85 books
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
This is the only modern natural history of the Mojave, which makes it the standard by default, but it’s also thorough, engaging, and well-written. There’s the geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little…
David B. Williams
David Williams spent nine years in Moab, working as a ranger at Arches and teaching for the Canyonlands Field Institute, and this is the field guide that came out of it, illustrated in line drawings by Gloria Brown. It covers…
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,…
Aaron Rolph
In the hands of Europeans, a mountain hut is more than shelter. It’s an expression of centuries of culture and intimate knowledge of life in the continent’s highest peaks. The photo-dense Alpine Refuges offers a tour of some of these…
Linda S. Cordell and Maxine McBrinn
If you get serious about Southwest archaeology, this is the book that ends up on your shelf, and the third edition from 2012 is the current one. Linda Cordell taught at New Mexico and Colorado and was about as central…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Huw Lewis-Jones put this together for the 300th birthday of Robinson Crusoe. The setup is simple: He handed a bunch of illustrators from all over the world the same assignment Defoe gave himself — you washed up somewhere, now draw…
Annie Montgomery Labatt
Annie Labatt taught art history at Texas, did a Rome Prize and a stint at the Met, and between 2013 and 2015 she gave twenty Friday-night lectures at the San Antonio Museum of Art. This book is those talks. One…
Marilyn Stokstad and Michael W. Cothren
This is the survey doorstop, the one that gets assigned. Marilyn Stokstad wrote the first edition in the nineties at Kansas, and she did something the old standbys hadn’t: She quit treating art history as a straight line from Greece…
Alison Jean Cole
Alison Jean Cole is a lapidary in Portland who cuts stone for a living, guides rockhounding trips, and puts out a very cool zine called Thunderegg. Most rock guides hand you a list of famous sites by state and that’s…
Taria Dawson
Dawson runs the Urban Sketching World blog and a YouTube channel out of Johannesburg, and she teaches this the way she talks — relaxed, minimal supplies, no gatekeeping. The lessons build: Individual objects, then food on a table, then a…
Janna Levin
Levin is a cosmologist at Barnard, and this is a short one, about one hundred fifty pages with drawings by Lia Halloran, meant to be read in a sitting. Her opening move is the one that got me: A black…
Thomas Elpel
No book is going to teach you botany in a day — you have to get down on your knees and go face to face with the flora. But this one gets you further in an afternoon than any field…
James Nestor
Nestor got himself into a Stanford lab and had a rhinologist plug both his nostrils shut with silicone for ten days, which left him breathing through his mouth and nothing else. His blood pressure spiked, he started snoring 4,000 percent…
Zack Klein
Zach Klein co-founded Vimeo, then in 2010 bought fifty-five acres of woods in upstate New York with his wife and some friends and started building. They needed ideas, so they made a Tumblr to collect pictures of handmade cabins, and…
Jessica Easto
No espresso in it at all, which is the first thing worth knowing. Easto sticks to manual brewing and covers ten devices — French press, Chemex, V60, AeroPress, siphon, cold brew, the lot — and treats them as variations on…
Felix Scheinberger
Felix Scheinberger has drawn more than fifty children’s books, and he wrote this to get people over the fear of the blank page. His stance is that a sketchbook belongs to you and nobody else, so there’s no wrong way…
Edmund C. Jaeger
In 1946, Edmund Jaeger was poking around a canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains when he found a poorwill wedged in a rock crevice, cold and unresponsive, and it stayed that way for weeks. Nobody thought birds could hibernate. He went…
Ekkehart Malotki
Almost everybody looking at rock art goes hunting for the pictures — the sheep, the hunters, the spirals with a story attached. (It’s the reason I drive past Mojave scratches to get to Colorado Plateau galleries.) Malotki and Dissanayake point…
Huw Lewis-Jones; Kari Herbert
Before cameras, if you wanted to bring back what you saw, you drew it. Married couple Lewis-Jones and Herbert — he’s a polar guide and historian, she’s the daughter of the explorer Wally Herbert — pulled together seventy sketchbooks kept…
Alex Patterson
Alex Patterson flew P-51s in the war, spent a career at IBM, retired, then went back to school and made himself an anthropologist. This came out of that second life, in 1992, and it’s still the standard — seventeen printings,…
