Here are five canyons on Cedar Mesa in Southeast Utah — Grand Gulch, Slickhorn, Johns, Fish, and Owl — walked and camped and described by a naturalist who was also a fine draftswoman. Zwinger addresses the geology and the plants…
Kate Murphy
I can’t claim to be a good listener, but I’m a better one after reading this book, which I revisit once a year for a refresher. Murphy is a reporter and listening is her job, and for this project she…
Daniel Duane
My favorite Daniel Duane book, and that’s saying something from the man who wrote Caught Inside. A Sierra boyhood braided with the harder history behind the postcard, and he never stops loving the place even as he reckons with it.
Caro Claire Burke
This might have been the most talked-about book of 2026, and it brought the term tradwife to the consciousness of the many thousands of people who had no idea. Natalie Heller Mills is an influencer who sells the pioneer life…
Claire Vaye Watkins
This is Watkins’s fourth book. Rose of Sharon — named for the Grapes of Wrath character — is a Sierra Club fundraiser living in a cinder block cabin in the Mojave, her daughter living with an ex on the East…
Diana M. Raab
I’m a confessed notebook, sketchbook, and journal nerd, so I consume books like this like a bottomless barrel of gummi bears. It’s twenty-six writers on what they actually do with a notebook. Sue Grafton, Dorianne Laux, Kim Stafford, John Dufresne,…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Maps of places that don’t exist and essays by the writers who made them. Treasure Island, Middle-earth, Narnia, Earthsea, Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, Discworld, and plenty more, reproduced large. Philip Pullman, Robert Macfarlane, Frances Hardinge, Cressida Cowell, David Mitchell, Joanne…
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Cherry-Garrard was twenty-four, half blind without his glasses, and paid to join Scott’s last expedition. The title journey isn’t the pole. It’s the winter trip he made with two others to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs, five weeks…
Alan Weisman
Weisman asks what happens if every human disappears tomorrow, and reports it out with the engineers and biologists who know. New York floods in two days once the pumps stop; the subways go first, then the streets collapse into rivers.…
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
These are bite-sized essays, one animal or plant each, illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. Nezhukumatathil is a poet, and each piece runs the natural history alongside her own life — Indian and Filipino parents, a childhood moving between Arizona, Kansas, and…
Stephanie Bower
Less a how-to than a survey of where the movement went. Urban Sketchers started as a Flickr group in 2007 and turned into a global thing with chapters in hundreds of cities, and Bower gathers work from sketchers across those…
James Hoffmann
Hoffmann won the World Barista Championship, and the first third here is the practical part — how coffee grows, what varietals are, the difference washed and natural processing makes in the cup, how roast level actually works, and brewing methods…
Patti Smith
Patti Smith wrote this in her forties, a short book about being a child in southern New Jersey — the fields behind the house, the woolgatherers she imagined moving through them at dusk, a slaughterhouse, a cloud museum, her brother…
Taylor Brown
Trace Temple’s family lost their New Mexico ranch after somebody shot an endangered wolf, and now he’s living out of his truck, broke and pissed at the government. A secretive militia offers him money to kill One-Eleven, the she-wolf leading…
Keith H. Basso
Keith Basso spent decades at Cibecue, Arizona, and the idea for the book sparked when an elder asked him to make a map with the real names on it. Apache place names turn out to be whole sentences — water…
Li Juan
“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight-pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter…
Paolo Bacigalupi
Oil is gone, the seas came up, and the world runs on calories — which means the agribusiness companies that own the seed patents own everything. Thailand has held out, protected by seawalls, a ruthless Environment Ministry, and a hidden…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wasn’t just the writer of The Little Prince, he was a pilot who helped pioneer postal aviation in the 1920s, when planes barely had instruments (he lamented that pilots of later, more-advanced planes were little more…
Haruki Murakami
Toru Okada is unemployed and boiling spaghetti when the phone rings. Then the cat disappears. Then his wife does. What follows involves a psychic prostitute, a teenage neighbor, a politician brother-in-law with something badly wrong in him, and a man…
Ann Zwinger
Here are five canyons on Cedar Mesa in Southeast Utah — Grand Gulch, Slickhorn, Johns, Fish, and Owl — walked and camped and described by a naturalist who was also a fine draftswoman. Zwinger addresses the geology and the plants…
Algernon Blackwood
Two men in a canoe run the Danube in flood below Vienna and camp on a sandy island in a wilderness of willow scrub. The river is eating the island under them. The willows move when there’s no wind. Things…
Roderick Nash
This is the book that helped found environmental history as a field. Nash traces what Americans have meant by wilderness — first a wasteland to be conquered, a place of moral danger, then, once it started running out, a national…
Richard Preston
A handful of amateurs discovered in the 1980s that nobody had ever been to the top of a redwood, and that the canopy three hundred feet up is a whole ecosystem — soil, huckleberry bushes, ferns, salamanders that live their…
Nick Hayes
This is the follow-up to The Book of Trespass and it moves from manifesto to action plan. Hayes and a dozen contributors argue that the English are locked out of ninety-odd percent of their own country and the answer isn’t…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane set out to find what wildness is left in Britain and Ireland, expecting remoteness — islands, summits, moors — and slept out in fifteen of them over a year. Then Roger Deakin, his friend, kept pointing him back toward…
