The Birchbark House

Written by: Louise Erdrich

First line: The only person left alive on the island was a baby girl. 

Why you should read this book: Often described as a counterpoint to the manifest destiny narrative of Little House on the Prairie, this is the first book in a series sharing the life of Omakakiins, an Anishinaabe girl living on the Island of the Golden Breasted Woodpecker in Minnesota in 1847. Readers experience a full calendar year of her life, doing chores, playing with other children, learning from her elders, exploring the natural world, surviving sickness and deprivation, celebrating success, and opening herself to a spiritual understanding of her world. Omakakiins is an engaging and surprising heroine whose worldview and journey is delightful and eye-opening, while the story touches on the danger presented to the community as the white culture imposes upon their land. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: I guess if you're one of those MAGA lunatics obsessed with removing historical signage from National Parks, you're not going to respond well to this story. 

Strange Animals

Written by: Jarod K. Anderson

First line: Green died and then he didn't. 

Why you should read this book: Following a very near-death encounter with a city bus, depressed and disillusioned city-dweller Green hauls himself off to Appalachia to reconnect with nature and encounters a natural world beyond the perception of most mortals. Following a terrifying encounter with not one, but two cryptids his first night outdoors, he finds himself apprenticed to Valentina Blackwood, presumably the world's oldest cryptonaturalist, and immersed in pursuit of a deadly killer. Green can see what others cannot see, so he can do what others cannot do, and with Valentina's help, he is determined to protect the natural world.

Why you shouldn't read this book: It's a great fantasy story, but I think I enjoyed this author's nonfiction work more. 

Never Alone: A Solo Arctic Survival Journey

Written by: Woniya Dawn Thibeault

First line: I heave a deep sigh and watch the water vapor from my breath--a small white cloud against the backdrop of heavy, dark clouds--float out across the ice.

Why you should read this book: I rarely watch reality TV and certainly had never even heard of the show Alone, but I was fascinated by the physical and emotional journey that Woniya takes in her pursuit of living her dream of pitting herself against the elements and thriving in the face of adversity. Dropped by helicopter north of the Arctic Circle in September and carrying only some homemade clothes, a brick of pemmican, ten survival objects, a bunch of cameras, and a tracking beacon, she rejoices in the freedom and possibilities of her frigid endeavor, enduring bitter cold and near starvation, but never giving up her sense of joy and delight. She nearly starves to death, but she never stops dancing, she never stops loving nature, and she never gives up on herself. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: The producers really did these contestants dirty; if they had dropped her off north of the Arctic Circle in April and let her take fifteen survival items instead of forcing her carry a ton of camera equipment and film everything she did from three angles, this lady would have been able to survive indefinitely. 

Something in the Woods Loves You

Written by: Jarod K. Anderson

First line: In Ohio, winter is landscape poetry.

Why you should read this book: Magical and heart wrenching, these essays braid the poet's childhood memories of Ohio's plants and animals with his intentional present day reconnection with nature, and its evolution as a tool in his arsenal against depression. This book touched me on a deep level, probably because it resonated with so many of my personal experiences, both beautiful and terrible, but the prose is  also a luscious dive into the wilderness, an immersive experience of midwestern flora and fauna through the lenses of nostalgia, depression, and recovery. This book is for anyone who has ever loved the woods. 

Why you should read this book: You hate the woods. 

October, October

Written by: Katya Balen

First line: We find the owl at the very edge of our woods, the morning after the storm. 

Why you should read this book: October has always lived in the woods with her father, searching for treasure (and finding it!), climbing trees, howling at the sky, and living her intentional, wild, off-the-grid existence (now with a baby owl whose life she's saved), until the day the woman who is her mother turns up to wish her a happy birthday. Now her entire life has been turned upside down, and October is forced to confront her own prejudices while simultaneously adapting to the strange new world that is modern London and the parent whose love she has chosen to reject for so long. This is a lovely, compelling story about that magical moment in our lives where we must take accounting of the inventory of our own childhoods, and determine what should be kept for the rest of our lives and what needs to be left behind in the dustbin of history.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You think children should just do what they're told the first time you ask. 

Hatchet

Written by: Gary Paulsen

First line: Brian Robeson stared out the window of the small plane at the endless green northern wilderness below.

Why you should read this book: Thirteen-year-old Brian is consumed with the secret knowledge that his mother cheated on his father, which is why they are divorced, and the reason Brian is a passenger in a Cessna flying across Canada to spend the summer with his father in the oil fields, all of which becomes suddenly much less important when the pilot has a heart attack and dies mid-flight. Armed with only the little hatchet his mother gave him before his trip, Brian manages to survive the crash and use every ounce of strength in his body and lick of intelligence in his brain to continue surviving alone in the wilderness. A modern-day boy-versus-nature story highlighting the resilience of the human spirit and the boundless nature of human ingenuity in the face of uncertainty.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You would never give a teenager an edged blade. 

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees

Written by: Thor Hanson

First line: The crossbow fired with a dull thwack and we watched its bolt disappear upward into the leaves and branches, trailing a length of monofilament fishing line that glinted in the scattered beams of sunlight.

