52 books
Rebecca Solnit
Solnit built this out of nine essays circling a single idea, which she takes from a line she found in Meno: How do you go looking for something when you don’t know what it is? Four of the nine are…
Diane Ackerman
Ackerman is a poet who reports like a naturalist, and she built this as five long sections, one per sense, with a short final piece on synesthesia. She starts with smell because it is the oldest sense and the one…
George Saunders
George Saunders taught a class on the nineteenth-century Russian short story at Syracuse for twenty years, and this book is that class on the page. Seven stories in translation, three by Chekhov and the rest by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol,…
Sally Mann
Sally Mann has been making pictures on the same Virginia farm for fifty years, and this is the book about how the work actually gets made. Not theory. The nuts and bolts of a life spent at it. She’s funny…
David Abram
David Abram put himself through school doing card tricks, which is how he ended up hanging around traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal. He figured they’d talk shop about magic. Instead he found their real work wasn’t with people at…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
You’ve read it, right? Or seen it on the shelf? Or the bestseller list? How it got there is part of the story. Milkweed, a small nonprofit press in Minneapolis, published it in 2013 with no marketing budget, and for…
Gary Nabhan
Terroir is the wine world’s word for the way a place ends up in the glass — soil, sun, wind, water. Nabhan takes it out of Burgundy and drops it on the Arizona-Sonora border, where he’s spent his life. Mexican…
Rebecca Giggs
She helped push a beached humpback back into the water off a Perth beach. It came back, and she stood with the crowd while it died. What stayed with her was the question underneath: What happens to a whale that…
Michael R. Canfield
A dozen field scientists open their notebooks and let you look. George Schaller’s pages from the Serengeti lions and the pandas in Sichuan. Bernd Heinrich on ravens in the Maine woods. Kenn Kaufman’s lists from the year he hitchhiked the…
Kiliii Yüyan
A book-length argument for entrusting Indigenous peoples with the land they have stewarded for millennia, and I’m convinced. The statistics do real work here, but it’s Yüyan’s photographs from nine Native communities that actually land the case.
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…
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.
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane found that a children’s dictionary had cut words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher to make room for broadband and cut-and-paste, and this book is his answer. Nine chapters, each on a landscape and a writer who saw it clearly…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Third in the run that started with Other Minds, and this one widens out from mind to the whole planet. His subject is action — how living things don’t just experience the world but reshape it, from bacteria oxygenating the…
Peter Turchi
Turchi’s premise is that a writer is a cartographer — you decide what to include, what scale to work at, where to put the edges, and how much blank space to leave for the reader. He runs it through actual…
Tove Jansson
For twenty-six years, Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent summers on a bare platter of rock in the Gulf of Finland, a tiny speck called Klovharun, living their dream of art and isolation. Her…
Robert Moor
Moor thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent the next several years asking what a trail actually is. So the book goes from fossil traces of the first creatures to move on a seafloor, to ants laying pheromone lines and correcting…
Annie Dillard
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…
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Fourteen pieces and hardly a dud. Sullivan at a Christian rock festival in an RV with a group of West Virginia teenagers, at Disney World with the Real World cast, in the Ozarks with Axl Rose’s hometown. Also: The cave…
Tyson Yunkaporta
Yunkaporta is an Apalech man from far north Queensland and an academic, and the book asks what Indigenous thinking has to say about global systems — not as culture but as method. Each chapter starts with a symbol he carves…
Peter Reyner Banham
Banham was the British architecture critic who took Los Angeles seriously when nobody else would, and this is what happened when he pointed the same eye at the Mojave. He drives it, camps it, and picks at his own reaction…
Geoff Dyer
Dyer looking hard at photographs, mostly one at a time, mostly for a few pages each. Eugène Atget’s empty Paris streets, Dorothea Lange, Roy DeCarava, Vivian Maier, Alex Webb, Gary Winogrand, plus a long stretch on his own preoccupations —…
Matthew B. Crawford
Crawford has a doctorate in political philosophy, took a think tank job, lasted five months, and quit to open a motorcycle repair shop. His argument is that we’ve built an economy that separates thinking from doing and calls that progress,…
Seth Kantner
Kantner was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River to homesteading parents and grew up hunting and trapping among Iñupiaq neighbors in northwest Alaska. This is memoir in photographs and short essays — his father’s pictures and his…
Janet Malcolm
Malcolm spent a career taking other people apart in print and refused to write about herself, then in her eighties wrote this — twenty-odd short pieces, each triggered by a photograph from her own boxes. A Czech Jewish family that…
