The best books on nature and freedom, for people who have looked at a tree so hard it changed their life

A bookseller once said to me, “There are your heroes, and there are your heroes’ heroes.” Walt Whitman is both.

He is the OG. I love the man so much that the first tattoo I ever got was a line from one of his poems. Whitman can write a poem whose premise is basically “What’s the deal with grass?” and make you weep. He can write a 50-page poem that I actually want to read and that, my friends, is a magic trick.

If you love travel and nature and being alive you can read my new book or you can just read the Whitman poem “Song of the Open Road.” I need to move on to the next rec before I convince myself to get another Walt Whitman tattoo.

If you have ever felt alienated by our capitalist society which tells us we do not deserve any sort of freedom or any sort of safety net, and which encourages us to use all of our time laboring and being “productive” – Jenny Odell’s book is for you.

I had already quit my job and started planning my road trip the week before How To Do Nothing came out, but if I hadn’t, I would have! The way Odell writes about paying attention to nature – she calls herself not a bird watcher but a “bird noticer” – has shaped the way I pay attention, too.

And Odell’s writing on “meeting the bioregion” of wherever you are, or learning about its plants, animals, and human history, was a direct influence on my book.

There’s a reason this book has been on the bestseller list for 100 million weeks straight.

Kimmerer, an environmental biologist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about ecosystems in a way that is both poetic and scientific. I learned so much, my heart swelled, I despaired, and I hoped.

In an age of climate change and microplastics and a different toxic spill each week, Kimmerer offers a way forward in which we care about the land and its non-human inhabitants, in which we act like the lives of future generations matter.

The first 300 pages of this book are maybe the best 300 pages of a novel I have ever read in my life.

Honestly, who knew that someone could go deep on trees and absolutely ruin you? This is the book I recommend to absolutely everyone looking for a fiction recommendation.

Put it this way: after I finished this book, I started learning the names of the trees that grow around me in the northeast, and it has actually changed my life.

Annie went off with this one!

Basically a female version of Walden, Annie Dillard wrote this book about a year in the natural life of a creek near her suburban home, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. I cannot believe Annie Dillard wrote this when she was 27 because it is so elegant, so deeply informed, and – I was not expecting this – so funny.

Just one of Dillard’s lines, as an example: “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.” Annie!!!