Great Nature Reads

Eight Great Nature Reads

It is about this time of year that I begin squirrelling books away for my holiday reading. Here in New Zealand, Christmas and summer holidays arrive at the same time. Not being an adventurous camping tramping kind of family, my summer holiday involves lots of reading in hammocks, reading under trees, and reading draped over the side of a pool.

My favourite reading is nature-related, soulful, and beautifully written. Here's my current list of favourites. I hope you find something you enjoy.

1.

ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG (2019)

by Brian Doyle (1956-2017)

I've surprised myself by opening this list with a book I only started reading today. This last-minute, must-include book arrived on my doorstep this morning. I began reading over breakfast. I'm three essays in and I finished each one with an involuntary gasp-sob. I'm shocked. Delighted, but shocked.

It could be that beautiful combination of right book, right time. It could also be knowing that Brian Doyle is no longer alive, making his meditations on life and living all the more poignant. Though this book is new to me, Brian Doyle is not. I started reading his essays a few years ago, shortly after his death from a brain tumour at 60 years old.

Brian Doyle left a large body of work - fiction and essays alike. One of my favourites of his essays (included in this book) is available online at Orion: The Greatest Nature Essay Ever. It's not claiming to be the greatest, rather setting out what the greatest nature essay might do and what it would be like to read. In doing so, it also quite possibly becomes the greatest nature essay ever, or at least one of the them. Or at least excite you to read more.

"The greatest nature essay ever ... Would begin with an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog to lie down, tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heavenssake, that’s why god gave you hands, and read straight through the piece, marveling that you had indeed seen or smelled or heard exactly that, but never quite articulated it that way, or seen or heard it articulated that way, and you think, man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow."

Yes! This is why I love this genre. And it’s what the books on this list give me. Ready?

2.

THE SUMMER BOOK (1974)

by Tove Jansson (1914-2001)

Is this a long essay, a memoir, or a wee novel? Apparently a bit of all of them, drawing heavily on Tove Jansson’s real experience of island life. (Jansson is the Finnish author of the famous Moomin books).

I’ve read this book every summer since discovering it ten years ago. We follow Sophia and her Grandmother around their tiny island off the coast of Finland. Life is simple, gentle and inextricably bound to the rhythms of nature on a remote island. This book was praised by Madeleine L'Engle, and is loved by Elizabeth Gilbert. It is a deeply soothing book to return to time and again.

"When the southwest wind was blowing, the days seemed to follow one another without any kind of change or occurrence; day and night, there was the same even, peaceful rush of wind. Papa worked at his desk. The nets were set out and taken in. They all moved about the island doing their own chores, which were so natural and obvious that no one mentioned them, neither for praise nor sympathy. It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace."

I think one of the reasons I love it so much is it reminds me of where my parents lived for years (after we’d all left home) - a remote part of the Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand, accessed by boat only. There is a certain self-sufficiency, simplicity and ‘make do’ that is deeply appealing when you cannot simply drive to get what you need.

You might also like to check out Tove Jansson’s beautiful short sketch called ‘The Island’ published in English by The Paris Review (originally published in a travel magazine in 1961, a precursor to the writing of ‘The Summer Book’ and recently translated into English).

Oh, and there is also ‘A Winter Book’ too. I’m saving that for winter.

3.

FINDINGS (2005)

by Kathleen Jamie

Scottish poet and writer Kathleen Jamie is one of my favourite nature writers. Hers was the first book I read where family life and motherhood were woven into her observations of the natural world. I love that she stands outside the 'nature writer goes on solo quest in wilderness' model. Although, she does that too— taking herself off to extraordinary remote locations and sending postcards back from the edge.

"Between the laundry and fetching kids from school, that's how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in traffic, oyster catchers. In the school playground, sparrows - what few sparrows are left - chirp from the eaves. there are old swallows' nests up there. It's late April, but where are the swallows? The birds live at the edge of my life. That's okay. I like the sense that the margins of my life are semi-permeable. Where the peregrines go when they're not at the rock ledge, I couldn't say."

If you enjoy Findings, follow it up with her later books of essays: Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019). Equally fabulous.

Visit Kathleen Jamie

4.

SIDEREUS NANCIUS OR THE SIDEREAL MESSENGER BY GALILEO GALILEI (2015)

Translated and with Commentary by Albert van Helden (2nd ed)

‘The Starry Messenger’ is the name often given to Galileo’s paper written in 1610. This is the document in which he declares that the moon's surface is rough and uneven (not the smooth globe it was then thought to be), Jupiter is being orbited by planets, and the Milky Way is not milky due to a dense viscous atmosphere but rather because it is thick with stars.

