/lit/ - Literature

What's a good nonfiction book about old places, forgotten places, and small places? Places with people and cultures tied to the land going back hundreds or thousands of years. Intimately human places with deep ties to nature and a half remembered histories stretching back into the mist.

I periodically come across an articles on Wikipedia that give me this feeling. Last time it was Andros key, today it was an article about the Isles of Scilly. I'm endlessly fascinated by cultural leftovers. There's an emotion that comes over me halfway between comfy and deep melancholy.

I get this feeling when I travel through tidewater Virginia and I see run down farm houses swallowed by the forest. You find these cemeteries dating back to the 17th century completely overgrown with brush slowly being lost to entropy. There are forest trails which for all I know could have been there when Powhatan still ruled. Some of the elders still speak their own dialect and fish in the bay. Of course I romanticize the place like only an outsider can, but this feeling is by no means exclusive to Virginia.

I'm a Christian man, but there's something that feels deeply pagan about the forest sometimes. Steinbeck's "To a God Unknown" encapsulates this perfectly, but that's a different and much darker feeling. Sometimes Faulkner scratches this itch, but I'm looking for something more in the vein of nonfiction.

An anon in my last post called this Psychogeography. Does anyone else understand what I'm referring to?

>>17969708
Also, hardly a book rec, but https://twitter.com/owenbroadcast understands American Psychogeography like no one else on Twitter. Granted, that is a very low bar.

Hi /lit/ this is more of a technical question, but I hope you all can help me out.

I constantly use a dictionary and thesaurus for my writing. Online dictionaries and thesurusi have allowed me to write far faster then when I have to flip through a physical book to find new words and synonyms. However, this means that word definitions can be updated without my knowledge. I first became concerned about this after Merriam-Webster changed the definition of sexual preference during the ACB confirmation hearings. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/15/amy-coney-barrett-merriam-webster-tweaks-sexual-preference-entry/3662507001/

I promptly downloaded PDF files of a Dictionary and Thesaurus to use as reference material. The Ctrl+F shortcut makes using these considerably faster to search than my physical volumes, but it is still an unwieldy arrangement given how frequently I use them and that they contain thousands of pages. Are there any comprehensive online dictionaries which are not updated? Alternatively can you recommend a large downloadable dictionary with rapid search functionality? I don't mind using a more recent text, but it is important to me that the definitions remain consistent.

This may seem a trivial concern, but language forms the basis of how we conceive of society. In the English speaking world this means that an increasingly consolidated group of for profit publishing companies wield considerable influence over our mental substructure. Regardless of your political affiliation, you should be worried by this fact. I understand that language changes and that dictionaries need to reflect that. I understand that my 1994 American Heritage Dictionary contains biases and political agendas. However, as someone who writes about politics it is very important to me that the language references I use remain consistent. Thank you.

pic unrelated

>>17063484
Beowulf
>>17063584
The Awakening - Chopin
>>17063527
Flying saucers, the process of matter and energy, science, the revolutionary and working-class struggle and the socialist future of mankind - Posadas
>>17063560
Childhood's End - Clarke
>>17063743
Desert Solitaire - Abbey