"A book about mountains, loss, death, life, living Zen and everything else in between. Living on a mountain myself, Peter reminds me that the mountains and stones are alive. Friends that I speak to daily. Peter Matthiessen, together with Gary Snyder, Arne Naess and John Cage are my teachers on how to grow older. With vigor, elegance and spark."

"I’ve never gone through a phase of music that I’m embarrassed about in later life, but I overplayed this song so can’t stand it anymore. I played the whole of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club’ to death when I was in my mid-teens, so despite this being an incredible song, it’s not something I reach for now"

"“Of shapes transformed to bodies strange” — Ovid’s theme is Shakespeare in a nutshell. As a theater fanatic, I discovered Ovid in my 40s when I wrote my PhD thesis on Renaissance Tragicomedy. For me, the root of drama and language is the invisible made visible in the shape-changing of sex, love, life and death. Not to mention food."

"This chronicle of history’s hundred deadliest wars and massacres, including death tolls, is a good way to settle bets (who was worse, Genghis Khan or Hitler?), brush up your history, and marvel at the cruelty and stupidity of our species. It was a useful source when I wrote “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.”"

"Oh, Patty. I miss you! Her debut novel moved me really deeply. It's so personally written, although it is also a dry dissection of an experience with death, also of a brother. Having lost my own brother recently, Patty's book, along with “Fourteen Stories,” reminds me that there is a way out of grief, which is creativity."