One of the rewards of being a fairly faithful reader arrives when you open a new book and realize it's the one you've been reading toward for years. That has been this reader's experience with both of these books by Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965–1980 and The Gift of Good Land….

These books are the kind that you spend months with, hate to give up, and plan to return to soon and often. There is that much pure pleasure in them, both in the spare and crafted elegance of their prose, and in the breadth and depth of their content. They're reference works of the body and soul, and books of practical reference for anybody who cares about the earth and the quality of his life upon it, which should include us all. Certain pages and even paragraphs have the power to lift you off into hour-long stretches of...