Why you should read this book: Bees are fascinating even if you're not a biologist, and they're even more fascinating when you have a biologist to explain them to you. Spanning the entire apian world (not just honeybees!), this book details, in particular, the evolution of bees (from wasps who figured out how to live fully vegetarian lifestyles) and how that impacted the evolution of plants and the evolution of humans. Focusing on the tiny microcosms of bees' worlds, this book opens up a vast, active universe that most of us are simply too big and too busy to notice. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You are ambivalent toward bees and have no interest in learning their secrets.

No Ivy League

Written by: Hazel Newlevant

First line: Add more calendars!

Why you should read this book: Homeschool ("my parents are hippies" homeschool, not "my parents are religious nuts" homeschool) teen Hazel has a nice life, studying whatever she feels like, hanging out with other homeschool kids, and the only thing she's missing is the cash she needs to go to DC with her boyfriend and best friend to see a band she loves. Hazel takes a summer job with No Ivy League, a group dedicated to hiring at-risk youth to remove invasive English ivy from the park, and suddenly she's in another world, working with kids with whom she can't seem to find any commonality, kids who have less than she does and resent her privilege. In this honest memoir, Newlevant relates the lessons she learned about race, class, romance, and community at her summer job. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: There's some spicy language in there, probably not for younger teens or kids. 

The Mysteries

Written by: Bill Watterson and John Kascht

First line: Long ago, the forest was dark and deep.

Why you should read this book: With its haunting illustrations and surreal text, it's an allegory about the fear of the unknown, and the respect this fear properly inspires, and the consequences of familiarity replacing that respect with contempt. I think. The main reason to read it is probably the fact that it was written by one of the most popular comic strip artists of the late eighties/early nineties.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Despite appearances, this isn't a kids' book; I'm not really sure what its intended audience is, except for "people who were sad that Bill Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes.

Ryokan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan

Translated by: Burton Watson

First line: Though travels/take me to/a different stopping place each night/the dream I dream is always/that same one of home

Why you should read this book: It's a curated collection of the poetry of the late 18th/early 19th century Zen monk Ryokan, including the three Japanese forms of waka, sedoka, and choka, along with a selection of his Chinese kanshi, all beautifully rendered into English that evokes the complex simplicity of the subject matter. These poems tend toward observations of the natural world (often focused on seasonal changes or animla behaviors), musings on his own life as an ascetic who begs for his meals and also likes to play ball with the village boys, and his thoughts on the people and world he knows, including his memories of the past. Reading these poems may perhaps offer the reader an understanding of the unspoken ideals of Zen Buddhism, or at least Ryokan's particular take on his beliefs.

Why you shouldn't read this book: If you were next in line for a position of power, you'd take it. 

The One and Only Bob

Written by: Katherine Applegate

First line: Look, nobody's ever accused me of being a good dog

Why you should read this book: Sequel to the heartbreaking and uplifting The One and Only Ivan, this book shows us the world from the eyes of Bob, the scrappy stray mutt who now has a comfy home with a little girl and gets to regularly visit his friends Ivan the gorilla and Ruby the elephant at the animal sanctuary down the street. Everything seems copacetic until Bob, Ruby, and Ivan find themselves swept up in a natural disaster that threatens to bring tragedy to all creatures, human and otherwise, in the animal sanctuary and the town. With more grace than anyone could imagine, Bob proves himself equal to the task and perhaps a better dog than he'd like to admit.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Trigger warning for really bad weather.

The Absolutely True Story...

Written by: Willo Davis Roberts

First line: My mom thoughts the Rupes were a nice, normal middle-class family.

Why you should read this book: It's got all of Roberts's trademark themes: normal "good" kids, messed up "bad" kids who lack adult supervision or guidance, adults who are so ridiculously oblivious/caught up in their own psychological problems that they don't even notice the horrible things that are going on right in front of their eyes, and really horrible things going on right in front of adults' eyes. Normal, "good" siblings Lewis and Alison are invited to go on a fantasy road trip with the Rupes, to serve as companions/babysitters for the Rupes "bad" kids while the parents basically ignore the children, and the rules of the road, and of common decency, and the fact that they're being stalked across the country by actually bad men, and everything else. Includes some nice descriptions of Yellowstone National Park.

Why you shouldn't read this book: It is a little bit silly.

Being a Human: Adventure in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness

Written by: Charles Foster

First line: I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill. 

Why you should read this book: A legal scholar and veterinary surgeon who teaches at Oxford and has a home and a family and all sorts of modern-day comforts intentionally shucks them all off in pursuit of an upper paleolithic consciousness, which he attempts to achieve by living in such a way as to summon the mindset of the earliest "behaviorally modern" humans. While many readers will find his methods insane, and his conclusions questionable (Foster uses the modern nonfiction literary technique of imagining in great detail things that he can't possibly know at all and then presenting his daydreams as fact, and sometimes of telling you later on that he made up part of the story because it would have been interesting if it had happened that way), this book does have the power to draw you in to its provocative thesis about our species' place in the order of the universe and our orientation to the natural world and all the things that are wrong with the civilization we've created in the last fifteen thousand years. It's not at all the book I thought it was going to be, but it's a pretty gripping book about a guy who feels out of sync with the world trying to synchronize himself with the planet and waking up certain parts of his mind while inadvertently removing himself even further from the world he started from.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You would consider a man voluntarily starving himself into hallucinations for eight days while lying outside in the snow and watching his young adolescent son eat road kill even though his friend's house is just a short walk away some form of child abuse.

