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Poems of Yosemite
Poems of Yosemite is a meditative collection by Charles Weeden that gathers decades of walking, aging, wondering, grieving, and returning into the granite-lit world of Yosemite and the High Sierra. The poems move through places like Shadow Lake, Half Dome, Garnet Lake, Rush Creek, Donahue Pass, Camp 4, and Cathedral Peak, but the real subject is inward travel: memory, mortality, faith, wilderness, and the strange way a landscape can become a person’s moral and spiritual compass. Weeden writes as someone who has not merely visited Yosemite, but been formed by it, from the youthful tent facing Tissiack to the older hiker crossing Donahue Pass and asking whether he is “the hiker or passenger.”
What I liked most is the book’s sincerity. It’s unguarded in a way that feels increasingly rare. In “Shadow Lake,” the speaker revisits a place from forty years earlier and finds not just scenery, but a confrontation with his younger self. That struck me as one of the collection’s deepest emotional chords, because Weeden understands that returning to a beloved place doesn’t freeze time, it reveals time. The mountains remain, but the self has altered. I also found “Tissiack’s Tears” genuinely moving, especially in its idea of the “unhalf,” the unlived life that appears in the reflective water. That’s the sort of image that lingers because it’s both simple and devastating. The best poems here don’t just admire nature, they let nature answer back, sometimes tenderly, sometimes without mercy.
Weeden can be lush, philosophical, playful, and blunt, sometimes all within the same handful of pages. I admired the ambition of poems like “Garnet Lake” and “Below Cathedral Peak,” where the ideas widen into questions about purpose, God, beauty, and existence. The diction gets a little heavy with abstraction, especially when the poems lean into philosophical naming, as in “Darwin and Dasein” or “Selectionist Proclaim.” I really liked the pieces rooted in physical experience: drinking from a Sierran stream, hearing the river’s voice, watching tourists in Crocs misunderstand a bedraggled hiker at Happy Isles.
I felt I’d spent time with a person trying to make peace with wonder, age, doubt, and gratitude, and that gave the collection a quiet cumulative force. Poems of Yosemite is warm and personal. Its best moments feel like sitting beside someone at dusk while they point to a ridge and tell you what it has meant to them over a lifetime. I’d recommend it to readers who love Yosemite, hikers who think as much as they walk, and anyone drawn to reflective nature poetry that treats wilderness not as escape, but as a place where the soul is patiently, sometimes painfully, returned to itself.
Pages: 56 | ASIN : B01MZ8E9S7
Donahue Pass: A Sierran Philosophy
Donahue Pass, by Charles Weeden, is a work of philosophical nature writing, part trail narrative and part extended dialogue, in which two friends hike from Rush Creek over Donahue Pass while talking their way through Darwin, Descartes, Heidegger, pragmatism, interpretation, and what it means to live with purpose. The book moves between mountain description and conversation, using the climb itself as both setting and structure, so the switchbacks become a kind of thinking pattern as the two men test ideas, joke with each other, and slowly arrive at a rough synthesis about evolution, meaning, and interpretation.
What I liked most is that the book never feels like it wants to lecture from a podium. It wants to walk beside you. That matters. The writing keeps returning to the body, to thirst, altitude, sore legs, a heavy pack, the small relief of water sitting in the mouth, and that physical strain gives the philosophical talk some grit. Without that, a lot of this could have floated away. Instead, the ideas stay tied to the trail. I also liked the friendship on the page. Mike’s sarcasm keeps puncturing John’s loftier turns, and that back and forth gives the book warmth and movement. It is often funny in a dry, relatable way. You can feel the book understanding that big ideas are easier to bear when somebody beside you is rolling their eyes.
I found the author’s ambitions more interesting than fully convincing, which is not a complaint. It is part of the book’s charm. Some stretches of the dialogue feel like a real conversation, and some feel more like a staged debate where each friend takes turns carrying a stack of books up the mountain. I did not mind that, exactly, but I noticed it. The book is strongest when the landscape and the thought are in balance, when a stream, a warbler, or the simple fact of climbing gives the philosophy something to push against. When it gets too deep into the argument, it can feel a little airless, which is maybe fitting for a book set above 10,000 feet. Still, I admired the reach. The author is braiding science and the humanities together and asks whether selection and interpretation are really separate ways of seeing the world.
I would recommend Donahue Pass most to readers who enjoy reflective nonfiction, philosophical fiction, and nature writing that is willing to stop and think instead of rushing to plot. It is especially suited to people who like books where conversation is the action, and where a hike through granite and water opens into questions about how to live.
