Why am I passionate about this?

Alienation from nature has contributed to environmental problems in today’s world. Until recently in human history, our daily lives were intertwined with living things. I've always been keenly interested in the intersection between people and nature, between ecology and society. How should we live, what have we done lately? Observation today can bring much-needed respect, and if we are lucky, we will find that animals, birds, and places intercept us in our wanderings, helping to bring forth distinctive and personal stories. There is danger, the seas are mighty, many monsters lurk in the dark. But can be silence too. Pull up a chair by the blazing fire, come listen to those voices.


I wrote

Sea Sagas of the North

By Jules Pretty,

Book cover of Sea Sagas of the North

What is my book about?

There are shadows on this shining sea. Fish cities have shrunk to hamlets, old ports have been levelled and harbours…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Epic of Gilgamesh

Jules Pretty Why did I love this book?

This is the oldest written story in the world. Gilgamesh was prince of the sheepfold Uruk, all its date groves and cool gardens, all the herds of antelope beyond the fields of spelt. In those days, scorpion men guarded the sun, and Gilgamesh wandered the wilds with his friend Enkidu in search of wisdom. The story’s lesson was simple and eternal. In many a city, in civilised settlements, the teeming markets drown the peace. Gilgamesh at first cut down the ancient cedars guarded by Humbaba, and killed the last fiery bull with wings. In the presence of nature, he found he should have been glad of life, but it was almost too late. A piece of sky fell down, and flood filled the world. At the end of his journeys, he, at last, finds peace in friendship and togetherness.

By Penguin Classics, Andrew George (translator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Epic of Gilgamesh as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The definitive translation of the world's oldest known epic, now updated with newly discovered material

Miraculously preserved on clay tablets dating back as far as four thousand years, the poem of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, predates Homer by many centuries. The story tells of Gilgamesh's adventures with the wild man Enkidu, and of his arduous journey to the ends of the earth in quest of the Babylonian Noah and the secret of immortality. Alongside its themes of family, friendship and the duties of kings, the Epic of Gilgamesh is, above all, about mankind's eternal struggle with the fear of death.…


Book cover of As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan

Jules Pretty Why did I love this book?

A beautiful and touching account of the author’s travels in early 11th century Japan. Lady Sarashina is deep in sorrow from the death of her husband and searches for solace in nature and place on pilgrimage routes and at temples along the way. This is a profound weaving of mind, journey, and place, as she travels across the 72 seasons of Japan’s year. Emotions link land and mind. She is acutely attentive to cuckoo calls and cherry blossom, the rain pattering on bamboo at night, the cool water in the stone well. “Even as I wander on my journey,” she writes, “It always stays above me in the sky, this moon at dawn, this moon I gazed on in the capital.”

By Lady Sarashina, Ivan Morris (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a unique autobiography in which the anonymous writer known as Lady Sarashina intersperses personal reflections, anecdotes and lyrical poems with accounts of her travels and evocative descriptions of the Japanese countryside. Born in AD 1008, Lady Sarashina felt an acute sense of melancholy that led her to withdraw into the more congenial realm of the imagination - this deeply introspective work presents her vision of the world. While barely alluding to certain aspects of her life such as marriage, she illuminates her pilgrimages to temples and mystical dreams in exquisite prose, describing…


Book cover of Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache

Jules Pretty Why did I love this book?

A brilliant and uplifting tale of how stories are used by the Western Apache people to tie them to place and give meaning to life. This is a quite unique book, speaking to all human experience. The Western Apache talk of mental smoothness, a mind that can be calm and focused. The smooth mind is a tightly woven basket, yielding but strong, resistant to the jarring effects of external events. “Wisdom sits in places,” said elder Dudley Patterson, “You will walk a long way and live a long time. And your mind will be smoother and smoother.” If objects and places have a story, they become magic vessels for memory and meaning. We are also more likely to look after and keep them. If landscapes contain stories, then we find that wisdom sits in places. Natural places themselves become moral guides. 

By Keith H. Basso,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Wisdom Sits in Places as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This remarkable book introduces us to four unforgettable Apache people, each of whom offers a different take on the significance of places in their culture. Apache conceptions of wisdom, manners and morals, and of their own history are inextricably intertwined with place, and by allowing us to overhear his conversations with Apaches on these subjects Basso expands our awareness of what place can mean to people.

Most of us use the term sense of place often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences…


Book cover of A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World

Jules Pretty Why did I love this book?

In one of the finest pieces of world literature, Robert Bringhurst recounts stories of the Haida mythtellers. The isles of Haida Gwaii are 160 km into the Pacific, drenched in rain, mist, and wind. Here was one of the world's richest traditions of story, place, and nature, where myths thought themselves into people. We have the extraordinary sagas of Raven Travelling, Goose Food, and the Qquana Cycle, some individual oral sagas more than 5,000 lines long. “Wealth has big eyes,” said one storyteller. Raven is the trickster of the North, is ingenious, ever-watchful from high spruce and red cedar. “Bring us good luck,” people called out. Says one, “He always fools everybody, so he gets by easy.” Yet many of the Haida people died on contact with colonial invaders, and the coastal villages and rows of totem house poles stand abandoned.

By Robert Bringhurst,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked A Story as Sharp as a Knife as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Haida world is a misty archipelago a hundred stormy miles off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. For more than a thousand years before the Europeans came, a great culture flourished on these islands. In 1900 and 1901 the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton took dictation from the last traditional Haida-speaking storytellers, poets, and historians. Robert Bringhurst worked for many years with these manuscripts, and in this text he brings them to life in the English language.


Book cover of Wild: An Elemental Journey

Jules Pretty Why did I love this book?

This is the most intense nature-writing and storytelling, as if written by bear or tiger, by the rainforest tree or tropical sea itself. Jay Griffiths becomes Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, as we travel out in life, across the threshold and leaving behind ordinary world. Myth is story, and it is also how we live, battling against personal and historical limitations. Jay finds the secret openings and weaves an Odyssey to the wildness of earth and sea, water and fire. On the heroic journey, we are repeatedly tested, and come back with an elixir. Story itself becomes currency and guide. The monk and mystic, Meister Eckhart of Thuringia, wrote in the early 1300s, “There are many ways, Some are crowded, others less travelled, But every way, is the right one.”

By Jay Griffiths,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Wild as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE ORION BOOK AWARD

Part travelogue, part manifesto for wildness as an essential character of life, Wild is a one-of-a-kind book from a one-of-a-kind author

'Undefinable, untameable, profound and extraordinary' Observer
_________________________

'I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize…


Explore my book 😀

Sea Sagas of the North

By Jules Pretty,

Book cover of Sea Sagas of the North

What is my book about?

There are shadows on this shining sea. Fish cities have shrunk to hamlets, old ports have been levelled and harbours are full of warming water yet there’s barely a single ship. An Arctic author asks, how do you say goodbye to a glacier? A burnished skipper, four score years of staring at horizons, says, you know, we were more tolerant in those days, when we sailed and steamed and brought home gifts and stories.

Sea Sagas of the North interweaves prose chapters and alliterative sagas. Each chapter tells of great travels across shores, seas and islands. Each saga tells of tales and times from across the ages.

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No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

By Rona Simmons,

Book cover of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

Rona Simmons Author Of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”

Rona's book list on World War II featuring the average Joe

What is my book about?

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.

The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.

No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…

No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

By Rona Simmons,

What is this book about?

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in human geography, Japan, and British Columbia?

Human Geography 11 books
Japan 516 books
British Columbia 55 books