Best sidewise revelation and questioning of faith (“extreme unction”).
Turned on its ear everything I thought I knew about the human role in the landscape, resetting my focus on invisible economies within the forest.
One of the great histories of the American landscape.
Blew Ian McHarg right out of the water. I read this book as a graduate student at Harvard. It helped me understand what I was doing and where I was going, with few roadmaps and no mentor.
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