This was recommended to me by Lawrence English, who called it one of the great, transformative texts that’s come out of the 20th century in one of my first and favorite interviews. It's an odd one to recommend to acquaintances here in Denver; as a loose plot summary, a man writing obsessively and beautifully about following a bird around, and eventually his consciousness fuses with the birds tends to garner the wrong sort of interest.

Truly, though, that's the summary; it's just one that underemphasizes basically every part of the book. It is unceasingly, word for word, the most beautiful writing that I have ever read. The first passage burned into my brain occurs just over a page in: I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival. There's an entire paragraph on the nightjar's song after that that's possibly twice as good, but it's very long. Suffice it to say that it contains the phrases if a song could smell, this song would smell of..., and frog-like despondency. Suffice it also to say that the first half of the paragraph is about the song itself, and the second about how it fades into the evening.

The Peregrine is full of facts - facts about England, about a or the peregrine, about every species of bird that I've ever heard of and then that many again that were new. They don't really matter, in the sense that they're owerwhelming and also true in that the book would be completely undone if they weren't. Alternating insane journalings and equally insane tables of peregrine dietary data, the book's completely unclassifiable, basically unspoilable, and utterly unmatched.