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There are a lot of books whose writing draws me in but few whose writing grabs me into the flowing poetry of its prose from the first syllable. For that matter, few prose books are so poetic that you can't really separate the emotional pull of poetry from the expository nature of prose.

This is Shelley Armitage for Radio Readers Book Bytes wishing you a good day. Writing my memoir, Walking the Llano about life along the Middle Alamosa Creek in the western Panhandle, I thought often about what Leslie Marmon Silko says about landscape. Landscape is not something “out there,” but we are a part of the very boulders we stand on, she says.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants was written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American author, biologist, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kimmer has also written a workbook to go with Braiding Sweetgrass and a young adult version with the same message as the original book.

Richard Powers has given readers another forceful novel titled Bewilderment. Written during the height of the Covid pandemic and published in 2021, this book joins the pantheon of art produced during the lockdown, stay home early years of the virus that changed the world.

The first time I read Sherwood Anderson’s WINESBURG, OHIO, was when I was in college at Fort Hays working on my master’s degree. I remember the book well for two reasons: (1) It reminds me of the life in a small town that I know, and (2) I’ve been thinking lately that some of the themes in the book are appropriate for us today.

This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR. The book is “Bewilderment” by Richard Powers. When we come into our narrator's story, he is a widower with his autistic, talented, brilliant, highly active, nine-year old son. They are on a trip to find a dark sky to look at the stars through their telescope.

This is Leslie VonHolten with another Radio Readers Book Byte.Radio Readers listeners will know that I absolutely am not a science fiction reader. The minute someone time travels, or gets on a spaceship, or has a conversation with some other kind of sentient life force not from Earth—well, I am out. No thank you.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!...”

Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Jane Holwerda from Dodge City, Kansas, ruminating on Richard Powers’ 2021 Bewildered, a work of fiction currently pushing my thinking on the scope of nature and the natural world.