Michael Pollan's '10 Favorites' for NYT Includes Wendell Berry

Food writer Michael Pollan's "My 10 Favorite Books" list for NYT features, among other luminaries, poet and environmental-advocate Wendell Berry. At number three on the list is Berry's Home Economics: Fourteen Essays/The Gift of Good Land/The Unsettling of America. (We're partial to Berry's poetry, but the list is delicious nonetheless.) More:

For his bookshop installation, One Grand, the editor Aaron Hicklin asked people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. The next in the series is Michael Pollan, author of many titles including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.” He shares his picks exclusively with T.

“Walden,” Henry David Thoreau

For its bracing prose as much as anything else. I’ve been arguing with Thoreau for most of my career. When he abandoned his beanfield because he couldn’t stand making “invidious distinctions” between his beans and the weeds, he gave up on agriculture and opted for wilderness — a tremendous mistake in my view.

Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sentence by sentence, some of the most stimulating thoughts anywhere.

“Home Economics: Fourteen Essays/The Gift of Good Land/The Unsettling of America,” Wendell Berry

I’ve learned more from Berry than anyone else about how best to engage with nature, and how to write a sturdy and pleasing English sentence.

“The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair

A powerful piece of journalism disguised as a novel.

Continue at NYT.