Annie Dillard spent a year watching the natural world around a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. What she produced is less nature writing than nature theology — a mystic’s journal of attention so fierce it borders on violence. The…
Kate Murphy
I can’t claim to be a good listener, but I’m a better one after reading this book, which I revisit annually for a refresh. Murphy is a reporter, so listening is her job, and she went looking for people who…
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
Natalie Heller Mills sells the pioneer life to millions of followers — raw milk, farm eggs, five kids, a husband, a ranch in Idaho, all of it shot beautifully and none of it done by her, since there are nannies…
Claire Vaye Watkins
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 with an ex on the East Coast for the…
Diana M. Raab
I’m a confessed notebook, sketchbook, and journal nerd, so I eat books like this like candy. Twenty-six writers on what they actually do with a notebook. Sue Grafton, Dorianne Laux, Kim Stafford, John Dufresne, Kyoko Mori, Ilan Stavans, and a…
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
Short essays, one animal or plant each, illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. The axolotl’s permanent smile. The corpse flower. The peacock she loved as a girl and the classmates who made that a problem. Firefly squid, whale sharks, cactus wrens, monsoon…
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 he’s living out of his truck, broke and furious at the government. A secretive militia offers him money to kill One-Eleven, the she-wolf leading the…
Keith H. Basso
Basso spent decades at Cibecue, and it started 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 flows down over a succession of…
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, 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 who…
Ann Zwinger
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 works the geology and the plants and the…
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
The book that founded 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 treasure and a…
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
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 that the answer isn’t just…
Robert Macfarlane
He 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…