Pages: 31 | ASIN : B07VV4X57K
Toby’s Trip
Toby’s Trip struck me less as a conventional children’s book than as a warm, wandering, unexpectedly bruised coming-of-age story told by a boy trying to understand his friend and, in the process, himself. It begins with the glow of Toby’s odd genius, the kind that turns a Saturday baseball game into a small philosophy of friendship, then follows that glow through separation, disappointment, danger, grief, reinvention, and an ending that feels earned rather than neat. What stays with me is the shape of the friendship itself: Toby nudging batters into pop-ups by inching his mitt toward the plate, changing a classmate’s grade on the first day they meet, later becoming both a near-criminal legend and a graduation speaker, while the narrator slowly finds his own life through wreckage, water, and hard-won self-knowledge. Toby’s Trip
I liked the book’s voice. It has a talky, boyish looseness, but underneath that surface there’s a real intelligence at work, a mind always doubling back to test an idea. The narrator’s habit of deciding that adults “do things backward” could have become a gimmick, yet it keeps deepening as the story goes on, until it becomes the book’s moral lens. Sometimes the prose is overextended, but I found that part of its charm. It sounds like someone thinking on the page, not someone polishing every sentence into obedience. The image of Toby’s mother somehow knowing the exact right sandwich, the pathetic grandeur of Smokey’s Ribs, the humiliating hilarity of the YMCA “drownings,” the strange calm of distance swimming after a body and a life have both been broken, all of that has texture. I never felt I was being fed lessons. I felt I was being brought inside a sensibility.
I also liked that the book trusts children, or at least young readers, with sorrow and ambiguity. This is not a tidy fable about a quirky friend. It’s about talent, class, parental projection, failure, and the frightening speed with which a teenage life can tilt off its axis. Toby’s father is not a cardboard villain, which matters. He’s a man hollowed out by borrowed ambitions, and the book’s most serious idea is that living according to someone else’s script is its own kind of slow erasure. That idea comes through beautifully in both boys’ arcs: the narrator escapes his father’s baseball-and-insurance future by discovering swimming almost by accident, and Toby, for all his comic brilliance, has to survive being misunderstood before he can become himself. The shift from intimate friendship story to hacking case and public triumph is a little wild. Still, there’s something winning about how unapologetically the book goes for largeness. It wants to talk about identity, freedom, grief, and vocation all at once, and more often than not, it gets away with it.
Toby’s Trip is heartfelt, funny, and thoughtful. It has sincerity, emotional reach, and a genuine belief that young people have inner lives worth taking seriously. I’d recommend it especially to reflective middle-grade and young teen readers, and also to adults who like stories about unusual friendships and the bewildering business of becoming a person.
Pages: 109 | ASIN: B0D1VRMPT8
Tissiack: A Sierran Siren
Tissiack: A Sierran Siren follows Awena, a Native American and white high schooler who runs cross country, deals with family pressures, hears a mysterious ancestral voice, and tries to figure out who she is. The story jumps between her school life, her tribe’s struggles, and big moments like the State meet and the winter Bracebridge feast. It also weaves in deep cultural history, government injustice, and a coming-of-age kind of quest that Awena doesn’t fully understand at first. By the end, she starts shaping a path that blends tradition, identity, and her own sense of purpose.
The writing sneaks up on you. One minute it feels like a simple YA story about running and friendship, and then suddenly it drops these heavy truths about Native history and government failures that made my stomach twist. I kept getting caught by the quiet moments, especially Awena’s talks with Ama. They felt warm and sad at the same time. I liked that the book didn’t rush those scenes. The whole vibe had this mix of modern teenage life and thousands-of-years-old memory that gave the story a kind of echo. It made the book feel bigger than it looked.
The scenes with the BIA meetings made me mad. The explanations about broken treaties and stolen land made me sit back and just stare for a second. I kept thinking about how unfair it all is, and the book didn’t sugarcoat any of it. I liked that the story leaned into the messy parts of identity and didn’t pretend everything works out cleanly. Some moments were blunt. Some were tender. Some were almost funny in a dark way, like the boys’ cross-country team acting tough and then totally wimping out in front of a mountain lion. The mix of moods kept the book alive.
By the end, I felt proud of Awena. I wanted to cheer for her. She isn’t perfect, and that made her real. She stumbles, she doubts herself, and she fights through it. The writing made me feel like I knew her. I also loved how the story kept circling back to the idea of hearing your own voice, not just the ancestral one but the inner one.
If you like coming-of-age stories with heart, culture, humor, and a real sense of place, Tissiack: A Sierran Siren would be great for you. It feels especially perfect for teens or adults who enjoy stories about identity and heritage, and for anyone who loves the outdoors or running. It also works well for readers who want something thoughtful but not heavy in a gloomy way.
Pages: 64 | ASIN : B0F922QL54
