A collection of twenty-three essays written in the wake of September 11, ranging from a Grand Canyon meditation and a defense of forests and seeds to letters to a daughter and a mother. Kingsolver weighs wonder, family, food, storytelling and what it means to love a country while grieving and questioning it.
Books mentioned in Small Wonder (11)
Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order by Jacques Attali: “In his 1991 book Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order, Attali observed with a chilling prescience that particularly among those in the Middle East …”
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare: “At age fifteen I was allowed to go on a trip with the high school English classes to see a performance of Measure for Measure … It was my first experience of Shakespeare”
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: “I threw Heart of Darkness over my shoulder at the first bark of temptation and went out on a date.”
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson: “There’s a particularly lovely one in the center of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars [on sex scenes in literature]”
Middlemarch by George Eliot: “With Middlemarch and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the world, a person should squander her reading time on fashionably ironic books about nothing much?”
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: “With Middlemarch and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the world, a person should squander her reading time on fashionably ironic books …”
Mending Wall by Robert Frost: “In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost invokes the image of his neighbor walking the fence line intent on constant survey and repair”
The Death of the Hired Man by Robert Frost: “In his poem “Death of a Hired Man,” Robert Frost captured … the most perfect definition of home: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver: “my friends at the Book Mark asked me to give the debut reading of my eighth book, The Poisonwood Bible, at their store”
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver: “This great apple that had fallen into my lap became my first novel, The Bean Trees.”
Roget’s Thesaurus by Peter Mark Roget: “My St. Martin’s Roget’s Thesaurus obligingly offers up … a whopping fifteen synonyms for copulation”