Michael R. Canfield
Anyone who’s contemplated keeping a nature journal knows the paralysis of structuring a blank book. Here, a dozen field scientists open their notebooks and give you a peek. There are George Schaller’s pages from the Serengeti lions and the pandas…
Anna Brones; Johanna Kindvall
Fika started as slang — Swedes flipped the syllables of kaffe and got fika. It’s a coffee break, but that undersells it. It happens once or twice a day, everywhere, at every workplace, and it’s a verb: You fika with…
Helen Birch
Two hundred-plus drawings by working artists, mostly people Birch found online, each one printed with a short note on how it was done. Ball-point pen on found paper. Crosshatching with a dip pen. Gouache over a photocopy. Colored ink on…
Fumio Sasaki
Sasaki was a magazine editor in Tokyo, thirty-five, living alone in a room stacked with books, CDs, DVDs, and gear for hobbies he’d quit, comparing himself to everybody and losing. So he spent a year getting rid of about ninety-five…
Gestalten
The follow-up to Rock the Shack, and the pitch is in the title: Buildings you inhabit to not to be found. They’re cabins, huts, treehouses, bothies, and small retreats from around the world, shot well and presented with plans and…
Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, eds.
A dictionary of American landscape words, written by forty-five writers instead of lexicographers. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney handed out the terms and let each writer define them — so Barbara Kingsolver gets some, Antonya Nelson, William Kittredge, Luis Alberto…
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…
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…
Bill Broyles
El Camino del Diablo runs across the driest corner of the Sonoran Desert, and for centuries the only reliable water on it was Tinajas Altas — a stack of natural rock basins in a granite ravine, filled by the rare…
Kyra Cane
Cane is a British potter,and her perspective is that drawing and making are the same activity at different stages. Drawing isn’t how you plan a pot, it’s how you think about one — the loose sketch that finds the curve,…
Martin Hogue
Hogue teaches landscape architecture and looks at camping the way an architect looks at a building — as a designed system nobody notices. The campsite with its numbered post, fire ring, picnic table, and parking spur is an invention with…
Lucinda Kaukas Havenhand
A history of the American interior between roughly 1940 and 1970, and it’s about interiors rather than the famous chairs. Havenhand covers the designers who shaped how rooms looked and worked — Florence Knoll, Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, Van Day…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Portraits of the great mountaineers — Mallory, Shipton, Tilman, Hillary and Tenzing, Bonington, Messner, Boardman and Tasker, Lynn Hill, Steve House, and others — each with photographs, a short bio, and a passage in their own words. Lewis-Jones is a…
Katy Bowman
Bowman is a biomechanist, and her argument is that exercise isn’t movement. An hour at the gym followed by nine hours in a chair leaves most of your body loaded exactly the same way all day, and cells respond to…
Marc G. Berman
In 2018, Florence Williams’s The Nature Fix showed the science behind some of the positive effects of the natural world on human health. Now, neuroscientist Marc Berman takes us deeper, much deeper, into the fundamental wiring proving us creatures of…
Mariko Higaki
Higaki is an industrial designer at Seiko, and this teaches drawing as a way of understanding how things are made. You sketch a stapler, a chair, a shoe, a coffee grinder — and the exercises push you to look for…
David Liittschwager
My Octopus Teacher might have alerted us to the idea of a novel alien intelligence beneath the waves, but nothing can prepare you for the profound diversity and unconventional beauty of octopuses, seahorses, and jellyfish seen through the lens of…
Peter Attia
This book was written and blew up before Attia was connected to Jeffrey Epstein. His argument — and I wholeheartedly agree — is that medicine is good at trauma and infection and bad at the four things that actually kill…
Brian Kelley
Author and photographer Brian Kelley has a huge collection of U.S. national park maps and ephemera—at least twelve hundred items. He notes, “If you just have one map, it doesn’t feel as significant. But then when you start getting this…
Gestalten
The one that started the small-cabin publishing run. Huts, shelters, and retreats from the last couple of decades, plus a handful of older icons, arranged for browsing — forest cabins on stilts, mountain refuges, a sauna at the end of…
Dennis Mersereau