It's an extraordinary historical document, and Albert van Helden presents it in this book with a great scene-setting Introduction and conclusion. These bookends really highlight the importance of Galileo's work in history. But read it for the poetry, my friends! Oh if only scientific documents returned to the language of old...

"The Sidereal Messenger - unfolding great and very wonderful sights and displaying to the gaze of everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the things that were observed by GALILEO GALILEI, Florentine patrician ... the face of the moon, countless fixed stars, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, but especially four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness.

"In this short treatise I propose great things for inspection and contemplation by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight."

You can also read the original document, on its own, here at Project Gutenberg.

5.

LONG LIFE: ESSAYS AND OTHER WRITINGS (2004)

By Mary Oliver

If you love Mary Oliver's poetry, you'll likely love her prose. It has the same divinity, grace and naming of everyday wonders as her poetry, but with a glimpse into her mind as well as her heart. And I loved the little windows she offered into her life in this book.

"There is a rumour of total welcome among the frosts of the winter morning. Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives and at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine. Nothing outside ourselves makes us desire to do so; the questions, and the striving toward answers, come from within."

It is peppered throughout with poems, and the essays range from nature essays to reflections on some of the writers that inspired and informed her: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wordsworth and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

If you enjoy reading Mary Oliver’s essays, I also highly recommend her final book of essays, Upstream (2016).

6.

the peregrine (1967)

by J. A. Baker (1926-1987)

The story of this book is almost as compelling as the book itself. Published in 1967, little is known about the author who wrote nothing before it and only one book after. However, writers and artists from all quarters have been hugely influenced by this book for over 50 years (including Kathleen Jamie, included in this list). It is said Baker wrote it after facing a life-threatening illness. To read it is to stand with him on the knife-edge of life and death, told through the life of the peregrine falcon, but there are echoes of his own mortality here too.

Baker tracks the peregrines, racing along after them on his bicycle, trailing through fields and hiding under bushes. He is insatiable and hyper-focused, like the peregrine itself:

"For ten years I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For ten years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air. The eye becomes insatiable for hawks. It clicks towards them with ecstatic fury, just as the hawk's eye swings and dilates to the luring food-shapes of all gull and pigeons."

This book is a love letter to the peregrine falcon, but also to language. Perfect for the nature lover, as well as lovers of exquisite, transcendent writing.

7.

h is for hawk (2014)

by Helen MacDonald

In this moving memoir, Helen McDonald takes on the training and flying of a goshawk. It's not really about that, or rather not wholly about that, as she is also chronicling the grief of losing her father. It's the grief that precipitates the buying of the goshawk, and these two things become tightly bound throughout the book. In addition, Macdonald rereads The Goshawk by T. H. White (1951) and his own torturous, rapturous experience becomes woven into her own.

“There would be a goshawk. And what happened next was this: my eyes started avoiding a book that lived on the shelf by my desk. At first it was just a visual blind-spot, a tic of a blink, then something like a grain of sleep in the corner of my eye. I'd look past the place where the book was with a little flicker of discomfort I couldn't quite place. Soon I couldn't sit at my desk without knowing it was there. Second shelf down. Red cloth cover. Silver-lettered spine. The Goshawk. By T.H. White. I didn't want the book to be there, and I didn't want to think about why, and soon it got to the point that the bloody book was all I could see when I sat at my desk, even if it was the one thing in the room I wouldn't look at.”

If you're a bird lover, or someone who knows and loves the relationship we have with our animal kin, if you love history, and wrenchingly beautiful writing about loss, you'll love this book.

8.

TEACHING A STONE TO TALK (1982)

by Annie Dillard

Which Annie Dillard book to share? I changed my mind three times. Of course, read any of her books and, if you love it like I do, you’ll make your way quick smart to others anyway. So, Teaching a Stone to Talk it is because it is the one that includes the essay Living Like Weasels. After lyrically describing her close encounter with a weasel emerging from under a rose bush, Dillard does what she does best - she expands the moment, and gives in to her own wildness:

“I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses.”

Dillard’s first book was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and maybe, actually, you should start with that one. Published at the age of 29, it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It clearly has a lot going for it. Unhelpfully, I don’t really know what to say about Annie Dillard, so enormous are my feelings about her writing. So I’ll just finish by sharing words written by author Marilynne Robinson (author of Gilead, and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner): “Annie Dillard’s books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event.”