23 books like How to Read Water

A ridiculously fun and eerily prescient folktale, about the rise of a Robin Hood figure and the community that rallies around her in a droughted, post-warming Portland, Oregon, I can basically never not recommend this book. Like Brown Girl in the Ring, this is one of the books that made me want to read and write about speculative community-building and environmental justice. Parzybok's clever, inviting prose makes this substantial novel a deceptively fast and joyful read, and I'm never not sad when it's over.

Awe, beauty, and a satisfying amount of information—The Blue Whale has it all. I love the curious child we follow through the book, as well as the visual comparisons that turn astonishing facts about the world’s largest living creature into subtly humorous images that I can relate to on a more personal level. In the final pages of the book, the child—our surrogate adventurer—falls asleep and dreams, amazed by a world that contains such tremendous creatures. 

As a young reader, I would have slipped into this book and lost myself for hours. While it’s not a picture book by most definitions, these gorgeously illustrated pages overflow with facts, stories, and cheerful art. Like its subject matter, Water: A Deep Dive of Discovery covers a lot of territory—from the many ways water affects the lives of all living creatures, to maps and diagrams, to simple experiments you can try at home. A lovely book that will hold up to repeated readings by curious minds.    

This edited volume provides an insightful collection of successful examples of the wave of re-municipalisations of water around the world.

Overall, there were 235 cases of water remunicipalisation in 37 countries, affecting over 100 million people between 2000 and 2015.

Reviewing the experiences of these instances of taking control of water back into public hands, the book provides a valuable discussion of what is necessary for making water re-municipalisation a success of progressive politics.

It outlines what is possible, but also what the dangers are, which need to be confronted. 

Not strictly speaking about food, but I decided it needs to be included here because good hydration is as foundational for health as a good diet - no matter how good your diet is, if you are chronically dehydrated, you won’t be well. Your Body’s Many Cries for Water describes why. The book’s subtitle sums it up: You're Not Sick; You're Thirsty: Don't Treat Thirst with Medications. Dr. Batmanghelidj’s fascinating exploration into the importance of proper hydration basically says that if people drank about 2.5 litres a day of clean water, we would be free of at least 50% of illnesses.

One of the best science books I know, at the same time profound, stimulating and accessible. Pollock describes discoveries made in his own laboratory and by others about a highly ordered state of liquid water that can be revealed in very simple experiments, that can lead to the generation of energy in new ways, and that plays a major role in all living cells. Pollack also opens extraordinary new areas for investigation through imaginative speculations, each with an “out on a limb” index to indicate how far it goes beyond established orthodoxy.

This is the story of the world’s biggest freshwater lake from its origin up to today. Most of it focuses on the last two centuries, when Lake Superior changed fast under the impact of deforestation, mining, and industrialization around its shorelines. In the last 50 years or so, environmental regulation in the U.S. and Canada has substantially improved Lake Superior’s water quality, although new threats connected to climate change will require new conservation efforts. Langston lives on the shores of Lake Superior, and writes about it with intimate knowledge and boundless affection.

Aside from the fun coincidence that I share my surname with the lake in this book, I fell in love on page one because one of the narrators is actually the lake! Chapters alternate between Renn Lake and 12-year-old Annalise, whose family owns lakeside cabins. Annalise has always felt a special connection to this water. When a toxic algae bloom threatens Renn Lake, she and her friends fight to save it. I grew up on a lake in Washington State that became clogged with Eurasian Milfoil, a highly invasive plant affecting water quality, fish, and other things. Remembering what it felt like to see my local lake transform, and how powerless I felt to help it, I rooted for Annalise and her friends and felt hope for this new generation of activists.

I love the way A Long Walk to Water follows two characters in two different timelines to reinforce the importance of water to survival. It’s an exciting combination of a true story and fictionalized one that intersect in an unexpected but wonderful way. Readers of any age, but especially younger ones, will be shocked by what one 11-year-old girl must do to obtain just a minimal daily amount of water for her family’s survival. They will also be inspired by how one 11-year-old boy, after barely surviving wartime experiences in his African homeland, returns years later to make a lasting impact on the lives of others. The double-pronged impact of these characters and their suspenseful stories will instantly engage readers, keep them enthralled to the final page, and leave a long-lasting impression.

This is more than a story, although it is a wonderful one. It is an eye-opener to the… show more.

This classic furnishes the best foundation for understanding land, water, and wildlife issues in the American West—and that necessarily means the public lands. Charles Wilkinson tacks from the past to the present, from law to history to ecology, effortlessly. What makes Crossing the Next Meridian so valuable is Wilkinson showing how nineteenth-century laws—the “lords of yesterday” in his apt phrasing—continued to guide the policy and politics around public lands and resources through the twentieth century. Packed with scholarship, legal reasoning, and on-the-ground reporting, Crossing the Next Meridian laid out clearly why the West I have lived in my whole life looks the way it does. Whenever I have a question about the history or law, this is my first stop. (I would love for him to issue an updated edition.)