Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Sam Pickering

Sam Pickering, Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and a prolific writer, may be more popularly identified as the model for the teacher in the movie Dead Poet's Society.

His most recent book of essays is Indian Summer: Musings on the Gift of Life.

I asked Pickering what he has been reading. His reply:
I have just finished Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts (1977) and tonight will start Between the Woods and Water (1986), both volumes describing Fermor's walk across Europe to Constantinople starting in winter 1933. Fermor is ninety-two and working on the third and final volume of the three volume series. Now that Eric Newby and Wilfred Thesiger are dead, Fermor is the last of his generation of English travel writers. As my muscles become corpses of themselves confining me to the lowlands of life, the more travel writing I read, partly for diversion and partly in hopes of association's resuscitating memories of quick, bounding days long past.
Pickering's new book, due out in May 2007, is Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do.

--Marshal Zeringue