Buy Being a Human from Amazon

Bruno the Beekeeper: A Honey Primer

Written by: Aneta Frantiska Holasova

First line: In his heart and soul, Bruno is a beekeeper.

Why you should read this book: A comprehensive tour through a year in the life of a beekeeper, this beautiful and informative book offers child-friendly guides to all the knowledge of the apiarist. Bruno, a bear, and his grandmother, a human, clean up in the autumn after the honey harvest, feed the bees in the winter, care for them in the spring, and harvest honey again in the summer. This book also offer wonderful charts illustrating the life cycle of the different bees in the colony, their anatomy, and the flowers they like, along with the tools of the beekeepers and everything else kids might want to know about bees and beekeeping, including Grandma's recipe for honey-sweetened gingerbread cookies. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You hate bees. And honey. And cottagecore. And Grandma. And cookies.

In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

Written by:  John Zada

First line: A froth of dark, roiling clouds churns above the swaying canopy. 

Why you should read this book: Canadian journalist John Zada travels to British Columbia to work on a travelogue for tourists interested in exploring the Great Bear Rainforest, but finds himself more interested in the First Nation peoples who have lived in the area for fourteen thousand years, and then most interested in the stories he hears over and over again—about the locals' real life encounters with Sasquatch. Enamored with the mystique of meeting Bigfoot as he imagined in his youth, Zada treks to the most remote areas and makes friends with every possible source in pursuit of his story, but as evidence piles up for both sides (believable narratives from those who have seen this storied cryptid firsthand versus believable conclusions based on the scientific method) he begins to question what the story actually is, anyway. What does it mean to believe in Sasquatch, to search for Sasquatch, to encounter Sasquatch, and what can we take away from the persistence of legends, on a global scale, of wild men, man apes, and other mysterious beings hiding in the vanishing corners that civilization can't reach?

Why you shouldn't read this book: Look, obviously if a respected journalist found incontrovertible evidence of the existence of Sasquatch, you would have heard about it already. 

The Desert Year

Written by: Joseph Wood Krutch

First line: Scenery, as such, never meant much to me. 

Why you should read this book: A New England academic, captivated by his scant passing views of the Sonoran Desert, dedicates a sabbatical year and change to living among the saguaros so as to learn the secrets of this strange landscape. Meandering yet focused, the narrative begins afresh with every chapter, with some observation of plant, animal, terrain, or weather serving as a springboard to the author's thoughts about life on earth (human and otherwise), philosophy, sociology, spirituality, along with biology, zoology, botany, and any other scholarly pursuit that springs to mind. In the tradition of the amateur American naturalist, Krutch endeavors to sit with his environment until it makes itself known to him, and then, in his professorial capacity, turns to books and experts to make further sense of the revelations granted to those who learn to love the land as they love themselves. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: I guess if you didn't like Walden when you were in college, you won't like this. 

 

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Written by: Jacqueline Kelly 

First line: By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat. 

Why you should read this book: Callie Vee, intelligent, thoughtful, and curious, realizes that she wants to be a naturalist when she grows up, just around the time that Callie's mother announces that she wants Callie to be a debutante. Guided by her eccentric grandfather, Callie becomes comfortable with the scientific process, the pursuit of knowledge, and the reading of difficult and forbidden books, chief among them Darwin's Origin of the Species, while desperately trying to escape a future that includes being tied down to a house, a husband, or children. Just an all-around delightful novel. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You'd rather be a debutante than discover a new species.

Last Chapter and Worse

Written by: Gary Larson

First line: Here are the cartoons taken from my final six months of newspaper syndication, plus 13 new cartoons I drew since I retired (more about that on page 81).

Why you should read this book: The cartoons in this collection are, at the same time, pure classic Larson and also a little wistfully silly, rehashing themes and ideas visited over and over again through the ten years of the Far Side strip. Nature, history, and suburban motifs run through the radical imagination of the cartoonist until they are transformed into something familiar yet unexpected and bizarre. The 13 new comics are a nice bonus for faithful readers.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're terribly serious and have no sense of humor.

Bear

Written by: John Schoenherr

First line: He woke in the cold rain and rolled onto the warm spot where his mother slept.

Why you should read this book: As with all bears, this bear has been abandoned by his mother now that he's old enough to fend for himself, even though he has much to learn about the world. Through trial and error, the bear learns all it needs to survive. Soon he is a large, full-grown bear, capable of standing up to anything the world can throw at him.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You miss your mom.

Snow

Written by: Uri Shulevitz

First line: The skies are gray.

Why you should read this book: A little boy with a dog is excited to see the signs of impending blizzard, while all the adults scoff and expect nothing from the sky. Of course, the little boy is correct, and delights in the translated city, white under its clean blanket of snow. High interest for little kids.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You hate shoveling.