The latest John Burroughs collection I have finished is the 1908 volume called Leaf and Tendril. This volume consists of reflections on science and natural history, including some discussions of evolution. I was amused to see that several of the topics were nearly identical to those in the Stephen Jay Gould collection I recently finished, as ( Read more... )

        I have to give a very qualified recommendation to the 1905 collection Ways of Nature, by John Burroughs. This collection of essays is a result of, but does not include, his 1903 Atlantic Monthly article "Real and Sham Natural History." That article kicked off the "nature-faker controversy" and a lengthy debate on how intelligent wild ( Read more... )

          It's been over a year since I read the last volume of the complete works of John Burroughs. That was one of his literary criticism collections, and those aren't really my favorites. But this month I moved on to the next volume, Far and Near, in which he returned (this is the first decade of the 1900s) to the Nature essays that I fell in ( Read more... )

    I have been nibbling away at this book - Literary Values, by John Burroughs
 - for months. Now that I'll be teaching American Literature it became wise to blaze through this looking for anything I can use in that class.
    Burroughs is one of my favorite essayists, and I've been working my way through his collected works.  This is the 12th ( Read more... )

My 70th completed book of the year (ta-da!) is Walt Whitman: A Study, by the nature essayist and sometime literary critic, John Burroughs.  I've been working my way through the complete works of Burroughs, and this is the sixth volume I've read this year, along with a Riverside Literature Series edition, making seven in all.  So one ( Read more... )

            I finished two books this weekend.  First was Odgen Nash's The ZOO, or really one should say Etienne Delessert's illustrated work, The Zoo, featuring poems by the then-dead Nash.  Some of his funniest animal poems, and about the third time I've read this.

I also finished John Burroughs's Riverby, the ninth volume in my ( Read more... )

            Okay, I guess I got tired of reading all this recent stuff from the 1960s, so I reached back to my more normal hundred-years-ago (1907) and finished off Camping & Tramping with Roosevelt, by John Burroughs.  It's one of the final two volumes of his complete works (depending upon which edition one consults) even though it was published ( Read more... )

            I've just completed two collections by naturalist John Burroughs: Afoot and Afloat, which is a Riverside Literature Series edition, #176; and Signs and Seasons, the eighth volume of his collected works.

Truth be told, I only read one essay in Afoot and Afloat in order to be able to say I had "finished" it.  The volume ( Read more... )

            Sad as it is to realize, I've finished only eleven books this calendar year.  On the other hand, there've been some darn good ones in there.

It can also be noted that the average time since publication is 98 years, proving once again how out of date I am.

The eleventh book referred to was Pepacton, another ( Read more... )

            My third completed book for 2008 is Birds and Poets, the sixth volume of the complete works of John Burroughs, the nature essayist.  Again, I enjoyed reading it, and I'm very glad I finally decided to read the complete works, which have been sitting on my shelf largely untouched for more than three decades.

This volume has ( Read more... )