Eugene reread old favorites, returning to the novels of Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, and Georges Bernanos. Lots of poetry too: Denise Levertov, Billy Collins, George Herbert, Mary Oliver. “I’d rather read poets than pastors,” he said. Eugene loved Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser’s remarkable Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, which was “an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials.” Concerned with our ecological meltdown, Eugene read Terry Tempest Williams and Rick Bass, who lived in the Yaak Valley, a remote corner of northwest Montana,
