The best books on stories and place since writing began

This is the oldest written story in the world. Gilgamesh was prince of the sheepfold Uruk, all its date groves and cool gardens, all the herds of antelope beyond the fields of spelt. In those days, scorpion men guarded the sun, and Gilgamesh wandered the wilds with his friend Enkidu in search of wisdom. The story’s lesson was simple and eternal. In many a city, in civilised settlements, the teeming markets drown the peace. Gilgamesh at first cut down the ancient cedars guarded by Humbaba, and killed the last fiery bull with wings. In the presence of nature, he found he should have been glad of life, but it was almost too late. A piece of sky fell down, and flood filled the world. At the end of his journeys, he, at last, finds peace in friendship and togetherness.

A beautiful and touching account of the author’s travels in early 11th century Japan. Lady Sarashina is deep in sorrow from the death of her husband and searches for solace in nature and place on pilgrimage routes and at temples along the way. This is a profound weaving of mind, journey, and place, as she travels across the 72 seasons of Japan’s year. Emotions link land and mind. She is acutely attentive to cuckoo calls and cherry blossom, the rain pattering on bamboo at night, the cool water in the stone well. “Even as I wander on my journey,” she writes, “It always stays above me in the sky, this moon at dawn, this moon I gazed on in the capital.”

A brilliant and uplifting tale of how stories are used by the Western Apache people to tie them to place and give meaning to life. This is a quite unique book, speaking to all human experience. The Western Apache talk of mental smoothness, a mind that can be calm and focused. The smooth mind is a tightly woven basket, yielding but strong, resistant to the jarring effects of external events. “Wisdom sits in places,” said elder Dudley Patterson, “You will walk a long way and live a long time. And your mind will be smoother and smoother.” If objects and places have a story, they become magic vessels for memory and meaning. We are also more likely to look after and keep them. If landscapes contain stories, then we find that wisdom sits in places. Natural places themselves become moral guides. 

In one of the finest pieces of world literature, Robert Bringhurst recounts stories of the Haida mythtellers. The isles of Haida Gwaii are 160 km into the Pacific, drenched in rain, mist, and wind. Here was one of the world's richest traditions of story, place, and nature, where myths thought themselves into people. We have the extraordinary sagas of Raven Travelling, Goose Food, and the Qquana Cycle, some individual oral sagas more than 5,000 lines long. “Wealth has big eyes,” said one storyteller. Raven is the trickster of the North, is ingenious, ever-watchful from high spruce and red cedar. “Bring us good luck,” people called out. Says one, “He always fools everybody, so he gets by easy.” Yet many of the Haida people died on contact with colonial invaders, and the coastal villages and rows of totem house poles stand abandoned.

This is the most intense nature-writing and storytelling, as if written by bear or tiger, by the rainforest tree or tropical sea itself. Jay Griffiths becomes Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, as we travel out in life, across the threshold and leaving behind ordinary world. Myth is story, and it is also how we live, battling against personal and historical limitations. Jay finds the secret openings and weaves an Odyssey to the wildness of earth and sea, water and fire. On the heroic journey, we are repeatedly tested, and come back with an elixir. Story itself becomes currency and guide. The monk and mystic, Meister Eckhart of Thuringia, wrote in the early 1300s, “There are many ways, Some are crowded, others less travelled, But every way, is the right one.”