9 tales of life and living your own way

The Power of the Dog

A Novel

Thomas Savage

Back Bay, $14.99 paper

This 1967 classic captures a moment in American history: Montana, in the early 20th century, when the locomotive, referred to by cowboys as “the power,” was just starting to interrupt steer herding and carve pathways of industry across the West. The cowboys, who can now see imitations of themselves on moving picture screens, are losing their connection to the land. “The new sun rising above the eastern hills showed a world so vast and hostile to individual hope that the young cowhands clung to memories of home, kitchen stoves, mothers’ voices....”

We Took to the Woods

Louise Dickinson Rich

Down East Books, $16.95 paper

Here’s a road map for exiting the rat race: In the early 1930s, Rich and her family moved to the Maine backwoods, on Lake Umbagog, 40 miles south of the Canadian border. The book was an overnight hit when it came out in 1942 — perhaps because Rich made it seem doable, with equal parts humor and common sense. Just having it on the shelf gives me an out clause in the city life contract I seemed to have signed.

The Tree

John Fowles

Ecco, $13.99 paper

Part memoir, part explanation and part warning, this book is one of most the beautiful, succinct and prescient pieces of writing (it was first published in 1979) we have. Fowles writes that nature is the source of our creativity and that we should treat our relationship to it as nothing less than a form of art. “The key to my fiction,” he writes, “lies in my relationship to nature.”

Five Skies

A Novel

Ron Carlson

Penguin, $14 paper

The archaeology of experience. Beyond its enormous beating heart, “Five Skies” is also an exquisitely crafted novel. Art, Ronnie and Darwin are building a motorcycle ramp in the Idaho wilderness. As they learn to trust each other, they are able to unburden themselves — of grief, insecurity, emptiness. Carlson burns off the excess pain around his characters to reveal their true selves.

Light Years

James Salter

Vintage, $14.95 paper

Remind those around you that it’s the daily stuff, the meals, the sounds and colors that give an existence texture: This book has traveled with me for years. I can’t shake the way Salter boils down life — the big and the small — into language. There’s a quality in this novel that I now see has little to do with money; more with beauty.

House of Light

Poems

Mary Oliver

Beacon Press, $15 paper

Pure beauty as the default mode — it’s important to have some Mary Oliver on hand at all times, and this is the one I’ve been going back to lately. It seems to me she was very loose and free in this 1990 collection, eyes wide open, pure joy and little of the irony of recent years.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris

Back Bay, $14.99 paper

Force your friends to laugh. If they don’t after reading this collection, well, consider giving them nothing but a lump of coal next year. I recently tried the title essay on a 12-year-old and she doubled over, in public, gasping for mercy.

Daybook

The Journey of an Artist

Anne Truitt

Penguin, $17 paper

Encourage the people you love to be creative, to make time for some kind of self-expression. This journal, first published in 1982, covers seven years in which Truitt allowed herself to be an artist. One by one, she pushes the obstacles aside — even the ones she has carried since childhood.

The Wake of Forgiveness

A Novel

Bruce Machart

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26

Here is a Greek tragedy of a novel set in Texas, in which the characters are watched not only by their author and their readers but by the gods, by the Texas sky and by the wise old moon. Fierce language, richly painted scenes, midnight horse races, brother versus brother, the tight grip of the patriarch; oh, what words can do!

Salter Reynolds is a writer in Los Angeles.