81 books like The Golden Spoon

I dream of one day walking the entire Long Trail, biking the back roads, and paddling a canoe across Lake Champlain, but in the meantime, Leath Tonino has done all that and more. He brings a friendly curiosity, scrounged-up equipment, and a high tolerance, or even yearning, for discomfort and solitude as he explores “the wilderness of home.”

And because he’s also always reading books—the title comes from Aristotle, and his literary heroes are many—his perspective is a little more philosophical than you might expect from a collection of reports about often-challenging outdoor adventures. Mainly written for the magazines that helped fund his modest expeditions, these short pieces explore defunct logging camps, slippery waterfalls, ice-kayaking societies, cormorant colonies, and the little-seen railroad tracks of Vermont.

In the title selection, the native Vermonter traverses the state in seven different ways: biking, walking, swimming, skiing, hitchhiking, flying, and paddling. For Tonino, it’s… show more.

A childless couple adopts a chimpanzee named Looee, and you already know from reading that sentence that it will lead to trouble and heartbreak. After a few pages, I didn’t care. In McAdam’s skilled hands, the inevitable sadness doesn’t matter, because the delicately handled point of view perfectly captures a doomed creature trapped between two opposing identities. In contrast, we also meet Podo, an alpha chimp at a research facility seeking to test the intelligence of primates. Podo is fully ape, but he is turning into something more. Their paths soon join, taking them deeper into a gray area between human and animal that I had never seen rendered on the page so vividly before. 

There’s a valid argument to be made that Shadowland is perhaps more of a horror novel than fantasy, but it’s never really out-and-out scary.

It’s certainly more magical than bloody, concerning two friends in the 1950s who spend a hallucinatory summer at an uncle’s place in the Vermont woods. And man do things get weird.

After a long, lovely prelude at a boarding school, Tom and Del have to navigate their failing friendship and the strange happenings in the woods, but most of all they have to look out for Del’s uncle Cole, an old-school magician who, it turns out, is far from an avuncular old guardian.

Full of fairy tales and fables and wonderful digressions (with Straub, the digressions are often the point), Shadowland feels timeless in a way Stephen King never does. It might be the best book I’ve ever read.

I’ve often wondered about the lives of the migrant farmworkers who come to Vermont, most often from Mexico, Guatemala, and Jamaica, but whom I only ever see in the grocery store checkout line or waiting at the service desk for cash transfers.

While it’s easy to idealize the rolling hills dotted with Holsteins, perfect for postcards and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cartons, dairy is big business in Vermont, and, like everywhere in the US, many of our farmworkers are immigrants without legal protection. Language and cultural barriers, and their very real fears of deportation, keep these workers’ lives hidden. This book, which brings together nineteen stories of personal witness, told by immigrant workers and illustrated, graphic-novel-style, by local comics artists, goes a long way to change that. While there are some common themes—the dangers of crossing the desert, longing for home, working endless shifts in all weather—the stories are… show more.

I’ve been reading Castle Freeman’s stories and novels for many years, and I always go back for more of his small-town settings, his sheriffs and loggers, and the lingering sense of menace he brings to every situation. But most of all, I go back for the dialogue, which is particularly funny, absurd, and even sometimes wise in this short, propulsive novel.

There’s something of Beckett in how these characters’ talk goes nowhere and everywhere at once. In the closed-down mill of the Dead River Chair Company, a handful of retired or otherwise unemployed men provide commentary and insight on the fast-developing plot, in which a young woman comes to them for information about a man who’s been stalking her and eluding the law.

They set her up with a couple of seemingly hapless locals, who together track him down in an abandoned logging camp in the dark woods. Freeman grew… show more.

This Picoult novel, written close to the time I began to shape my book, asks whether we can love across time. While the theme is much more grounded in practical and natural circumstances, the fact that the question is teased out in this novel helps shape the same question my character, Adelyn, finds herself embroiled in. Is Innis capable of breaking the barrier using the strength of a first love?

Pioneer Species is a book of poems by friend and farmer-poet Ross Thurber. A small vineyard I work with in southern Vermont, my own agricultural essay and investigation on a sense of place different than my own, is part of Ross’s Lilac Ridge Farm. Like Mary Oliver, Ross is intensely bound to the natural and cultivated world of his farm in which he lives and his poems capture a language that brings forward the light, the shadow, the fog, the till, the butterfly, the flower, the cow. I am constantly inspired by his poems to be out in my own fields and to contemplate and communicate my own place in them. A delicious collection about a deeply personal and lyrical view of farm life.

Many YA novels set in a theatrical environment are heavily romance-focused. This book is the best I’ve found in that category. The hero, recent high school graduate Cass, has a super-strong voice that made me laugh out loud. She’s snarky, off-color, bold, and impatient. The theater plotline weaves throughout the story as Cass and cohorts perform The Taming of the Shrew at a summer theater. She steals ideas from Shakespeare’s play to torment her costar and nemesis, Drew. 

Theater Quotient: High. Much of the plot revolves around rehearsals and elements of the play trickle into real life.

I can’t get enough of quirky, indefatigable teen sleuth Stevie Bell. She’s determined to solve a decades-old cold case, but must also navigate social awkwardness, anxiety, and people who literally want her dead.

I enjoyed how this book flip-flopped between the present-day narrative and the past. My friend and I got to see Maureen Johnson give a talk at a nearby bookstore, and we loved it; she’s basically a stand-up comedian. 

This is a feel-good book with just enough punch to keep it from being cute.

It comes with a building project, some hurricane-induced drama, a bit of romance, and two dogs.

Cooper and Bubba are the canines who wind themselves around the main characters, as most dogs do in real life. Cooper is everyone’s friend, and he orchestrates introductions.

But he’s also a bolter who gets lost just as flooding begins and evacuation becomes unavoidable.

Catherine Drake’s books are always a respite between heavier reading, and this one is one of the best.