If you’re curious about the world, you can find secret doors that open onto sudden vistas. For me, exploring the lives and origins of the caracaras unveiled an astonishing story about life on Earth—and though the books in my list are mostly nonfiction, they all explore real worlds as absorbing as any fantasy.
I wrote
A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey
This book is the second in a trilogy about a long journey Fermor made—mostly on foot—from Holland to Istanbul in 1934, when he was nineteen years old. Fermor wrote the books from memory many years afterward, so their veracity is open to question, but his imagination and skill aren't: he might resent the comparison, but his books gave me the same thrills as an adult that I remember from my parents reading The Lord of the Rings to me as a child. Though all three are astounding, Between the Woods and the Water is my favorite— it begins as he crosses the Danube into Hungary from the west, follows him across Romania, and ends up in the Balkans, a region that would soon be transformed (and, in part, erased) by World War II. Fermor knows that too, but he doesn't mention it: he lets the places he walks through and the people he meets seem timeless and ageless, lit by the joy and wonder of his youth.
The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary.
Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania.
The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's…
Werner Herzog demands that his film students read this book, and it's easy to see why: it's an act of pure seeing that makes a humdrum English landscape blaze with vivid life. Baker, who seems diffident about humanity at best ("we reek of death," he grumbles) embarks on a quest to know the peregrine falcons who live in—and pass through—the place where he lives, and in describing their lives he finds a luminous and heroic world hidden in the muddy fields and clouded skies of Essex. Ours "is a dying world, like Mars," he writes, "but glowing still."
David Attenborough reads J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing.
The nation's greatest voice, David Attenborough, reads J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing, The Peregrine.
J. A. Baker's classic of British nature writing was first published in 1967. Greeted with acclaim, it went on to win the Duff Cooper Prize, the pre-eminent literary prize of the time. Luminaries such as Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez and Andrew Motion have cited it as one of the most important books in twentieth-century nature writing.
Despite the association of peregrines with the wild, outer reaches of the British Isles,…
Don't be put off by the sobering dedication to this thick tome ("To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved"): Rebecca West's record of travels through the Balkans between the world wars is an exuberant magnum opus that will immerse you in the (literally) Byzantine history and minute details of a fascinating place and time. If you like your humor bone-dry, she’d often really funny, and you’ll relish the company of her fearsomely powerful mind: her deftness and insight in describing people and places seem almost superhuman.
Though she admits that the book is so long that few people will ever read it, I was so caught up in the force of her writing that I didn't want it to end. I've read one passage about a Bosnian dentist's struggle to outwit her domineering father many times— a strangely heartwarming tale—and I'm always stunned by its clear-eyed tenderness.
'Impossible to put down' Observer 'One of the great books of the century' Times Literary Supplement
Rebecca West's epic masterpiece not only provides deep insight into the former country of Yugoslavia; it is a portrait of Europe on the brink of war. A heady cocktail of personal travelogue and historical insight, this product of an implacably inquisitive intelligence remains essential for anyone attempting to understand the history of the Balkan states, and the wider ongoing implications for a fractured Europe.
Matthiessen is best known for The Snow Leopard, but I think this book, written fifteen years earlier, exceeds it. As part of an anthropological expedition to the highlands of New Guinea, he was among the first westerners to describe the lives of the indigenous Papuan farmers who lived there—and he dares to imagine them from the inside, with his trademark understated lyricism. It's an extraordinary book, full of beauty and drama, and though it isn’t a journey to the distant past, it often feels like it: this was a place where neighboring villages fought ritualized wars against one another every week or so. The last line alone is worth the price of admission.
A remarkable firsthand view of a lost culture in all its simplicity and violence by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927 to 2014), author of the National Book Award–winning The Snow Leopard and the novel In Paradise.
In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea live the Kurelu, a Stone Age tribe that survived into the twentieth century. Peter Matthiessen visited the Kurelu with the Harvard-Peabody Expedition in 1961 and wrote Under the Mountain Wall as an account not of the expedition, but of the great warrior Weaklekek, the swineherd Tukum, U-mue and his family, and the boy Weake, killed in…
David Mitchell's fantasia of life in the closed world of Edo Japan is a visceral, eerie, and profound novel that's also great fun, and it has everything: love, honor, treachery, bureaucracy, magic, a terrifying cult, a debauched ape, and the delightfully arch proto-scientist Dr. Marinus. As with many of his novels, it has the feel and richness of great cinema, and his depiction of life on an island in Nagasaki harbor where representatives of the Dutch East India Company are permitted to trade with a secretive nation they barely understand is so well-researched that you'll almost believe it happened.
The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
'Brilliant' - The Times 'A masterpiece' - Scotsman
Be transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.
Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two…
In 1833, a young Charles Darwin met an animal in the Falkland Islands that puzzled and amused him: a smart, curious bird of prey that seemed like a cross between a hawk and a crow. It stole hats and other precious objects from the crew of the Beagle, and Darwin wondered why it was confined to the bottom of the world—but he set this mystery aside, and never returned to it. Almost two centuries later, a chance meeting with these rare birds led me to pick up where he left off, sending me thousands of miles and millions of years in search of their origins. (“To call this a bird book,” enthused The Dallas Morning News, “would be like calling Moby-Dick a whaling manual.”)
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks left by browsing deer, predatory weasels, and inquisitive bears, skunks, and raccoons. Master tracker Kim A Cabrera provides photos and illustrations.
Winner of the prestigious John Burroughs Medal, Russell also writes about community, a sense of place, and a renewed connection with the nonhuman world. She explores the health of…
What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs
Did a red fox pass this way? Could that be a bobcat print there in the dirt? Do those tracks belong to a domestic dog or a coyote? Combining lyrical memoir with an introduction to wildlife tracking, What Walks This Way explores the joys of learning to recognize the traces of the creatures with whom we share our world.
The nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife-mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice-near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. With wit and compassion, she guides readers through…
