Poverty Creek Journal
Thomas Gardner
A meditative book about running, by an English professor at Virginia Tech who is also the dad of one of my high school classmates (who herself is name-checked a couple of times). (Check out my own dad’s name in the acknowledgements!) Poverty Creek is a place I used to go on hikes as a kid. The book is mostly not about running per se, but about the stuff the author thinks about when he’s running, and about his observations of the natural world as well. It’s a very brief book, but one I enjoyed reading a lot. Gardner makes pretty frequent allusions to literature, mostly to stuff I haven’t read, but he does it in a way that makes it understandable even so. His writing is quite lyrical, but doesn’t come across as forced or pretentious. It was sort of next door to reading poetry, which I appreciated as someone who wouldn’t generally pick up and read a book of poetry.