The question posed by the title of celebrated British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s keenly felt study of rivers is answered in the first few pages by his nine-year-old son: “Duh.” Yet, self-evident values are not always treated self evidentally. In…
Philip Ball
The gene-as-blueprint story is wrong and Ball’s argument is that biological science has known it for a while without saying so out loud. The human genome came in at around twenty thousand genes, fewer than a water flea, and it…
Michael Pollan
A skeptical Michael Pollan came to psychedelics late, and in his sixties he took LSD, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT under guides so he could report from inside. Around that he builds the history: The first wave of research in the fifties…
Jenny Odell
This isn’t a digital detox book, which Odell says up front. She’s an artist who spends a lot of time watching birds in an Oakland rose garden. Her position is that the attention economy is an economy and that refusing…
Tristan Gooley
Every tree is a record of what happened to it. Gooley teaches you to read it: why branches on the south side grow at a different angle, how a tree leans away from prevailing wind and thickens on the windward…
Tristan Gooley
The short, gentle one in Gooley’s run of “how to nature” books — an introduction rather than a manual, aimed at getting the senses back open. Fifteen short exercises, most taking a few minutes: Listen for the shape of a…
Tristan Gooley
Water carries signs and almost nobody reads them. Gooley works through puddles, ponds, rivers, and open sea: How ripple patterns reveal wind direction and depth, how eddies mark what’s under the surface, how the color of a wave says something…
John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren
The companion to Laws’s Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, and it’s built for anybody leading a group — teachers, naturalists, parents, camp staff. Forty-plus field activities with the actual instructions, timing, and prompts, all organized around three questions…
Tana French
The second Cal Hooper mystery. Cal, a retired Chicago cop, has settled into the west Ireland village of Ardnakelty, is with Lena, and is teaching a teenage girl named Trey carpentry. Then Trey’s father comes back, four years gone, with…
Halley Sutton
Salma Lowe gives celebrity death tours in Los Angeles — a van, a script, the houses where famous people died — and one of the stops is her own sister’s, a movie star found dead in 1975 at twenty-two. Then…
Fernanda Melchor
The body of the Witch is found in an irrigation canal outside a Mexican village called La Matosa, and the novel works outward from there through five people connected to the killing — a teenage girl, a boy, a mother,…
Katie Ives
In 1962, a climbing magazine ran a photo of an impossible range of granite spires called the Riesenstein, said to be in British Columbia, and climbers went looking for it. It was a hoax — the picture showed the Kichatna…
Ling Ling Huang
Enka grows up on the poor side of a walled city in Florida, gets a scholarship to an elite art school, and immediately fixes on Mathilde, the prodigy everyone else is afraid to approach. Mathilde is genuinely great and genuinely…
Ed Yong
An Immense World delivers miracles on every page. A fly’s vision updates six times faster than a human’s, perhaps rending its perception of our movements in slow motion. Cows’ gazes appear unfocused because they see in a horizontal band and…
Luis Elizondo
Elizondo ran a Pentagon program on unidentified aerial phenomena, resigned in 2017, and was central to the infamous Navy UFO videos going public. This is his account. He promised more than he delivered—or, to be fair suggested more. But still.…
Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin’s book about Patagonia is one of the great travel narratives — though what exactly it is up for debate. It’s part travelogue, part history, part fiction, part hallucination, part what the actual. Chatwin walked through Patagonia collecting stories…
Ross Coulthart
Coulthart is an Australian investigative reporter with a legitimate journalism career — organized crime, war crimes, corporate fraud — and he came to the UFO subject as a skeptic. The book works through the documented material rather than the folklore:…
Junichiro Tanizaki
An essay from 1933 about what electric light did to Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki argues that Japanese beauty was built for dimness — lacquerware designed to catch a single flame, gold leaf that only works in a dark room, the recess…
David Roberts
This book changed my life. Roberts was a mountaineer who fell hard for the Ancestral Puebloans and spent years walking to their sites in the canyons of southeast Utah and northeast Arizona — cliff dwellings on ledges, granaries, rock art…
Tana French
In 1984, three children go into the woods outside a Dublin suburb and only one comes out, found clinging to a tree with his shoes full of blood and no memory of it. Twenty years later, that boy is Detective…
Robert Moor
The author of On Trails turns to biology, taking the tree as a lens and “treethinking” as a path to wisdom. The metaphor strains by the fourth or fifth application, but the range is his point and the reporting earns the reach.
M.R. Carey
A physicist in a collapsing Lagos discovers how to step sideways into parallel Earths and is immediately picked up by the Pandominion, an empire spanning a million versions of the world, run by the humans and animal-descended peoples who got…
Peter Kuper
A little context: Homo sapiens have been around for a few hundred thousand years. Insects? Four hundred million years. In this beautifully rendered, graphic-novel-style accounting of the natural history of bugs, artist Peter Kuper notes insects are perfectly happy without…
Wade Davis
Wade Davis’s monumental history of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s — and the World War I trauma that drove them. The climbers who went to Everest were survivors of the trenches. The mountain was where they went to…
Jon Krakauer
Chris McCandless graduated from Emory, gave his savings to charity, abandoned his car, burned his cash, and spent two years drifting the West under the name Alexander Supertramp before walking into the bush north of Denali in April 1992. He…
