46 books like Rocks in His Head

This is a lovely, lyrical book that mixes poetic language and hard scientific facts. And it’s all supported with some of the most beautiful art I’ve ever seen in a picture book. The spread describing comets, meteorites, and asteroids is particularly wonderful. The book is part of a series that also includes: An Egg is Quiet, A Seed is Sleepy, and A Butterfly is Patient.

If you haven’t already shared this classic with a child, you must!

Everybody Needs a Rock sets out to explain the ten rules of finding a special, just-right rock. Deeply in tune with kids’ relationships to the stones they collect, this delightful picture book insists that you must “look a rock right in the eye” and that a rock “has to feel easy in your hand.”

This book’s gentle humor makes me grin every time, and its overarching message, that a rock is a treasure more compelling than any toy, empowers children to connect with nature and revel in their own imaginations. 

This book talks to the readers in second person describing the different types of rocks they may find. But, the book doesn’t use their scientific names. Oh, no. This book tells you if you have a skipping rock, a wishing rock, a splashing rock, a sifting rock, a worry rock, or one of many other types of rocks. It’s illustrated with wonderful photographs of kids and rocks.

This book tells readers all kinds of things rocks can be using rhyme and whimsy. For example: “A rock can be a … tall mountain. Park fountain.” “Hopscotch marker. Fire sparker.” This book will spark imagination and conversation about all the other things rocks could be. There’s scientific rock information in the back, along with a glossary and recommended rock books.

This book has been criticized for not including enough different locations of fluorescent minerals (which, here, are centred mainly around North America and Greenland), but personally, I think it is enough to make a start - it all depends where we are on, in our journey! 

Myself, I’m most stunned by the amazing photographs, which occupy a large portion of the book - showing various minerals under UV light (which, incidentally, is not the “UV light” that we know from parties) in a completely different context. This world is all around us, and yet most of us make no attempt to even know it. Has anyone done tours of underground caves under these lighting conditions, yet? And, if not, why not?

This is one of my favourite novels about the imagined life of the 19th Century fossil enthusiast, Mary Anning.

Though poor and uneducated, Mary had a passion for dinosaur fossils, scouring the windswept Jurassic coast near Lyme Regis. She found fossils nobody else could, making discoveries that shook the scientific world. But science in the past was an almost entirely male-dominated arena, and Mary’s finds were effectively stolen from her, and she was ignored and forgotten in the scientific community.

Mary’s story is one of female hardship, endurance, and tenacity, and her contribution to our scientific knowledge deserves to be remembered. 

With pockets full of rocks and a purple-dragon T-shirt, science-loving Jada Jones makes her debut in this early chapter book series. When her best friend moves away, school is the last place Jada wants to be, until her teacher announces a project about rocks and minerals. The only problem—she’s in a group with two BFF’s who don’t seem to like her or her ideas. Readers will love reading about Jada’s journey to new friendships and becoming a fourth-grade rock star—setting her up for new challenges in subsequent titles. I love the fact that Lyons created a science-loving girl.

Another favorite romance trope of mine is Beauty and the Beast, and Quick gives us The Beast of Blackthorn Hall paired with a paleontologist heroine who brooks no nonsense, especially from the Beast. The poor man doesn’t understand how outmatched he is until it’s too late. There are caves, dinosaur fossils, smugglers, the ocean tide, and the wonderful road to love for two characters who really, truly, need each other. The dialogue absolutely sparkles. Amanda Quick is a pen name for NYT bestselling author Jayne-Ann Krentz.  

In the first half of the twentieth century, Russian botanist Nikolay Vavilov travelled the world collecting seeds representative of agricultural biodiversity.

In light of hunger and famine in the newly formed Soviet Union, Vavilov hoped to find and create hardy strains that could survive the Soviet climate and alleviate hunger. What he found, however, was not just the importance of saving seeds but also the cultural knowledge and traditions necessary for these seeds to flourish.

Nabhan’s retelling of Vavilov’s travels shows why simply maintaining a seed bank is not enough. Instead, we must also preserve traditional knowledge along with the seeds. To me, Vavilov’s quest reveals the importance of food democracy, that people maintain control of the foods they eat.

This is perhaps the best book on two separate yet related topics: cultural anthropology and ethnobotany. Davis, well-known for The Serpent and the Rainbow, his book (and subsequent movie) about his quest for a Haitian zombie poison, here takes on twin adventure stories: his own research in Columbia and nearby countries in the 1970s, and that of his Harvard mentor and titan of ethnobotany, Richard Evans Schultes, some 30 years earlier. Both are compelling and compulsively readable simply as adventure stories, but Davis also uses them to demonstrate, in a way few other books ever have, the profound and essential connection between human beings and the living world around them.