100 books like Journey of the Pink Dolphins

Serious writing about animals going extinct and how we are all to blame doesn’t necessarily resonate with everyone. Different communication approaches are needed.

In this book, writer Douglas Adams, and Zoologist Mark Cawardine document their travels to see very rare and endangered species like the Kakapo and the blind river dolphin. Never shying away from the realities faced by these species, this book has a wonderful, engaging lightness of touch that rides above the richness and wisdom underpinning the stories being told.

I love this book, not least because it makes me realize that, despite being very much a nature lover’s book, we need more narratives about nature that can appeal to people who don’t necessarily love nature but do enjoy entertaining, amusing, witty writing.

Laura Esquivel’s delicious love story is chock full of cooking and magic realism. When protagonist Tita first sees Pedro, a forbidden passion ignites and burns bright. It consumes and almost devours the young lovers at the center of this novel.

When I set out to write my book, I wanted to include elements of magic realism and lots of cooking. Growing up Italian in New Jersey, the magic of food was a huge part of my upbringing. Like Tita in Like Water for Chocolate, I learned very early in life that great cooking is the best way to capture and keep anyone’s heart.

This book taught me how to watch birds. 

Many bird books aim to teach about birds and how they live, conveying factual information while ignoring (or lamenting) our human interactions with them. There are also books about birding, telling picaresque stories of extreme birdwatching adventures, or delving into technical minutiae aimed at maximizing one’s skill at bird identification. This book doesn’t fall into either of those categories; instead, it focuses on the rich and positive rewards of paying attention to birds. 

What was that sound? Why did those birds all fly up into the tree? What will I discover if I simply sit still in the woods, patiently watching and listening? When I started asking—and being able to answer—these questions, my whole world changed.

Without this book by Maria Mudd Ruth we may never have known about the captivating life of the Marbled Murrelet. This little seabird depends on the health of both the inland old-growth forest for its home and the distant Pacific Ocean for its livelihood. In this natural history mystery, Ruth tracks what we know and when we knew it about the Marbled Murrelet. From what she managed to uncover, we now know that if we lose the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, we will lose this avian piece of the natural puzzle. I admire Ruth’s tenacity in her deep research and brilliant telling of this little bird’s story.

There’s a line near the beginning of Berwald’s book where she mentions that jellyfish came into her life “when the haze of sleepless nights” brought on by early parenthood had begun to lift, and she was beginning to once again have an existence beyond parenting. What follows is a chronicle of Berwald’s deep dive into all the fascinating aspects of her new passion and the people and places she experienced because of it.

I read this book while I was living in that very haze, and enjoyed both following Berwald’s adventures and imagining those that I’d have once my haze had lifted.

In The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade famously told stories to keep herself alive. In this novel the wife of a man in a coma uses stories to coax him back to life. The storytellers she brings to his hospital bedside include a raven, a ghost, a centaur, and Scheherazade herself. Even a house gets a monologue here. I love how this book brings the mythic aspects of life into every day for the purpose of healing. The underneath here is the man’s subconscious. The entities speaking to him exist in the every day; we just don’t normally see them. This book brings them all to life. A beautiful story beautifully told.  

This is Paula Gunn Allen’s modern-day retelling of many Native American tales. They feature talking animals, shape-shifting bears, and creation stories. Here, we see how the underneath comes to the surface in wondrous and awe-inspiring ways. The ordinary walks with the extraordinary. In fact, the ordinary is extraordinary. Allen sees power in these tales for women, and that’s what I loved about this book. These stories are part of a female shamanic tradition; they are in many ways medicinal. 

Once again, the ordinary and the extraordinary are nearly one and the same. In this book, as in all of Charles’s books, the Otherworld—in this case the faery world—is with us now. Charles is a pioneer of urban fantasy and always writes entertaining and amazing books. I love his characters. They are alive and fascinating. He plays with names and gender: for example, Jack is a woman. He invites us to pay attention to the Otherworld. He also shows us that giving the faery realm its due is not running away from reality. In this novel, stories help us to heal and live in the here and now with joy and vigor.

In The Dolphin House, author Audrey Shulman helped me form an extraordinary bond with one species in particular: dolphins.

Although this remarkable novel is based on a true story about a bizarre 1960s experiment, what caught my attention upfront was the fact that the main character, Cora, is partially deaf. Few authors incorporate people with different abilities in their writing, let alone make them a focal point.

Shulman takes this a step further, making Cora’s “disability” the trait that helps her understand and empathize with the four dolphins in her care. The writing is swift and confident; the story, engrossing.

The title doesn’t do justice to how stunning the information within it is, the very careful and thoughtful research, the documentation of our historical connection with cetaceans. Most impressive are the thorough descriptions of their brains, minds, communication skills well beyond our ability to even register and understand. Their echolocation, their ability to sense electrical signals from heartbeats, their multidimensional vocalization, and connected visual and aural brain areas allows them to send “sonic pictures” to each other, receiving “at least ten times more through the sense organs than we can,” is just for starters. Read this book and be amazed…and humbled!