A field guide to what’s over your head, written by a weather journalist for people who don’t want the math. Cloud types and what each one is telling you about the next few hours. How a thunderstorm actually organizes itself…
Matt Titone
No matter how swanky the houses in the third iteration of Gestalten’s addictively voyeuristic Surf Shacks series, you know there’s sand on the floor—maybe not in the luscious pictures, but just before or after. What distinguishes these forty homes, from…
Indoek
Matt Titone is a SoCal graphic designer with a wide range of creative projects, including a Ventura, California gallery called Indoek. In this first of his three “surf shacks” books, he photographed surfers at their homes, not in the water,…
Wendy Trusler, Carol Devine
Is it a cookbook? A field journal memoir? A photo album with cool archives, like a scan of a 1912 polar menu featuring “Plum Pouding Union Jack” and penguin? Yes, yes, and yes. But, cooking and cleaning...in Antarctica? Two young…
Gabriel Campanario
Campanario is the Seattle Times artist who started the Urban Sketchers blog in 2007 and turned it into a worldwide network, and this 2012 book is the movement’s first big showcase. More than a hundred sketchers from thirty-odd countries, work…
Amy Tan
Amy Tan started drawing birds in 2016 and kept a nature journal for six years, and this is a facsimile of it — her ink and watercolor drawings with her handwritten notes running around them. The Northern flicker, the scrub…
Suhita Shirodkar
Shirodkar sketches out of San Jose and this is the entry point to the urban sketching handbook series, of which I have most, if not all. (I’m guilty of looking at sketching more than actually sketching). It was published about…
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Forty-nine British birds, every one of them in decline, from avocet to yellowhammer. Macfarlane writes each as a short essay rather than an identification entry — habits, flight, song, myth, and threat — and he varies the form wildly, including…
Edmund C. Jaeger
Jaeger’s 1933 guide, and for decades it was the only real one: geology, water, weather, plants, animals, and the routes across the Mojave and the Colorado, written by a man who walked it for sixty years and taught at Riverside.…
Michael Easter
Easter went thirty-three days into the Arctic on a caribou hunt with no resupply, and he uses that trip as the backbone for the rest. His case? That we engineered away every discomfort humans evolved with — hunger, cold, heat,…
Rick Rubin
People went bananas over this book, but I’m not one of them. Rubin has produced records for Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Slayer, and Adele, and he does not play an instrument or work a board. What he does is…
Matt Warshaw
Warshaw spent years assembling this — fifteen hundred entries covering surfers, breaks, board designers, films, magazines, contests, terminology, and the odd corners nobody else bothered with. It’s alphabetical and it’s browsable to a dangerous degree: You look up one thing…
George Hlavacs
Hlavics argues that sketching is a set of decisions, not a talent. He breaks it into a small number of things you’re actually choosing — line weight, edge, value, what to include — and shows how varying just those changes…
Margareta Magnusson
Marie Kondo pushed me, and Magnusson made me jump—that and having to fill two Dumpsters with junk when my dad died. Döstädning is a real Swedish word and a real practice: Going through your things while you’re still able, so…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has been walking the Sierra Nevada since 1973 and has done something like a hundred trips, and this is everything he knows about it in one enormous, wandering book. Route descriptions and gear lists sit next to the geology…
Natalie Leon
The old Japanese calendar splits the year into twenty-four sekki and then into seventy-two ko — microseasons of about five days each, with names like east wind melts the ice and rotten grass becomes fireflies. Leon studied tea and spent…
Joshua M. Powell
Not a guidebook. Powell hiked the PCT and made a visual compendium of it — hand-drawn maps, charts, and diagrams covering the whole 2,650 miles from Campo to Manning Park. Elevation profiles, snowpack, water sources, the mileage between resupply towns,…
David Yetman
Yetman and his coauthors cover the saguaro’s biology and its absurd arithmetic — it takes decades to reach a few inches, a hundred and fifty years to full height, thousands of seeds a year of which almost none survive —…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Facsimile pages from the private logbooks and sketchbooks of people at sea across four centuries. Naval officers, whalers, a ship’s surgeon, naturalists, a young woman on an emigrant voyage, modern sailors and marine biologists. Watercolors of coastlines drawn as navigational…