Seth Kantner
Kantner’s collected dispatches — columns, essays, and reportage from northwest Alaska written over a couple of decades. Wolves and caribou and the biologists counting them, the economics of a village where a gallon of gas costs what it does, snow…
Jack Turner
Turner spent decades guiding in the Tetons and this strident book stems directly from it. His argument is that we’ve replaced actual wild experience with representations of it — nature documentaries, photographs, managed parks, permits, interpretive signs — and that…
Rebecca Solnit
A sequel of sorts to Hope in the Dark. Solnit takes the last sixty-odd years — her own lifetime — and lays out how completely the underlying beliefs have shifted on race, gender, sexuality, disability, the environment, and what nature…
Jared D. Margulies
There’s a global black market in rare cacti and succulents, and Margulies spent years inside it — with collectors, growers, smugglers, customs officers, and conservation scientists across Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South Africa. Plants poached out of the ground in…
Donald D. Hoffman
Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who ran evolutionary simulations and got a result he didn’t like: Organisms that perceive reality accurately lose to organisms that perceive fitness payoffs instead. His conclusion is that space, time, and objects are a species-specific…
Motohisa Yamakage
Yamakage was a Shinto priest in a lineage going back generations, and this is an insider’s explanation for outsiders. Kami as presence rather than deity. Purification as the central practice and why it matters more than belief. The shrine, the…
Nan Shepherd
British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when…
Anu Partanen
Partanen moved from Finland to New York, married an American, and found herself suddenly anxious in ways she never had been — about health insurance, about childcare, about student debt, about what happens if a job ends. Her argument is…
Michael Pollan
This book disabused me of my illusions about “organic.” Four meals, traced all the way back. A fast food dinner eaten in the car, which turns out to be corn wearing costumes — Pollan buys a steer and follows it…
Gary Snyder
Nine essays, and the central move is to separate wilderness from wildness. Wilderness is a legal designation; wildness is a quality of self-organizing process, present in an old-growth forest and equally in your own body and in language. Snyder writes…
David Sax
Sax noticed—in 2016, the year I launched AJ in print—that vinyl, paper notebooks, film, board games, and independent bookstores were all growing while the industries around them digitized, and went to find out why. It isn’t nostalgia — the buyers…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A short book — essay length, illustrated — built on one plant. The serviceberry ripens in June and everything eats it: Birds, bears, people. Kimmerer uses it to lay out what she calls a gift economy, the way it works…
David Abram
Abram’s first book and the argument the rest of his work rests on. He apprenticed himself to traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal, expecting to talk about magic, and found their real work was keeping relations square with the land.…
Nicholas Triolo
This is a book about walking in circles, and the obvious question is “why would you walk in circles?” The answer, in the deeply considered view of author Nicholas Triolo, is profound: because it will change your relationship with the…
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.…
Christof Koch
Koch spent decades at Caltech hunting the neural correlates of consciousness with Francis Crick, and this is his case for integrated information theory — the idea that consciousness is a measure of how much a system’s parts inform each other,…
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Simpson is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, a writer and musician, and this book thinks with water rather than about it. She starts from a Nishnaabeg story about a woman and a flood and works outward through ice, rain, tributaries, and the…
Anil Ananthaswamy
Recommended by a friend of a friend who’s a working physicist. One experiment, two hundred years. Shine light through two slits and it makes an interference pattern, like waves. Fire it one particle at a time and the pattern still…
Rebecca Solnit
Walking as a subject with a history, which nobody had really tried before. Solnit runs from bipedalism through the peripatetic philosophers, the invention of the country walk as recreation, Wordsworth and the Romantics, pilgrimage, the labyrinth, mountaineering, the flâneur, protest…
M.R. O’Connor
“I had forgotten that my phone knew nothing of whether humans can fly, or the seasonal flow of the Rio Grande, that it had no actual experience because it had never been born, only programmed by someone who might never…
Julian Brave NoiseCat
NoiseCat’s father, a Secwépemc and St’at’imc carver, left when he was young, and NoiseCat grew up with his non-Native mother in the urban Native community in Oakland, spending time on the Canim Lake reserve in British Columbia. The book is…
Matthew B. Crawford
Matthew Crawford devotes Why We Drive to an anonymous couple he sees running down a wooded trail, pretending they’re riding motorcycles, making vrooming noises and playfully leaping over roots. It’s this eye for the small but uniquely human details that…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
