Read Locally

Not too long ago, in places like London and Paris, books weren’t merely entertainment, but also a way to make a record of a place and a time. Local writers were revered because of this—they were writing history—and Londoners and Parisians kept of with their writers’ work, and felt, in some way, that their lives had more meaning because they kept these writers around.

These days, not so much.

Of course, it’s not that nobody writes local interest books anymore, or even that nobody publishes them, but that people don’t know about them. (Let alone read them.) A case in point is Citadel of the Spirit, a Bible-sized anthology edited and published by native Oregonian Matt Love.

This is an amazingly exhaustive book of essays about Oregon, written by an equally exhaustive list of Oregon’s writers. (The back cover reels off some of the book’s topics, in a rather humorous bulleted list. The first six are marijuana, blackberries, stripping, view-master, Oregon lottery & rain.)

I’ve read most of the book. Parts of it are brilliant. Parts of it are average. This isn’t the point.

The point is that Citadel of the Spirit is about us. It’s written about the place we live, by authors who we might very well run into as we walk down the street, and who, if we’re forward enough, we can quite easily track down and have a cup of coffee with.

Every Oregonian should own a copy.