Kassia St. Clair
Seventy-five colors, two or three pages each, and every one has a story with a twist. Mummy brown was made from actual ground-up mummies, and Victorian painters kept buying it until they found out. Scheele’s green was arsenic and it…
Stephanie Bower
Bower trained as an architect and taught architectural drawing, and this is the tips volume — a hundred and one short entries you can flip to quickly. How to find eye level and why everything depends on it, how to…
Gabriel Campanario
This is the buildings volume and the one that fixes the most common glitch. It’s all about perspective, finding eye level, one and two vanishing points, how to draw a street that runs uphill, how to fake a crowd of…
Mike Yoshiaki Daikubara
Everybody draws the lines and then fills them in. Daikubara does it backwards — watercolor down first, loose and fast, shapes and values with no outline, then ink on top once it’s dry, and only where it’s needed. The advantage…
Róisín Curé
People are the thing that stops most sketchers cold. They move, and everybody already knows what a person is supposed to look like, so the errors show. Curé’s fix is to start with proportion and then get you drawing fast…
Veronica Lawlor
Lawlor drew the aftermath of September 11 on the streets of Manhattan, and this is the volume about drawing as journalism — going to the event and reporting it in line. Courtrooms, protests, disaster zones, political conventions, ordinary meetings. She…
Virginia Hein and Gail L. Wong
The volume about sketching the parts of a scene that won’t hold still and don’t have straight lines. Hein and Wong work through trees as masses rather than leaves, foliage in different seasons, water and reflections, rock and cliff, skies…
Katie Woodward
Light is what makes a sketch read, and this is the volume about it. Woodward works through value structure first — squinting to reduce a scene to three or four tones — then the direction and quality of light, cast…
Shari Blaukopf
Blaukopf teaches in Montreal and sketches a lot of wet streets and bare trees, and this is the color volume of the handbook series. It’s pocket-sized and built around one idea: A tiny palette, mixed well, beats a big box…
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…
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…
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…
Rosalie Haizlett
With luck, Tiny Worlds will trigger FOMO—and point you toward the miraculous web of beauty seen at foot level and strolling speed. Plagued by chronic migraines as a teenager, West Virginia watercolorist Rosalie Haizlett started taking long walks in nature…
David
Longtime National Geographic photographer David Doubilet has spent more than twenty-seven thousand hours underwater, often in pursuit of the images that have become synonymous with his name: over/unders, above and belows, or, as he calls them, half-and-halfs. Enabled by domed…
Isabel Carmona Andreu
Confession: I have an absurdly large collection of urban sketching books and spend more time admiring their artwork than actually drawing. That’s okay. This is a beginner’s book, and right up my alley. Andreu sketches around Newbury in England and…
Felix Scheinberger
Scheinberger’s watercolor book, and it’s aimed at people who’ve been told watercolor is difficult and precious. He isn’t. It’s color theory taught quickly, a small palette, the mechanics of wet-on-wet and glazing, how to keep whites, how to fix a…
Kim McCoy
What The Joy of Cooking is to home cooks, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets…
Patrick Syme
Before color charts, naturalists had no shared vocabulary, so a German mineralogist named Abraham Werner built one and the Scottish painter Patrick Syme expanded it in 1814 — 110 colors, each with a hand-painted swatch and three references: A mineral,…
David Allen Sibley
Sibley drew the definitive field guides, and this is the opposite of a field guide: A big book of large paintings with the answers to the questions people actually ask. Why do birds stand on one leg. How they sleep…
Murray Dickson
Okay, I do a little prepping and this book is part of it. Published by the Hesperian Foundation, the outfit behind Where There Is No Doctor, and written for health workers and villagers with no dentist within a day’s travel.…
David Werner
Okay, I do a little prepping and this book is part of it. It’s a village health care manual, first published in 1970 out of work in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, and still the most widely used health book…
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,…
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…
