100 books like Martin Marten

This book made my heart both soar and ache.

I follow Renkl’s wonderful writing in the New York Times about the nature in her own neighborhood (and occasionally Southern politics), and Late Migrations is a collection of essays in which she ties together the loss of family with the losses of beloved wildlife.

She wrote such a gorgeous last paragraph about living with grief. “And that’s how I learned the world would go on. An irreplaceable life had winked out in an instant, but outside my window the world was flaring up in celebration. Someone was hearing, ‘It’s benign.’ Someone was saying, ‘It’s a boy.’ Someone was throwing out her arms and crying, ‘Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!’ I tear up every time I read those lines.

This book is a scientist’s telling of his serious and quirky ambition to know what ravens know. When I got to the description of an experiment whose distinguishing feature was the author wearing a kimono, that’s when I realized I’d been learning as much about the mind of a raven biologist.

I love this book for showing how much more bird brains have in common with human brains–with respect to their capacity for emotion and intellect–than is commonly appreciated.

Whenever I fly across country, I love looking out the window of the plane to watch how water has sculpted the landscape below—especially in undeveloped expanses, where I often see dozens of squiggles from rivers that have changed course.

Erica Gies’s fascinating book gave me an expanded view of the relationship between water and land, even in our modern cities, and introduced me to people who are figuring out new ways of living respectfully with this mighty and essential force.

I worry that people don’t hear enough about solutions to the climate crisis, but, thankfully, Paul Hawken and his collaborators lay many of them out in this book.

They focus not on the flashy technologies that often grab headlines—and not just on the reduction of fossil fuels—but on the power of a healthy, living Earth to heal itself. Of course, we need to be partners in this healing, and Hawken illuminates the people, organizations, and approaches that are doing just that.

Published in 1957, this book is hard to find—but it’s a gem, especially for anyone who likes tromping around wetlands as much as I do.

Carrighar shows how disruption cascades through a pond ecosystem when a storm damages a beaver dam and how all the creatures living there struggle to adapt. Her careful observations of nature and scientific research allow her to show these creatures as real characters—not Disney-like humans with fur or scales, but living beings with will, curiosity, and cleverness. 

This book is motivated by the global uproar over the killing of Cecil, an African lion, by an American trophy hunter. The author is the researcher who made it his purpose to learn about lions from Cecil’s life and about humans’ relationships with lions through Cecil’s death.

I love the book for demonstrating the power that is unleashed when we care enough to name a wild animal, and that caring is reinforced by subsequently discovering that they have story-filled lives. The book warmed my heart when I found the book’s author–who has the felt responsibility and privilege of telling these stories–to be as lion-hearted as Cecil. 

This is the self-told journey of two scientists’ quest to know what free-ranging, wild baboons know about themselves and their fellow troop mates. When living–as baboons do–in a tangle of social relationships involving 50 or more baboons, it pays to know them and yourself.

The authors retell impressive adventures through the forests of Botswana’s Okavango Delta and dumbfound the reader by showing what can be learned about a baboon’s mind by playing them the recorded calls of their troop mates.

While the authors’ straightforward telling of their scientific sleuthing is remarkable, what I love most about this book is how deeply it blurs the line between what it means to be human and to be a baboon.

I love this book for the same reason that I love all the books on this list. That is, I learned as much about pronghorn antelope as I did about the scientist-author who studies these curiously fast creatures of the open grasslands.

Byers brings the reader on one field trip after the next, showing how he’s studied pronghorn and what it’s like to be there–there in the big sky country and there in Byers’ mind as he assembles his observations into a fascinating account of why pronghorn are so fast.

What I love most is Byers’ sharing–by word and deed–of why he cares so much about these creatures and the places they call home. 

Having grown up as one of few Asians in my high school, I didn’t really prioritize defining my identity as a Japanese-American. All I really cared about was blending in. But after reading this wonderful book, I realized being connected to my ethnicity and culture was both important and natural.

Olivia, the Japanese-American protagonist, spends her days with her family, traveling from Oregon to Arkansas in search of work. The “floating world” is one of temporariness and fleeting observations, like listening to a neighbor playing records or noting the color of a waitress’s painted nails. Olivia deals with tensions within her family as well as the racism they encounter on the road.

For me, this book helped me realize that I could honor the specificities of who I am against a general backdrop of the community within which I existed.

I knew Ted Weesner. We taught creative writing at Emerson College. This is Ted’s first book which still gives me chills because of how filmic the prose is—as in stepping into a film—only it is not only visual, it is visceral. You feel every part of this book and feel it deeply, sympathetically, and even though the main character is making mistakes his mistakes are your mistakes, his disappointments are your disappointments, his hopes are your hopes and thus his tragedy is yours to keep.