 | My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
Buy new: $8.50 / Used from: $3.00 This is the place to start if you haven't read any Muir. The story of his slow journey to the high country with a flock of sheep shows his awakening to the "Range of Light."
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 | The Land of Little Rain (Modern Library Classics) by Mary Austin
Buy new: $9.56 / Used from: $5.99 A slim, gorgeous, and riveting classic about the Owens Valley and the Sierra.
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 | Roughing It (Mark Twain Library) by Mark Twain
Buy new: $12.89 / Used from: $5.45 Mark Twain's idyll at Lake Tahoe and his near-drowning in Mono Lake provide an entertaining, irreverent view of the country when it was barely settled.
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 | The Mountains of California by John Muir
Buy new: $14.95 / Used from: $0.11 A nice set of Muir's essays which alternates between narration and natural history.
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 | Stories from the Country of Lost Borders (American Women Writers Series) by Mary Hunter Austin
Buy new: $24.00 / Used from: $3.37 This is not so well known as The Land of Little Rain, but a few of the stories share the same rapt sense of the luminosity of the desert and the Sierra.
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 | High Sierra of California by Gary Snyder
Buy new: $19.46 / Used from: $7.16 Tom Killon's glorious color prints and Gary Snyder's backpacking journals complement each other.
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 | The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Buy new: $11.20 / Used from: $2.77 In this Beat classic, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder climb Matterhorn Peak in the Central Sierra in October--a merry escapade.
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 | Turtle Island (A New Directions Book) by Gary Snyder
Buy new: $10.36 / Used from: $4.95 Snyder won a Pullitzer for this book, which contains many Zen-influenced poems in simple language about his home in the foothills and his trips to the High Country.
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 | The Practice of the Wild: Essays by Gary Snyder
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $6.50 Gary Snyder articulates the philosophy which gave rise to the Deep Ecology movement, with frequent reference to his experience building a home in the Sierra foothills.
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 | Treasury of the Sierra Nevada by Mark Twain Walt Whitman
Buy used from: $1.15 A fascinating and comprehensive anthology of historical narratives, short stories, and poems about the Sierra. Robert Leonard Reid offers excellent brief introductions situating each fragment.
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 | Assembling California by John McPhee
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.44 McPhee gives us an imaginative and precise overview of the geology of the Sierra Nevada along with many anecdotes from his travels with a geologist.
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 | Hardy Californians: A Woman's Life with Native Plants by Lester Rowntree
Buy new: $17.12 / Used from: $9.90 Lester Rowntree has been called "the female John Muir" with good reason. As an elderly woman, she spent much of her life developing intimacy with California's plants, trooping around the state by herself and camping in ditches starting in the 1930s. She especially loved the high country and wrote about it with zest, eloquence, and more humor than Muir could have dreamed of.
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 | The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) by David Wyatt
Buy new: $45.00 / Used from: $6.50 The essays on Fremont, John Muir, and Mary Austin illuminate some of the symbolic frameworks American writers have applied to the Sierra.
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 | One Day on Beetle Rock (California Legacy Book) by Sally Carrighar
Buy new: $14.95 / Used from: $3.75 A classic, engaging, gentle, meticulously observed description of one day in the southern Sierra from the perspectives of various creatures.
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