North of Now: A Celebration of Country and the Soon to be Gone

W.D. Wetherell sings the praises of mountainous western New Hampshire, where he has lived for many years in Thoreauvian simplicity, with wood stove and manual typewriter, without television or computer. His book is made up of little essays on such simple things and on low-maintenance pleasures like reading poetry, stargazing, and collecting local folklore and history. "I am revealing myself to be as extinct as a dinosaur, dead as a dodo, a relic of another era, a footnote to an age that not only rushes ahead in heedless bondage to the new, but tramples in contempt on anyone who stubbornly refuses to keep pace," he writes, all the while doing just that, refusing to keep pace with the larger world. He encourages his readers to follow suit, to learn to live more simply, to rely on their own abilities, and to remember the lessons of Walden. --Greg McNamee